Wreck of the Medusa The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century

The Wreck of the Medusa is a spellbinding account of the most famous shipwreck before the Titanic. Drawing on contemporaneously published accounts and journals of survivors, historian Jonathan Miles brilliantly reconstructs the ill-fated voyage and the events that inspired Theodore Gericault's magnificent painting The Raft of the Medusa. In June 1816, the flagship of a French expedition to repossess a colony in Senegal from the British set sail. She never arrived at her destination. At her helm was the incompetent captain Hugo de Chaumareys, who, ignoring telltale signs that they were in shallow waters, plowed the ship into a famously treacherous sandbar. When disaster struck, a privileged few claimed the lifeboats and 146 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft, abandoned, and sent adrift. Without a compass or many provisions, hit by a vicious storm the first night, and exposed to sweltering heat during the following days, the group set upon each other: mayhem, mutiny, and murder ensued. When rescue arrived thirteen days later only fifteen were alive. Meanwhile, those in the boats who made it to shore undertook a dangerous two-hundred-mile slog through the desert. Among the handful of survivors from the raft were two men whose written account of the tragedy became a best seller that rocked France. The political aftershocks exposed a corruption that reached as far as the restored Bourbon king. Miles's astonishing story, full of action, adventure, catastrophe, and art, takes the reader's breath away.Miles, Jonathan is the author of 'Wreck of the Medusa The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century', published 2007 under ISBN 9780871139597 and ISBN 0871139596.