Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

Among the countless episodes of disaster at sea, the fate of the French frigate Medusa and her people still possesses a poignant and mournful distinction. Other ships have gone down with much greater loss of life, including such modern instances as the Titanic and the Lusitania, or have been missing with all hands, but the story of the Medusa casts a dark shadow across the chronicles of human suffering, even though a century has passed since the event. There are some enterprises which seem foredoomed to failure by a conspiracy of circumstances, as if a spell of evil enchantment had been woven to thwart and destroy them. Of such a kind was this most unhappy voyage.

As an incident of the final overthrow of Napoleon, Great Britain returned to France the colonial territory of Sénégal on the west coast of Africa, between Cape Blanco and the Gambia River. A French expedition was equipped and sent out to reoccupy and govern the little settlements and clearings which thinly fringed the tropical wilderness. It included officials, scientists, soldiers, servants, and laborers, who sailed from Rochefort in the Medusa frigate and three smaller vessels on the seventeenth of June, 1816.

The French Navy had been shattered and swept from the seas by the broadsides of Nelson’s fleets, and its morale had ebbed. This mission, moreover, was not a strictly naval affair, and the personnel of the frigate was recruited with no particular care. The seamen were the scrapings of the waterfront, and the officers had not been selected for efficiency. They were typical neither of the French arms nor people. It seemed a commonplace task, no doubt, to sail with the summer breezes on a voyage not much farther than the Cape Verd Islands and disembark the passengers and cargo.

Captain de Chaumareys of the Medusa was a light-hearted, agreeable shipmate, but he appears to have been a most indifferent seaman and a worse master of men and emergencies. When no more than ten days out from port he discovered that his reckoning had set him thirty leagues, or almost a hundred miles, out of his course. This was not enough to condemn him utterly, because navigation was a crude art a century ago and ships blundered about the high seas and found their way to port in the most astonishing manner. But Captain de Chaumareys was not made cautious by his error, and he drove along with fatuous confidence in his ability and would pay no heed to the opinions of his officers. He also managed to lose touch with the three smaller ships of the squadron, and they vanished from his ken. It was one fatal mischance after another.

On the first of July, when the frigate crossed the tropic of Cancer, the debonair captain made it an excuse for a holiday and took personal charge of the gaieties which so absorbed him that he turned over the command of the ship to M. Richefort, one of the civilian officials who had seen naval service. There was a feeling of uneasiness on board, for all the fiddling and singing and dancing, and the officers discussed it over their wine in the ward-room and the passengers were aware of it in the cabins, “while the crew performed the fantastic ceremonies usual on such occasions although the frigate was surrounded by all the unseen perils of the ocean. A few persons, aware of the danger, remonstrated, but without effect, even when it was ascertained that the Medusa was on the bank of Arguin.”

The ship was, in fact, entrapped among the shoals and reefs which extended like a labyrinth far out from the African coast. It was an area of many disasters to stout ships, whose crews had been taken captive or killed by savage tribes, if they survived the hostility of the sea. M. Richefort, who was so obligingly acting as commander of the Medusa, insisted that there were a hundred fathoms of water under the keel and not the slightest cause for anxiety, and they still danced on deck to the scraping of the fiddles.

With a crash that flung the merry-makers this way and that, and brought the spars tumbling about their ears, the Medusa struck in only sixteen feet of water, and the deadly sands had inextricably gripped her. She was a lost ship on this bright day of calm seas and sunny weather and the sailors blithely tripping it heel-and-toe. It was soon realized that the frigate might pound to pieces in the first gale of wind, and that advantage had best be taken of the quiescent ocean to get away from her. The coast was known to be no more than forty miles distant, and the hope of escape was strong.

There was ample time in which to abandon ship with some order and method, to break out provisions and water-barrels, to build a number of buoyant rafts and carefully equip them, to safeguard the lives of the people as far as possible. The frigate carried carpenters, mechanics, and other artisans, and all manner of tools for the colony of Sénégal. Hundreds of people had been saved from other ships in situations even more desperate than this. There had been strong men, unwavering authority, and disciplined obedience in them, however, but this doomed frigate was like a madhouse, and panic ran from deck to deck. The crew was slack at best, but it could not be held altogether responsible for the demoralization. The soldiers and laborers were Spanish, French, Italian, and negroes, many of whom had probably been in prison or the convict hulks, and were sent to Africa for their country’s good.

The frigate had five seaworthy boats, which were hurriedly launched and filled with people whose only thought was to save their own skins. In one of them was the governor of Sénégal and his family, and in another were placed four children and the wives of the officials. In this respect the ancient chivalry of the sea was lived up to. There were heroes among the French army officers, as might have been expected, for they kept clear of the struggle for the boats, and succeeded in holding most of their men, who were assigned to the one raft which had been frantically thrown together.

The five boats shoved off and waited for the raft, which it was proposed to take in tow. Barrels of bread and wine and water had been hoisted on deck, but in the confusion almost all the stores were thrown into the boats. M. Correard, geographical engineer attached to the expedition, had gallantly volunteered to take chances with his own men on the raft. He had kept his wits about him, and delayed to ask Captain de Chaumareys whether navigation instruments and charts had been provided for the raft. He was assured that a naval officer was attending to these essentials and would be in charge of the party. Forgetting his duty entirely, this faithless officer scrambled into one of the boats, and the raft was left without means of guidance.