Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

There are cowards in all services, afloat and ashore, but they are seldom conspicuous. Among those who fled away in the boats was the gay Captain de Chaumareys, who oozed through a port-hole without delaying a moment. In this manner he disappeared from the narrative, the last glimpse of him as framed in the port-hole while his ship was still crowded with terrified castaways for whom there were no boats. He was a feather-brained poltroon who, by accident, happened to be a Frenchman.

BOATS WERE FILLED WITH MEN WHOSE ONLY THOUGHT WAS TO SAVE THEIR SKINS

There were intrepid men in the Medusa who bullied the others into helping make a raft. The best that they could do was to launch a pitiful contrivance of spars and planks held together by lashings. It was sixty-five feet long and twenty broad, not even decked over, twisting and working to the motion of the waves which slapped over it or splashed between the timbers when the ocean was smooth. As soon as it floated alongside the frigate, one hundred and fifty persons wildly jammed themselves upon it, standing in water to their waists and in danger of slipping between the spars and planks. The only part of the raft which was unsubmerged when laden had room for no more than fifteen men to lie down upon it.

The weather was still calm, and the ship rested solidly upon her sandy bed, the upper decks clear of water. It seems incredible that no barrels of beef and biscuit were lashed to the timbers of the raft, no water-casks rolled from the tiers and swung overside. A kind of mob hysteria swept these people along, and the men of resolution were carried with it. They were unaccustomed to the sea, and a frenzied fear of it stampeded them. The flimsy, wave-washed raft floated away from the Medusa with only biscuit enough for one scanty meal and a few casks of wine. The stage was set, as one might say, for inevitable horrors.

One of the boats which was not so crowded as the others had the grace to row back to the ship with orders to take off a few, if there were men still aboard. To the surprise of the lieutenant in the boat, sixty men had been left behind because there was not even a foothold for them upon the raft. The boat managed to stow all but seventeen of them, who were very drunk by this time and preferred to stand by the ship and the spirit-room. The fear of death had ceased to trouble them.

For the moment let us shift the scene to survey the fate of these seventeen poor wretches who were abandoned on board of the Medusa. The five boats reached the African coast and most of their company lived to find Sénégal. The governor bethought himself that a large amount of specie had been left in the wreck, and he sent a little vessel off; but lack of provisions and bad weather drove her twice back to port, so that fifty-two days, more than seven weeks, had passed before the Medusa was sighted, her upper works still above water.

Three of the seventeen men were found alive, “but they lived in separate corners of the hulk and never met but to run at each other with drawn knives.” Several others had sailed off on a tiny raft which was cast up on the coast of the Sahara, but the men were drowned. A lone sailor drifted away on a hencoop as the craft of his choice, and foundered in sight of the frigate. All the rest had died of too little food and too much rum, after the provisions had been lost or spoiled by the breaking up of the ship.

It was understood that the raft, with its burden of one hundred and fifty souls, was to be taken in tow by the five boats strung in a line, and this flotilla would make for the nearest coast, which might have been reached in two or three days of favoring weather. After a few hours of slow, but encouraging, progress, the tow-line of the captain’s boat parted. Instead of making fast to the raft again, all the other boats cast off their cables and, under sail and oar, set off to the eastward to save themselves. The miserable people who beheld this desertion denounced it as an act of cruelty and perfidy beyond belief. It may have been in the captain’s mind to make haste and send a vessel to pick up the castaways, but his previous behavior had been such that he scarcely deserves the benefit of the doubt.

On the makeshift raft there were those who knew how to die like Frenchmen and gentlemen. What they endured has been handed down to us in the personal accounts of M. Correard and M. Savigny, colonial officials who wrote with that touch, vivid and dramatic, which is the gift of many of their race. Even in translation it is profoundly moving. When they saw the boats forsake them and vanish at the edge of the azure horizon, a stupor fell upon these unfortunate people as they clung to one another with arms locked and bodies pressed together so that they might not be washed off the raft.