At eleven a.m. on July 5, as the boats pulled away from the half-submerged raft, there were 147 people on board. Among the officers and leaders who huddled self-protectively in the center were the surgeon Henri Savigny, the geographical engineer Alexandre Corréard, and Jean Griffon du Bellay, secretary to Governor Schmaltz. The most senior naval man on board, midshipman Coudein, lay with his wounded left leg perched on a barrel in an attempt to keep it as much out of the saltwater as possible. Even though precious flour had been jettisoned to lessen the weight of the makeshift platform, many people clinging to the structure were submerged to their waists, and everybody was swamped by the repeated batterings from waves and spray. As the boats disappeared into the distance, the belief that they had been heartlessly sacrificed, coldbloodedly abandoned, numbed every soul on board. Slowly, dismay gave way to anger, fueling threats of vengeance hurled into the void.
Unable to obtain the governor’s permission to assign his twelve workmen places alongside him in a boat, Corréard realized that duty compelled him to stay with his men and so he had joined them on the raft. Looking out on the desolate expanse of ocean, this young man who had behaved honorably reflected on the cutting of the ropes attaching the makeshift structure to the towing boats. That arm, hacking like an executioner, performed an act of the most extreme cowardice. If that was the kind of leadership that the Bourbon restoration gave the French then it was clearly in the interests of France and, indeed, of humanity itself to overthrow this regime. Looking out at the friendless sea and lowering sky, Corréard determined to stay alive in order to record and accuse. In a perfectly human way, he may have regretted his decision to take a place on this impossible platform, and perhaps he now questioned his decision to flee to Senegal instead of staying at home where an important political struggle was simmering.
The leaders immediately set about searching for the compass, charts, and anchor that Lieutenant Reynaud had promised were on board. None was found. The lack of a compass was a particularly serious want, but Corréard remembered seeing one in the hands of the workshop foreman who was on board. Happily, the man did have one but, as he handed over the tiny instrument to Coudein, it slipped, fell between the wooden supports, and was lost in the sea.
The 146 men and one woman crammed onto the raft could hardly have been a more diverse group. The navy had indeed been favored in the evacuation of the frigate as there were only about twenty sailors on board. Otherwise there was a butcher, a baker from Rochefort, an armorer, an artillery sergeant and captain, a master cannoneer, a barrel maker, a helmsman, domestics of the staff officers on the Medusa, members of the Philanthropic Society, and, among the soldiers from the Africa Battalion, men from Italy, Arabia, Guadeloupe, San Domingo, India, Asia, America, Poland, and Ireland—an explosive grab bag of mercenaries, captives, and ex-convicts, all furious with the French leadership.
Midshipman Coudein’s father, the captain of a man-of-war who had witnessed Napoleon’s capitulation to the Bellerophon, had recently been retired to make way for men like Chaumareys. Coudein’s scorn for the captain of the Medusa was clearly shared by most of the leaders on the raft but was at odds with the secretary to the governor, Griffon du Bellay, who displayed a surprising loyalty to the commanders of the expedition. One of the first to crack, Bellay threw himself overboard during the first day. Saved by Savigny, he attempted suicide again but found it impossible to release his frightened grip on the raft.
Several days before their departure from France, Coudein had suffered a severe bruising to his left leg that had not healed and the effect of seawater washing over the painful abrasion almost made him faint with pain. His condition made him unable to move and the “strong and courageous” Savigny took the initiative, becoming the de facto leader. Born in the bloody year of 1793, Jean-Baptiste-Henri Savigny passed his medical exams in Rochefort at nineteen and went to sea for the first time in October 1812. For the following three and a half years he served on four different ships before being assigned to the Medusa as a surgeon, second class. When he sailed for Senegal, his sweetheart in La Rochelle had given him a belt ribbon as a love token and talisman. This he intertwined with republican colors, thus declaring his political sympathy with the likes of Alexandre Corréard.
As a gentle breeze was blowing, Savigny supervised the erection of a small mast and sail. While this enabled the raft to move, without a compass to guide them and a rudder to steer them they remained at the mercy of the winds and currents. The fact that this mast was erected under the supervision of a surgeon while there were engineers and carpenters on board suggests the degree to which Savigny had taken charge. He proposed their first meal of sodden biscuit, made somewhat palatable by a soaking in a little wine. Having distributed and consumed this uninviting mixture, the biscuits were gone and the raft was left without food. The human body can survive for up to fifty days without solids so this was not, in itself, alarming, but in the sweltering heat it would be necessary to satisfy the need for liquid and the remaining water and wine would not last long, shared among the 147 people on board. All through the rest of that first day, this combustible bunch fed off their need for revenge. Having someone to blame, someone to attack, made them eager for survival and provoked lively exchanges about how best to achieve it.1
As night fell the wind freshened, the sea rose, and clouds and darkness obscured the horizon. Savigny, along with some other resolute individuals, began lashing ropes to the raft with which people might attach themselves for extra safety. As the sea smashed over the platform, everyone struggled to secure themselves. They were bucked back and forth by the agitated ocean and bodies fastened to the ropes were flung overboard and buffeted, banging back against the raft. Through the pitch black, broken only by the whitecapped waves, the desperate leaders thought they glimpsed a distant light. They signaled by igniting some gunpowder and firing shots from a pistol they had hung up, out of harm’s way, near the top of the mast. There was no response, and as the light disappeared they were left to conclude that it could only have been some distant breaker catching a streak of moonlight as it pierced the rumbling cloud.2
The first sight that breaking day afforded was that of squealing people who had been trapped and mangled between the masts and spars that had been laid and lashed together to form the deck of the raft. The saltwater that swamped the deck at each scoop and pitch of the craft drenched their lacerations, causing them excruciating pain. Slowly, their shrieks and moans diminished as they lost consciousness and died of their wounds or slipped off the platform and perished in the sea. The deck was still too crowded to permit a clear view of what had happened and so, before the next distribution of drink, a roll call was taken. Although the number was approximate, for in such a throng anyone could easily call out twice in order to secure a double portion, the total revealed that about a dozen people had already been lost.
With day’s calm came the heat and a thirst hardly alleviated by the meager ration. A baker and two apprentices could bear the situation no longer and committed suicide by hurling themselves into the sea. A tightly packed mass on a vulnerable structure under a suffocating expanse of sky sparked flash points of panic, charging the heavy atmosphere till it became as electric as the breaking of a tropical storm. By nightfall, people began to hallucinate and bawl out as fear overpowered them. The wind whipped the sea into a frenzy more furious than that of the night before and again people clutched at the raft while struggling to protect their limbs from being crushed between the heaving spars of its deck. Mountainous waves arced above the platform in a manner that reminded Corréard of his native town of Serres, overhung on its steep mountainside by a threatening arc of rock. In the misadventure of his attempt to flee from a country overwhelmed by calamitous circumstances, that giant wave of rock, now so far away, might never be seen again.
The raft was now running before the wind, easing the force and frequency of the waves drenching those on board. This meant, however, that the vulnerable stern was taking the full force of the gale, sending men surging forward. As the prow was likewise fragile, the overcrowding in the middle of the raft resulted in the crushing or trampling to death of several people in the stampede from port to starboard as the mass attempted to counterbalance the lateral pitch of the craft. When the sea calmed, a group of terrified soldiers, thinking their end was upon them, decided to drown their last moments in drink. They broke open the wine cask lashed near the center of the raft and gorged themselves on a liquid swiftly mixing with the saltwater that sloshed in through the hole they had gouged. Soon oblivious to the increasing undesirability of the mix, these famished men became easily intoxicated. Already crazed by the onslaughts of the angry sea, they became hell-bent on slaughtering everybody and smashing the raft in an orgy of destruction.
An enormous Asian made for the edge and began to hack at the cords holding the raft together. Raising his hatchet and swiping viciously at an officer who made haste to stop him, he was run through with a saber and pushed into the sea. Immediately, the drunken band elbowed toward the leaders who had placed themselves, in relative security, around the base of the mast. A soldier lifted his saber to attack an officer but was cut down with repeated blows. Such a firm response repulsed the attack and the rioters, still wildly swinging their swords and bayonets, regrouped in the stern where one of them, pretending to rest, slyly set about cutting the fastenings of the raft in order to sink the structure and kill everybody on board. A leader, getting wind of what was going on, rushed at him. Another soldier pulled his knife to intervene and slashed at the officer’s coat in his attempt to cut him down. The leader swirled round, grabbing both men, and hurled them into the sea. This clash triggered a riot in which the drunken soldiers started to chop the shrouds and stays, toppling the mast across the thigh of Captain Dupont, of the Africa Battalion, who tumbled, senseless, to the deck. The drunks fell on him and heaved him into the sea from which he was rescued by the other leaders who then laid him across a barrel. From that perch he was dragged by the rioters, who, according to Savigny and Corréard, were intent on settling some score by gouging out his eyes. Such relentless and murderous frenzy forced the leaders to counterattack, slashing or clubbing the drunken mob into submission.
Corréard had slumped in a kind of trance when the noise of this brawl roused him and he assembled with his workmen in the bow. Far from protected in their rear, they were attacked by both the mob on board and by those who, having fallen off into the sea, tried to scramble onto the raft again. A traitor among Corréard’s workforce, a carpenter named Dominque, had sided with the mutineers. Nevertheless, finding that this renegade had been thrown into the waves, Corréard plunged in to save him. When they were back on board, the traitor’s wounds were treated, after which he once again sided with the rebels, a choice that cost him his life.
Seeing the only woman on the raft thrown overboard with her husband, Corréard and the foreman, Touche-Lavillette, roped themselves together and plunged into the sea to save them. Back on deck, husband and wife collapsed into each other’s arms as, once again, the tanked-up mutineers attacked and the leaders counterattacked till the raft was strewn with dead and bludgeoned bodies.
Corréard heard the woman he had saved calling out to Our Lady of Laux. Like the mountainous waves that peaked above them, this invocation took him back to his native region where a church dedicated to Our Lady of Laux was a place of pilgrimage where the lame and paralyzed sought miraculous cures. He was particularly pleased to have saved a woman from his part of the country, which, it transpired, she had left twenty-four years before. A sutler, she had since traveled with the Grand Army through many campaigns and battles.
After a short period of relative calm during which many of the soldiers fell on their knees and asked to be pardoned, a furious band of drunkards, brandishing knives and sabers, attacked the raft’s leaders. Rioters without weapons went at their victims with their teeth and several people were savagely bitten, among them Savigny, who was also hit by a sword in his right arm, depriving him of the use of two fingers for a time. One of Corréard’s workmen was seized by a frenzied soldier who chomped at his Achilles tendon while three others slashed at him with their knives and smashed him with the butt of a rifle. Lavillette saved the man from certain death. Other leaders rescued Lieutenant Lozach, whose assailants in their stupor had mistaken for Lieutenant Anglas de Praviel, an officer, they claimed, who had been harsh with them prior to the departure of the expedition and whom they had become obsessed with killing. Throughout the conflict, amid the dark tangle of wet, bloodied bodies, Coudein remained incapacitated on his barrel, protectively nursing a young sailor only twelve years old. Suddenly, the midshipman was seized and flung, along with the barrel and the boy, into the waves. Despite his wounded leg and the heavy swell, Coudein struggled to save them both, dragging himself and the boy back onto the raft.
The riot quelled; Savigny fell into a profound torpor. He was hardly aware of his saber wounds but his ratcheting stomach pains were insupportable, his vision was blurred, his legs would hardly support him, and he was dimly aware that he was finding it difficult to think. He heard people around him crying desperately for a leg of chicken or some bread. Some, thinking themselves still aboard the Medusa, asked to be allowed to sleep in their hammocks. Several cried out to imaginary boats to save them. Some assumed they were moored in pretty harbors with well-provisioned towns embracing them. Corréard was rambling on the Italian hills when Griffon du Bellay interrupted his reverie.
“I remember, we were abandoned by the boats, but don’t worry, I’m writing to the governor and within a few hours we’ll be saved.”
To which the drifting Corréard replied, “Have you a pigeon to carry your request swiftly?”
Horror, half dreams, and hallucinations were merging the real with the imaginary so that existence on the raft became an impossible kaleidoscope of fact and fiction. In the grip of such delirium the day had no need to accept what the night sanctioned.3
The naturalist Gaulthier had led an expedition to explore the Senegal River in 1795. Moored in the delta in the terrible heat, the men on board his ship succumbed to a kind of delirium, threw themselves overboard, and perished. Although some contemporary doctors thought that this behavior, accompanying a condition known as calenture, was caused by sunstroke, others, pointing out its appearance at night, argued that such derangement was the result of the continual buildup of hot air trapped inside the hull of a ship. Oppressed by the excessive temperatures of the stifled spaces between decks, sailors in the tropics became dangerously overheated, hallucinated fantastic objects on the surface of the water, and fell victim to fever and frenzied delirium in the hours of darkness. They awoke babbling, with flashing eyes and menacing gestures; fantasizing the fields and forests of homes a world away, they would throw themselves overboard into the sea. Although there were no confined spaces on the raft, there was certainly congestion. During windless afternoons when the platform lay baking in the searing July sun, the air became sufficiently incandescent to provoke tropical fever.4
As dawn broke on the third day, those left alive were jolted by the scene of utter desolation. The raft was a butcher’s block. Strewn out, heaped up, sixty people had somehow been murdered or killed or had committed suicide during the night’s fighting. The remaining two barrels of water and two barrels of wine had been slung into the waves, leaving only one last cask of wine on board. Into another day of drifting, the survivors were in a wretched state, their clothes slashed and ripped and their bodies smeared with the blood of battle and blistered red by the sun. Summoning up unguessed-at resources of determination, the leaders repaired and reerected their mast, trying to position the sail so that onshore breezes would, despite the contrary currents, speed them to the coast. But they made little headway and merely zigzagged across the longitude on which they had been wrecked, steadily, but not swiftly, moving south.
A small ration of wine was distributed over the carnage of the second night’s battle. Hunger was champing at them so, using sharp or pointed decorations from their uniforms, they made hooks with which to fish. They even bent bayonets to make hooks large enough to catch sharks but, despite the attractive trail of blood pooling from the raft, they were unable to hook one. Indeed, the entire venture failed as the current swirled the improvised fishing lines beneath the raft where they snagged.
Without a successful catch, and with no food left on board, the men became desperate. Some took to eating the leather harnesses and scabbards of their sabers or their ammunition pouches. Others ate fabric or portions of their hats that were covered with grease or scum. In other shipwrecks, or in similar situations of deprivation, such resources had often been consumed. The crew of the Fattysalam had, in 1761, eaten the buttons or leather from belts and cartridge cases. Captain Bligh and the few faithful from the Bounty had resorted to raw seabirds. On board the raft, one sailor, pining for food, steeled himself to eat excrement but, lifting it to his mouth, found he was unable to persist.
Those still just about alive studied the heaps of dead human bodies strewn across the deck. There was a resource, a heap of nutriment lying at their feet, carcasses of meat that certain writers had likened to veal or pork. One such authority had asked what difference it made to a “lump of clay, whether it be devoured by worms, by animals, or by its fellow creatures.” Taking the precaution of counseling his readers against the dangers of developing a taste for human meat, which had once happened after a famine in India, the German explorer von Langsdorff asserted that when survival was at stake, such as in famines, sieges, and shipwrecks, the gravity of the situation sanctioned the breaking of any taboo. In the Old Testament, the Israelites under siege were told that they would eat the fruit of their own bodies, “the flesh of thy sons and daughters.” Von Langsdorff reminds his readers that in the Third Book of Herodotus, when the Persian army under King Cambyses was crossing the desert to Ethiopia and they ran out of food, the king ordered the killing of every tenth man in order to feed the rest. While such extermination was the act of a ruler who held human life cheap, there had been sufficient examples of expedient cannibalism for it to become, for shipwrecked men, a custom of the sea. In 1710, when the ship’s carpenter of the wrecked Nottingham Galley died and “his Skin, Head, Hands, Feet and Bowels” had been buried in the sea, his body was quartered and eaten. In 1727, a similar fate awaited those who perished on board the stricken Luxborough Galley. On some occasions, the desperation of starving men had even driven them to murder. In 1759, the crew of the Dolphin had cast lots and an unlucky passenger was shot through the brain. Decapitated, his head was flung overboard, while the rest of his body kept the crew alive.
In 1766, after the wreck of the Tiger, a slave was killed and smoked. When the American sloop Peggy was stricken in a storm during her return from the Azores and supplies dwindled, two pigeons and the ship’s cat were killed, cooked, and served. The captain received the cat’s head and “devoured it with greater relish than he had ever enjoyed from tasting food.” In the days that followed, the survivors consumed candles and oil, tobacco and leather, until those supplies ran out. In a complete reversal of European suppositions about cannibalism being a habit of the African tribes, the sailors pulled a black man from steerage, shot him through the head, and began to cut him up. They were about to fry up his bowels for supper when “one of the foremast men … was so ravenously impatient that, tearing the Negro’s liver from the body, he devoured it raw.” Having pickled all but the head and fingers, the rest of the body kept these men alive for the following nine days, at which time lots were drawn for a fresh execution. The unlucky straw fell to one David Flat, who remained brave and chose the same executioner who had killed the black man. Mercifully, rescue arrived before he was shot.
Although in their narrative Savigny and Corréard approach the moment with great dollops of remorse, at sea, in times of extreme peril, cannibalism appears to have been considered a legitimate and accepted means of survival. Thus on the third day of drifting helplessly, some of those left alive on board the raft set upon the dead bodies strewn about and started hacking off limbs and eagerly chomping on raw human flesh. They incised and pulled away the skin from a shoulder or stomach or thigh and ate off the body, slicing or scooping out the brownish purple flesh.
During the third night the sea was calmer and it was possible for the survivors to get some fitful rest. The water washing over the raft swelled up to their knees and it was necessary to doze standing up, crushed against one another for protection. When dawn broke on the fourth day, they found ten or twelve more dead bodies scattered about the raft. It was an unsettling awakening for the survivors, who realized that they too must soon meet the same fate. Slowly, they consigned the bodies to the deep, saving only one, who, as Savigny and Corréard put it, would “nourish those who, only a short while before, had clasped his hands in friendship.”5
Pangs of hunger plagued those who had not yet succumbed to the ready supply of human flesh and, toward evening on the fourth day, when a shoal of tiny flying fish landed on the raft, those with sufficient energy trapped a huge quantity, which they gutted and placed in an empty barrel. Somewhat bucked by their sudden good fortune, they managed to rig up a makeshift oven and cook the catch, which they immediately devoured. The fish were tiny and ultimately unsatisfying, so some took advantage of the fire to grill human flesh, rendering it less odious. It was at this point on the fourth day that Savigny and Corréard and the other leaders first tasted one of their late companions. From then on, they were forced to continue their cannibal diet but it was never again possible to cook the flesh because there was nothing left on board the raft with which to start a fire. Instead, they decided to cut the flesh into slices and hang them up on the stays to dry, making its eventual consumption a less nauseating prospect.
Satisfied by their meal and exhausted, everyone attempted to fall asleep, gingerly trying not to rub or pummel their ulcerated wounds. Hardly had their immense fatigue overcome their chafing pain than another riot broke out. According to Savigny and Corréard, some Spanish, black, and Italian soldiers attacked the leaders in an attempt to finish them off, rabid for Lieutenant Anglas de Praviel, whom they could not believe was not on board. They started to scale the mast, intent on capturing some money that had been hung on high to keep it safe for when the raft was washed ashore. Again there was butchery. Again the battle-worn sutler was flung overboard and again she was recovered. At last, the troublemakers were overthrown, stabbed to death, and discarded, leaving, out of the original 147 souls that had been crushed aboard the raft, a group of only thirty survivors.
There was a belief that frequent submersion could rehydrate the body by virtue of the absorbent nature of the skin; the efficacy of wearing clothes drenched in seawater, an idea handed down from James Lind, the man wrongly credited with finding the cure for scurvy, was widely upheld. The problem on the raft, however, was that too frequent submergence combined with the drying vigor of the tropical sun created serious problems. Frequent dousing in seawater refreshed the body to a certain extent, but it also removed the grease from the skin and, as the seawater evaporated, salt crystals acted as irritants, provoking boils, excoriations, and ulcers. Their bodies, covered with pustules, became so sore that each movement proved agonizing and, by the fifth day, the seawater had scoured the sun-blistered skin from the feet and legs of those left alive.6
The survivors, in their increasingly deplorable state, calculated that they had enough wine left for four days, after which, without liquid and at the end of their tether, death would swiftly follow. Such calculations were made futile when, on their seventh shadowless day afloat, two soldiers snuck behind the remaining wine cask, drilled a hole, and started drinking. This crime was judged, by common consent, to be capital and the sentence was executed at once.
The twelve-year-old cabin boy Léon, whom Coudein had already rescued from death by drowning, perished in the midshipman’s arms. This left only twenty-seven souls alive, fifteen of whom, from all appearances, were likely to be lost in the following hours.
Gravely wounded or critically ill, those left alive had lost their sense of time and much of their reason. A council of the inner circle of leaders was held at which they discussed the state of their supplies and at which they considered putting those closest to death on half rations. With a sinister logic, they perceived that this would condemn the weakest to a slow but certain end and, at the same time, still consume the raft’s dwindling resources. Working under such a rationale, they agreed on a tougher and more desperate solution. Amid intense despair at the horror of what they agreed to do, they decided to throw the weakest overboard and thus secure, for those remaining, at least six more days of precious wine. Certain that they would all perish unless such hardhearted measures were adopted, their instincts for self-preservation made them resolve to eliminate those too weak to resist. But who among them was willing to be the callous executioner? Who would be able to carry out such an inhuman act? Savigny and Corréard record that three sailors and a soldier “took upon themselves this cruel killing.” There was no command recorded, no drawing of lots. Perhaps there was a question of rank, but by that stage, after the innumerable sufferings, the violence, the degradations and indignities that had so deformed their sensibilities, any one of those who remained might have been capable of such an act.
Among the victims was the lone woman, whose thigh had been broken between the masts and spars of the raft’s deck. Also murdered was her husband, who had been severely wounded in the head. Using the pathos of this sutler’s story, Savigny and Corréard, aware that they were recording a new depth of abasement, interjected an appeal into their narrative, “Readers, who shudder at the cry of outraged humanity, recollect, at least, that it was other men, fellow countrymen and comrades, who had placed us in this abominable situation.”7
The fifteen survivors of this cull next agreed to throw their sidearms into the sea so as to avoid the crazed quarrels likely to erupt between such crippled spirits. They kept one saber and a few tools, and were soon diverted by an unexpected visitor. A familiar sight in a meadow on a summer’s day in France, a common white butterfly flittered above this shambles before settling on the mast. It signaled the proximity of land and the overjoyed but broken men scrambled to scour the horizon. Then more butterflies arrived, sending the men’s spirits soaring and fluttering with hope. Soon afterward, a gull was sighted, as if to confirm that land must be close; and so they prayed for a new storm that would carry them in and dash them onto the nearby shore. When other gulls arrived the famished men attempted to snare one, without success. Such gentle evidence of a world beyond the bloodstained frontiers of their raft brought them up sharp. But despite their self-disgust, they were so cheered by these sightings that they set about constructing a new raised platform near the mast. On this they would make a shelter.
Their efforts considerably improved their living conditions and alleviated some pain. Hunger had diminished since the first few days though their heads still ached from the dazzle of the sun and their thirst was brutal, their tongues were swollen, their lips cracked. Some wet their mouths with urine cooled in small tin containers. Griffon du Bellay downed ten or twelve cupfuls in succession but another man found he could not touch the stuff. It was a widespread but mistaken belief that urine is poisonous and that its consumption could do permanent damage. In fact, with its high proportion of water, it is a valuable source of ingestible liquid. Those left on the raft, heartened by the promise of nearing land, diverted themselves with comparative tastings. Savigny observed that certain people produced decidedly tasty urine, whereas the output of others was bitter and unpalatable.8
When a lemon was miraculously found along with a few cloves of garlic, the disputes over rights of apportionment became savage and almost ended in further killing. Two vials of teeth-cleaning liquid were also found and drops containing cinnamon and cloves eased parched tongues and slaked chronic thirst if only for a few seconds. Some tried putting pewter in their mouths, which gave a sensation of coolness and kept the saliva moving. Sipping their meager wine ration through a quill had a more restorative effect than drinking it outright, which only intoxicated these broken men and made them feisty.
By the tenth day, when it seemed that the slightest upset might make any one among them snap and a general testiness was building toward a full-scale brawl, several sharks, each about thirty feet long and perhaps only somewhat sated by the bodies thrown from the raft, surrounded the platform. Watching the sleek backs moving in so close, the men half wished the sharks would do their worst and finish them off. Some even defied them by lying on the submerged part of the raft in a painful attempt to refresh themselves. But though the sharks, surprisingly, did not attack, these men were stung all over by medusae or Portuguese men-of-war, giant jellyfish whose stinging filaments can reach up to fifty feet long. The agony of their sting lasted only a few hours but induced vomiting, fever, and fearful stomach cramps.
By July 16, their eleventh day on board the raft, the survivors knew themselves to be close to death. Branded by the white-hot heat, skin blistered into huge ulcers, these wild-eyed, bearded specters nonetheless summoned up their last reserves of strength to build a smaller raft out of the slats and supports from the edges of their platform. Oars were made from barrel staves and the plan was that eight of them would try to row for shore. A sailor went aboard to test the structure, which sank immediately, and so they resigned themselves to their raft and to inevitable death. Prostrated by the heat, chafed and inflamed by the salt water, blinded by the screaming light, emaciated, hallucinating, and wasted, they passed the night of July 16 in a state self-recrimination and terror. They mumbled, in their delirium, about the sad state of France. Lavillette observed that, in the good old days, he had been afraid only in the heat of battle, whereas now he was surrounded by Frenchmen who threatened him all the time. Others craved the chance to take on the Bourbon enemies of liberty. Still others longed for a death that would deliver them from the oppressions of the new regime. Savigny suggested that, with one of the tools left on board, they carve their names and some indication of their misadventure on a piece of wood and fix it to the mast, in the hope that after their deaths it would be found and the contents communicated to their families and friends at home.9
In the early morning of July 17, while they were consuming their small ration of wine, a sail was sighted. Thrilled out of their delirium, the men struggled to attract its attention. It was so distant that they could make out only the tops of the masts of what they slowly recognized to be a brig. They fastened different-colored handkerchiefs to some straightened hoops from a cask and a man was helped up onto the mast to signal. For half an hour their stomachs were tight with an agony of expectation. Some imagined the ship was moving closer, others that it was sailing away until, at last, it did indeed disappear from sight. Their excitement collapsed into a most fathomless despair. It had been, like the fastening of the towropes to the raft all that hell ago, a false hope, and now there was nothing left but to resign themselves to death.
Two hours later the master gunner, wanting to go forward to take some air, poked his head out of their shelter. Flying French colors and sailing straight toward them was the Argus. Tears erupted and rolled down burned and blistered cheeks. Dessicated bodies throbbed with unbelieving exultation. The brig hove to and put out a boat to investigate. For those on the raft, the sight of a well-kempt and kitted crew clustered on the bulwarks, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, was like the most fantastic mirage. When the boat lay to beside the raft, the officer, zealous and tender, lifted the most badly burnt and ulcerated of the survivors on board, placing Alexandre Corréard, who was in the most urgent need, beside him. As they were gently carried aboard the Argus, these skeletal figures presented a most pitiable and frightening sight. Hardly able to move, their eyes were sunken, their beards had matted, and their flesh had shrunk against their skulls as if in readiness for death.
They were given a good hot broth and their wounds were dressed attentively. The surgeon, during the two days that the survivors remained on board, put them on a strict diet to gradually readapt their bodies to normal fare. But delirium persisted. One army officer who wanted to throw himself overboard in search of his lost wallet had to be restrained. Those who managed to sneak behind the doctor’s back to gorge themselves were rewarded with excruciating cramps.
The Argus had given up her search for the Medusa and was heading back to Saint-Louis when first detected by the survivors on the raft. After the brig disappeared from their sight, a change of wind made Captain Parnajon resolve to continue his search for the wreck, a decision that led to the discovery of the raft, which had drifted south to a point about ninety nautical miles from the wreck and thirty-two nautical miles off Portendick.
Under a favorable breeze they sailed for Saint-Louis, where they dropped anchor at three o’clock on the afternoon of July 19. In his report to Governor Schmaltz, written in the roads of Saint-Louis, Parnajon noted that
I found on this raft fifteen people …. These unfortunates had been obliged to fight and kill a large number of their comrades who had revolted in order to seize the provisions …. Others had been taken by the sea, or died of hunger or madness. Those that I rescued had fed themselves on human flesh for several days, and, at the moment when I found them, the ropes which held the mast were covered with morsels of this flesh which they had hung up to dry. The raft was also covered with scraps which further attested to the food which these men were obliged to consume; they had been sustained by a little wine which they handled as carefully as possible; they still had several bottles when I found them.
Of the 147 people abandoned on the raft two weeks earlier, fifteen were left alive: Dupont, the infantry captain; l’Heureux, a lieutenant in the infantry; Lozach and Clairet, second lieutenants; Griffon du Bellay; midshipman Coudein; Sergeant-Major Chariot; Courtade, a master gunner; Lavillette, the workshop foreman; Coste, a sailor; Thomas, a helmsman; François, a male nurse; Jean-Charles, a black soldier; Corréard, the engineer; and Savigny, the surgeon. Of these fifteen, who had the exceptional stamina and indomitable will to survive, five would be dead within the next few months.10