Historian Jonathan Miles delivers a spellbinding account of the ill-fated voyage of the most
famous shipwreck before the
Titanic, the events that inspired Theodore Géricault’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. When the incompetent captain ran the ship aground on a treacherous sand bar, the privileged few claimed the lifeboats and one hundred and forty six 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. Meanwhile, those in the boats who made it to shore, undertook a dangerous two hundred mile slog through the desert. Miles’s astonishing story, full of action, adventure, catastrophe, and art literally takes the reader’s breath away.