Wrecks of the Medusa

The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century by Jonathan Miles, 249 pages

and

Wreck of the Medusa: Mutiny, Murder, and Survival on the High Seas by Alexander McKee, 290 pages

In 1816, the frigate Medusa, enroute from France to Senegal with 400 passengers and crew, ran aground on a sandbar in the Bay of Arguin off the Mauritanian coast.  The ship's boats could not carry everyone, and 147 people were crammed onto a hastily built raft.  The initial plan to tow the raft to safety was swiftly abandoned - if it was ever seriously intended - and the craft was left to drift with the current.  Fighting soon broke out over the limited supplies and space, cannibalism followed, and finally the weaker survivors were tossed overboard in order to conserve what little remained.  When rescued 12 days later, only 15 men survived, five of whom died within days.  

This remarkable story of shipwreck and survival created a sensation in a France still divided by the Revolution and Bonaparte, and there were immediate attempts to capitalize on the tragedy as emblematic of the incompetence and venality of the restored Bourbon monarchy.  It was soon immortalized by painter Theodore Gericault in his 1819 masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa, which continues to inspire interest in the tale of the ill-fated frigate two centuries later.

Alexander McKee's Wreck of the Medusa was originally published in 1976 as Death Raft, while The Wreck of the Medusa by Jonathan Miles was published in 2007.  The lurid original title of the former honestly announces its nature as a pulp adventure tale, while the latter book is more interested in the broader significance of the event than the details of the event itself.  Unexpectedly, it is the adventure tale which is more open about conflicts in the primary sources - Miles seems to have ignored competing claims until his conclusion.  Miles' account quickly becomes jumbled and confused, clumsily shifting between the story of the Medusa and the life of Gericault and doing a better job describing the latter, especially immediately after the wreck when even a straightforward retelling is forced to deal with no fewer than six separate groups of survivors.  McKee, for his part, only briefly deals with Gericault, but includes details of other analogous incidents from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which, besides being interesting in themselves, illumine the main story, though not as much as the author claims.