ABSTRACT

Figure 1.1. The male readership of Lloyd's Merchants' Room at the Royal Exchange. From the Illustrated London News (7 October 1854): 333. © Illustrated London News / Mary Evans Picture Library.

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The nineteenth century had none of the twentieth century's confidence in unsinkable vessels. Long before publicity surrounding the TitanicHenry Adams confessed to feeling a “delightful shudder" following news of that wreck-disasters at sea were recorded in broadsides, chapbooks, magazines, and, with increasing prominence, newspapers.5 Many ship­ wrecks first known to nineteenth-century audiences through the press are still known to us today. One wreck is especially familiar to modern audiences through Gericault's famous painting The Raft o f the Medusa (1819), which takes as its subject an accident with which few news read­ ers at the time would have been unacquainted. In 1816, the French frig­ ate La Meduse struck a reef off the West African coast. Life boats could accommodate only 250 of the 400 people aboard the ship. The cap­ tain and senior officers seized the boats before abandoning those left behind to an overcrowded raft built from lashed masts and beams. The majority of these passengers died from illness, starvation, and a vio­ lent mutiny. Desperate survivors at one point devoured a butterfly that landed on the mast, according to Dickens's description of the scene for Household Words: “Upon this raft, every conceivable and inconceivable

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passengers boarded the raft. The number of survivors dwindled to thirty after four days; twenty-seven after one week; and just fifteen after two weeks at sea. Notoriously, survivors shoved sick passengers overboard in order to preserve rations before ultimately resorting to cannibal­ ism. The scandalous story became known to the public through a sur­ vivor s account published in the Journal des Debats, dispatches reported in the Moniteur UniverseI, and reports printed in The Times? Gericault's painting-entered in the Salon of 1819 catalogue as "Scene de Naufrage” ("Scene of Shipwreck")—was shown in London to the general public for six months in 1820. This sensational wreck by itself, however, gives little indication of the vast number of shipwrecks occurring each year.