Today in History: 1816 French frigate “La Méduse” runs aground
Two hundred years ago, 147 French sailors and maritime passengers were cast adrift on a raft off west Africa. They ended up fighting, killing, and eating the dead. Extreme, then, even for French sea-farers. Scandal and uproar ensued in post-Napoleonic France. More to our point, the episode inspired one of the greatest, and biggest, paintings of the 19th century.
At 16ft by 24ft, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa is not too far short of the raft it depicts. The vast work fills a wall in the Louvre’s Denon Wing, (around the corner from the Mona Lisa). I’ve occasionally gazed at it to the point of sea-sickness.
The story is simply told. In early summer 1816, the frigate Medusa was taking French officials to assume control of Senegal, ceded to France by Britain after the fall of Napoleon and restoration of the monarchy the previous year.
Predictably, it was captained by an old incompetent who hadn’t been to sea for 20 years, an aristo given command because he was a monarchist. He ran the ship aground 50 miles off Mauretania. Lifeboats were insufficient for the 400 crew and passengers, so a raft was rapidly built. It was to be towed by the lifeboats. But, fearful for their own safety, folk in the lifeboats cut the ropes.
The raft was powerless, the 147 bereft of supplies. They fought, they chewed leather belts and hats to fend off starvation, they chucked the weak overboard and finally tipped over into the taboo of cannibalism.
When picked up 13 days later, on July 17, only 15 survived (of whom, five died shortly afterwards). Back in Paris, two survivors wrote a best-seller, blaming the disaster on the naval command and, by extension, the entire backward-facing Restoration regime.
Meanwhile, 27-year-old Théodore Géricault saw his chance to make a name by committing the tragedy to enormous canvas. His preparations were prodigious. He interviewed survivors, visited morgues to get the right deathly skin pallor and filled his flat with body parts (including a severed head from a lunatic asylum) to act as “models”. Finished in 1819, the painting found some favour in France, much more in a London invariably thrilled by evidence of killer French bungling. The Raft of the Medusa entered the Louvre only after Géricault’s early death, from TB, in 1824. There it remains, immensely more overwhelming than any image you’ve recently summoned to your smartphone. Experts will tell you it’s an evolution of classicism towards romanticism. I’ll tell you that there’s so much going on, the work threatens to surge from the frame and sweep you away.
So, please, after you’ve scrummed down before the Mona Lisa, skip next door for the Louvre’s real art action. Then you can leave. You’ve had your money’s worth.
Read more here: Raft of the Medusa: a grisly tale of incompetence and cannibalism
Also on this day:
1679 Europeans first visit Minnesota and see headwaters of Mississippi in an expedition led by Daniel Greysolon de Du Luth
1698 English engineer Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine
1787 Marquis de Sade shouts from Bastille that prisoners are being slaughtered
1798 Marine Police established by The West India Committee to guard merchant vessels on the river Thames, London, beginnings of the world’s oldest continuously serving police force
1843 An alligator falls from sky during a thunderstorm in Charleston, South Carolina
1849 Giuseppe Garibaldi begins hunger strike in Rome
1865 One-time Methodist Reform Church minister William Booth and his wife Catherine Booth found the East London Christian Mission, now known as the Salvation Army
1881 US President James Garfield shot by Charles Guiteau a disappointed office-seeker; Garfield dies 79 days later
1900 First flight of Zeppelin LZ-1, a dirigible airship designed by Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin, at Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany
1901 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rob train of $40,000 at Wagner, Montana
1921 Warren G. Harding signs a joint congressional resolution declaring the official end of war with Germany
1937 Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappear flying over the Pacific Ocean en route to Howland Island. Noonan is declared dead the following year, and Earhart is declared the year after (1939)
1951 Leidse astronomers discover radio signal out of Milky Way system
1956 Elvis Presley records “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” at RCA studio in New York City
1980 Comedy film “Airplane!” written and directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and starring Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty premieres
1985 European Space Agency launches Giotto (Halley’s Comet Flyby)
2002 Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon.
2005 10 Live 8 concerts held around the world organised by Bob Geldof to raise awareness of poverty
2018 British divers discover 12 boys and their coach alive in Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand after being trapped for 9 days by monsoon flooding
2019 Newly rediscovered Lewis chess piece sells at auction for £735,000 in London
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1990 Margot Robbie - Australian actress and producer (The Wolf of Wall Street, Focus), born in Dalby, Queensland
1986 Lindsay Lohan - American actress (Another World; Freaky Friday; Mean Girls), born in New York City
1973 Peter Kay - British comedian, actor and writer ( Peter Kay’s Car Share), born in Farnworth, England
1957 Brett “the Hitman” Hart - Canadian Wrestling champion, born in Alberta
1956 Jerry Hall - American model and actress, married to Mick Jagger and Rupert Murdoch (Batman, Freejack), born in Mesquite, Texas
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2014 Louis Zamperini - American World War II veteran whose story of capture by the Japanese inspired the movie “Unbroken”, dies at 97
1961 Ernest Hemingway - American author (The Old Man and the Sea, Nobel Prize for Literature - 1954), dies from suicide at 61
1778 Jean-Jacques Rousseau - French philosopher, political theorist, and writer (Confessions) whose works inspired French Revolution leaders and Romantic academics, dies of cerebral bleeding from a stroke at 66
1644 William Gascoigne - English astronomer and mathematician (introduced telescopic sights), is killed in the Battle of Marston Moor at 24
1566 Nostradamus - French astrologist and prophet (Les Propheties), dies at 62
Holidays on this day
Freedom From Fear of Speaking Day
I Forgot Day
Made in the USA Day
National Anisette Day
Second Half of the Year Day (Non-Leap Years)
Special Recreation for the Disabled Day
World Sports Journalists Day
World UFO Day
The Funnies:
Interesting (not necessarily extinct) animal of the day:
If a nickname has the word “lobster” in it, you know it’s going to be big. So it is for the Lord Howe Island stick insect, affectionately known as the “tree lobster.” Once so plentiful in the forested areas of Lord Howe Island, located several miles off the coast of Australia, that fishermen used them as bait, sightings of these stick insects declined precipitously—and by the early 1930s, they were presumed extinct. Their fall occurred after black rats infested their remote volcanic habitat in 1918 and devoured them. Twelve other invertebrate species and five bird species were also exterminated due to the rats.
But there were rumors that the big, black bug was living on Ball’s Pyramid, a tiny, sheer-faced volcanic “sea stack” about 12 miles (20 km) from Lord Howe Island. Could it be true?
Intrepid scientists traveled to the treacherous pyramid in 2001 to “make sure” they were gone. They were astonished to find a tiny population of the insects surviving on one lone, scruffy shrub, clinging to life on a 60 degree slope of the barren rock.
Upon the insect’s “rediscovery,” two breeding pairs were brought to the Australian mainland for breeding; a few other zoos, including San Diego, are now also participating in resurrecting the rarest insect on the planet.
The Lord Howe Island stick insect is a large, flightless, nocturnal insect that can grow the length of an adult human’s hand. It has a stout body—females have a broad abdomen with an ovipositor while males are more slender but have longer and thicker antennae and enlarged hind legs. Juveniles, called nymphs, are bright green for the first few months of life and active during the day; adults are a dark, glossy brown-black. Another name for a stick insect is phasmid.
Lord Howe Island stick insects are endemic to the Lord Howe Island Group, a cluster of volcanic islands in a crescent shape in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. Today, a tiny population survives on Ball’s Pyramid, a steep, tiny volcanic “sea stack” about 12 miles southeast of the main Lord Howe Island. These individuals are the founders of the zoo-based recovery programs.
Ball’s Pyramid is the tallest volcanic sea stack in the world at 1,844 feet (562 meters) high. It is about 3,600 feet (1,100 meters) long and 980 feet (300 meters) across. Little grows here, but a single patch of a spindly melaleuca bush Melaleuca howeana that manages to eke out a living in a tiny plot of soil is the lifeblood of the Lord Howe Island stick insect! The entire habitat is at the mercy of the sea and endures blistering heat during the day, storms, and strong winds. The insects shelter in cavities formed in plant debris or at the base of the shrubs on Ball’s Pyramid.
With the absence of rats on Ball’s Pyramid, the tiny population living there is as safe as it can be, especially since access to the island is severely restricted. Back on Lord Howe Island, people are working on eradicating the rogue rodents, so the Lord Howe Island stick insect can be reintroduced and once again reign over its historic domain after almost a century of exile.
On Ball’s Pyramid, adult Lord Howe Island stick insects spend the night nibbling on leaf tips of the melaleuca bush, and then retreat out of sight by day. At the San Diego Zoo, melaleuca and Moreton Bay fig plants are being cultivated to provide sustenance for the growing population in managed care.
Read more: Lord Howe Island Stick Insect | San Diego Zoo Animals & Plants
Quote of the Day:
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
Albert Einstein
Video of the Day:
Happy birthday to Kevin Hearn (keyboard player) (1969)
and to Dave Parsons (bass player) (1964):
Comic of the Day:
Credit: #931; The Adventures of Currency – Wondermark
Inspirobot Always Controversial, Occasionally Inspirational Quote of the Day:
Read @Vikingmichael’s shady Spark! from yesterday here: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/spark-pro-series-1-july-2025
Don’t forget to leave some spice right here ↓
