The notorious tragedy of the frigate Medusa has fascinated many, from René Goscinny (Astérix and Obélix) to Julian Barnes, not to mention Géricault’s terrifying canvas in the Louvre, The Raft of the Medusa (1817). On this raft, jerry-rigged from masts and crossbeams, 149 passengers and crew were set adrift four miles off the coast of Mauritania, when the dignitaries escaping the Medusa in lifeboats decided to tow them no further. When, thirteen days later, the raft was intercepted almost by accident, only 15 men were alive. Those thirteen days are a record of famine, thirst, murder, and finally cannibalism comparable to the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Emptaz plunges us into history, taking as his narrator the medic Savigny, a survivor whose original account of the disaster launched the investigation and scandal that shook Louis XVIII’s young regime. In a mimicry of documentary, Emptaz augments his first-person account with all manner of missives, lists, log entries. The facts are well known. The Medusa was to convey Colonel and future governor Schmaltz to Senegal, to receive the colony from the English. By royal appointment, Hugues de Chaumareys was made ship’s captain for his loyalty to the crown, though he had never commanded a ship of such size, and had in fact not been on the seas for the decade of his exile during Napoleon’s reign. The Arguin Bank, where the vessel ran aground, was a well-known danger common to every maritime map.

Emptaz relates with great precision how a series of compounded errors on the part of the powerful mounted to a grisly catastrophe that might well have been avoided, but which instead deteriorated into a display of the basest and most bestial aspects of man. To meticulous detail and colorful sailor’s slang the author adds a classic Gallic J’accuse leveled at the corruption and incompetence of those in command, making this truly a tale for our times.