On 2 July 1816 the French Navy frigate Méduse, bound for Senegal under Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of present-day Mauritania, the result of incompetent navigation that had carried the ship some 160 kilometres off course. The frigate carried roughly 400 people; her six boats could take only about 250. When efforts to refloat the hull failed, the senior officers and officials took to the boats, and at least 146 men and one woman were crowded onto a hastily built raft about 20 metres long, intended to be towed ashore.
Within a few miles the tow lines were cast off — by accident or by choice the record disputes — and the raft was abandoned on the open sea, almost awash, with little food and a quantity of wine but scarcely any fresh water. Over the next thirteen days the people on it died by the score: drowned, killed in fighting on the first nights, starved, driven to suicide, and in the end eaten by the survivors. When the brig Argus sighted the raft on 17 July, fifteen men were still alive; several died soon after rescue. The boats had reached the Senegalese coast; almost everyone left on the raft had not.
The Méduse is remembered less as a shipwreck than as an indictment. The grounding was avoidable, the abandonment of the raft was a betrayal, and the appointment of a captain who had barely sailed in twenty years was a symptom of a navy handing command by royalist favour rather than competence. Two survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, published an account that became an international scandal, and the young painter Théodore Géricault built from it Le Radeau de la Méduse, fixing the disaster permanently in the public conscience.
Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, under Captain Charles B. McVay III, was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea, between Guam and Leyte. The ship rolled over and sank in about twelve minutes. Of the 1,195 men aboard, roughly 300 went down with the cruiser; close to 890 entered the open Pacific with few rafts, little water and almost no organized survival gear. By the time the survivors were found by chance four days later, only 316 were still alive. Around 880 men died — the greatest single-ship loss of life in U.S. Navy history.
The disaster had two distinct phases, and the second was the deadlier. Many men survived the sinking only to die slowly in the water from exposure, dehydration, drinking seawater, wounds and the despair that drove some to swim off or slip from their lifejackets. Schools of sharks, primarily oceanic whitetips, gathered around the drifting groups and fed on the dead and the living; estimates of shark deaths range from a few dozen to more than a hundred, though most men were killed by the sea and the sun rather than by teeth. No distress signal was acted upon, and the ship’s overdue arrival at Leyte went unnoticed for days. The survivors were spotted only by accident, by a patrol pilot who happened to look down.
The Indianapolis is remembered for the secrecy that surrounded her and the injustice that followed her. Days earlier she had carried components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian on a mission so classified that her loss was tangled in silence. Captain McVay was court-martialed in December 1945 — the only U.S. captain so tried for losing a ship to enemy action in the war — and convicted of failing to zigzag, on testimony from the very submarine commander who had sunk him that it would have made no difference. McVay took his own life in 1968. He was formally exonerated by Congress and the Navy in 2000–2001, more than fifty years too late for him.