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.
The yacht Mignonette, a small cruising boat being delivered from England to a buyer in Australia, foundered in a gale in the South Atlantic on 5 July 1884, roughly 1,600 nautical miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope. Her four-man crew — captain Tom Dudley, mate Edwin Stephens, the sailor Edmund Brooks, and the seventeen-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker — escaped into a thirteen-foot lifeboat with almost no provisions: two tins of turnips and no fresh water. They caught a turtle a few days later, but by the third week they were starving and drinking their own urine, and Parker, who had also drunk seawater, lay dying in the bottom of the boat.
On 25 July, after about twenty days adrift and with no sail in sight, Dudley, with the assent of Stephens, cut the boy’s throat with a penknife. The three men drank his blood and ate his body to survive. Brooks took no part in the killing but shared the food. Four days later, on 29 July, the German barque Montezuma sighted the boat and rescued the three living men. They made no secret of what they had done, believing it sanctioned by the seafarers’ grim “custom of the sea” — that starving castaways might draw lots and sacrifice one to save the rest.
The law disagreed. Dudley and Stephens were tried at Exeter and, in the judgment of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), convicted of murder, the court ruling that necessity is no defence to the deliberate killing of an innocent person. Sentenced to death, they were reprieved by the Crown to six months’ imprisonment. The case did not turn on whether the men were monstrous — the court accepted their suffering — but on whether desperation can license one person to kill another. It remains a cornerstone of the common law on murder and necessity.
The Batavia, flagship of the Dutch East India Company on her maiden voyage from the Netherlands to the East Indies, struck Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the coast of Western Australia before dawn on 4 June 1629. She carried roughly 340 people. About forty drowned in the wreck; the rest, some 280 men, women and children, reached a cluster of small, low coral islands that had no fresh water and almost no food. What followed was not principally a story of exposure but of murder. While the commander went for help, one man turned the marooned survivors into victims of a planned slaughter.
The upper-merchant Francisco Pelsaert and the skipper took the ship’s longboat and about forty-seven people and made an open-boat voyage of roughly 1,900 nautical miles over thirty-three days to the port of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to bring a rescue ship. In his absence the under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz, who had been entangled in a mutiny plot before the wreck, seized control of the largest island. To stretch the scant supplies and remove anyone who might oppose him, he and a band of followers murdered an estimated 125 of the stranded — men, women and children — by drowning, strangling and the sword over some weeks, while a number of women were kept and abused.
Cornelisz had sent a party of soldiers under Wiebbe Hayes to a separate island, expecting them to die of thirst. Instead they found water and game, learned of the killings from escapees, armed themselves with improvised weapons, and repulsed the mutineers’ attacks. When Pelsaert returned on the rescue ship Sardam in late September 1629, the soldiers’ resistance had held. Cornelisz and the chief murderers were tried on the islands and hanged in October, several first having a hand struck off; two lesser mutineers were marooned on the Australian mainland. Of the roughly 340 who had sailed, only a fraction reached Java alive.
On the night of 13–14 May 1866 the three-masted ship General Grant, bound from Melbourne to London under Captain William Loughlin, drifted in light winds onto the towering western cliffs of the main Auckland Island, in the subantarctic ocean some 460 kilometres south of New Zealand. The ship was carried into a great sea cave; her mainmast struck the rock roof and was driven down through the hull, and she filled and sank in the cave with most of the 83 people aboard still trapped inside. Sixty-eight drowned. Only fifteen reached the shore of one of the loneliest archipelagos on earth, and of those, ten would live to be rescued eighteen months later.
The survivors landed with almost nothing and faced a climate of near-constant rain, wind and cold. Their lives turned on fire and food. They learned to keep a fire burning continuously, having no reliable means to relight it, and they lived on seals, sea birds and their eggs, wild pigs descended from animals left by earlier visitors, and roots, eventually moving to better ground on Enderby Island. The Auckland Islands lay far off any shipping route, so no rescue could be expected to come looking; the castaways’ only hope was endurance or their own escape. After nine months, four of the strongest men set out in a small boat to reach New Zealand without compass or chart. They were never seen again.
The General Grant is remembered as one of the great subantarctic castaway ordeals, and as a lesson in the lethal isolation of the southern islands. One more survivor, David McLelland, died of illness on the island before the end. The remaining ten were found in November 1867 by the brig Amherst, by chance rather than by search, after eighteen months of marooned survival. The wreck — and a cargo that reportedly included gold — has drawn salvage expeditions ever since, but the ship has never been certainly relocated within the cave, and the bones of those who drowned lie there still.
On 28 July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of an English supply fleet bound for the struggling colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was deliberately driven onto the reefs of Bermuda by Admiral Sir George Somers to keep her from sinking under him in a hurricane. The ship had been separated from her fleet, battered for days, and was leaking faster than her exhausted company could bail. Rather than let her founder in open water, Somers steered the dying ship at the land. She wedged between two reefs close enough to shore that every one of the roughly 150 people aboard — colonists, sailors, the new governor of Virginia, women and children — got safely off. Not a single life was lost in the wreck. It is one of the rare entries in this catalogue in which the doom was averted by the very decision that destroyed the ship.
The castaways then spent about ten months on Bermuda, an uninhabited island feared by sailors as the “Isle of Devils” but in fact mild and abundant, thick with wild hogs, fish, birds and cedar. They survived comfortably enough that survival itself bred a new danger: discontent. Several factions argued that the wreck had freed them from their indentures and that they should stay in this paradise rather than sail on to the hunger and disease of Virginia. Sir Thomas Gates, the colony’s incoming governor, suppressed a series of conspiracies, and one ringleader, Henry Paine, was executed by firing squad. A handful of people died on the island of illness or violence, and two parties sent for help in a small boat were never heard from again, but the great majority lived.
From Bermuda cedar and salvaged fittings the company built two new ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, and on 10 May 1610 sailed for Virginia, reaching Jamestown on 23 May 1610. There they found the colony nearly annihilated by the “Starving Time” — perhaps sixty survivors of some five hundred. The Sea Venture‘s castaways, given up for dead, had arrived as unexpected rescuers. Reports of the wreck, above all William Strachey’s vivid True Reportory, reached London in 1610 and are widely held to have helped inspire Shakespeare’s The Tempest.