Saturday

No 114.

APRIL

PRICE
ONE PENNY.

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE OF GENERAL LITERATURE AND EDUCATION
Astor APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.

VOL. IV.

CREW OF THE MEDUSA ON THE RAFT,

From the Picture by GERICAULT'

There were five boats; in the first were the Governor of Senegal and his family, in all thirty-five; the second took forty-two persons; the third twenty-sometimes precipitated into the sea; floating between eight; the fourth, the long-boat, eighty-eight; the fifth, twenty-five; and the jolly-boat, fifteen, among whom were four children, and some ladies. The military had, in the first instance, been placed upon the raft-the number embarked on this fatal machine was not less than one hundred and fifty; making, with those in the boats, a total of three hundred and ninety-seven.

bound the Raft together: one of them, seizing an axe, actually began the dreadful work. This was the signal for revolt; the officers rushed forward to quell the tumult, and the man with the hatchet was the first that fell-the stroke of a sabre terminated his existence.

The passengers joined the officers, but the mutineers were still the greater number; luckily they were but badly armed, or the few bayonets and sabres of the opposite party could not have kept them at bay. One fellow was detected secretly cutting the ropes, and immediately flung overboard; others destroyed the shrouds and halyards, and the mast, deprived of support, fell on a captain of infantry, and broke his thigh; he was instantly, seized by the soldiers and thrown into the sea, but was saved by the opposite party. A furious charge was now made upon the mutineers, many of whom were cut down: at length this fit of desperation subsided into egregious cowardice: they cried out for mercy, and asked forgiveness on their knees. It was now midnight, and order appeared to be restored; but after an hour of deceitful tranquillity, the insurrection burst forth anew: the mutineers ran upon the officers like desperate men, each having a knife or a sabre in his hand, and such was the fury of the assailants, that they tore their flesh and even their clothes with their teeth: there was no time for hesitation; a general slaughter took place, and the Raft was strewed with dead bodies.

Some palliation must be allowed on account of their miserable condition; the constant dread of death, want of rest and of food, had impaired their faculties; nor did the officers themselves entirely escape. A sort of half-waking dream, a wandering of the imagination, seized most of them : some fancied they saw around them a beautiful country, covered with the most delightful plantations; others became wild with horror, and threw themselves into the sea. Several, on casting themselves off, said calmly to their companions, 'I am going to seek for assistance, and you shall soon see me back again.'

On the return of day it was found, that in the course of the preceding night of horror, sixty-five of the mutineers had perished, and two of the small party attached to the officers. One cask of wine only remained. Before the allowance was served out they contrived to get up their mast afresh; but having no compass, and not knowing how to direct their course, they let the Raft drive before the wind, apparently indifferent whither they went. Enfeebled with hunger, they now tried to catch fish, but could not succeed, and abandoned the attempt.

'It was necessary, however,' said the survivors, 'that some extreme measure should be adopted, to support our miserable existence; we shudder with horror on finding ourselves under the necessity of recording that which we put into practice; we feel the pen drop from our hands; a deadly coldness freezes all our limbs, and our hair stands on end. Readers, we entreat you not to entertain, for men already too unfortunate, a sentiment of indignation; but to grieve for them, and to зhed a tear of pity over their unhappy lot.'

The extreme measure' was, indeed, horrible: the unhappy men whom death had spared in the course of the night, fell upon the carcasses of the dead, and began to devour them. Some tried to eat their sword-belts and cartridge-boxes; others devoured their linen, and others, the leathers of their hats; but all these expedients, and others of a still more loathsome nature, were of no avail.

A third night of horror now approached; but it

proved to be a night of tranquillity, disturbed only by the piercing cries of those whom hunger and thirst devoured. The water was up to their knees, and they could only attempt to get a little sleep by crowding closely together, so as to form an immoveable mass. The morning's sun showed them ten or a dozen unfortunate creatures stretched lifeless on the Raft; all of whom were committed to the deep, with the exception of one, destined for the support of those who, the evening before, had pressed his trembling hands in vowing eternal friendship. At this period, fortunately, a shoal of Flying-fish*, in passing the Raft, left nearly three hundred entangled between the spars. By means of a little gunpowder and linen, and by erecting an empty cask, they contrived to make a fire; and mixing with the fish the flesh of their deceased comrade, they all partook of a meal, which, by this means, was rendered- less revolting.

The fourth night was marked by another massacre. Some Spaniards, Italians, and negroes, who had taken no part with the former mutineers, now entered into a conspiracy to throw the rest into the sca. The negroes had persuaded the others that the land was close to them, and that once on shore, they would answer for their crossing Africa without the least danger. A Spaniard was the first to advance with a drawn knife; the sailors seized and threw him into the sea. An Italian, seeing this, jumped overboard; the rest were easily mastered, and order was once more restored.

Thirty persons only now remained, many of whom were in a most deplorable state, the salt-water having entirely removed the skin from their legs and thighs, which, with contusions and wounds, rendered them unable to support themselves. The remains of the fish and the wine were calculated to be just enough to support life for four days; but in these four they also calculated that ships might arrive from St. Louis to save them. At this moment, two soldiers were discovered behind the cask of wine, through which they had bored a hole, for the purpose of drinking it; they had, just before, all pledged themselves to punish with death whoever should be found guilty of such a proceeding, and the sentence was immediately carried into execution, by throwing the culprits into the sea.

Their numbers were thus reduced to twenty-eight, fifteen of whom only appeared to be able to exist for a few days; the other thirteen were so reduced, that they had nearly lost all sense of existence; as their case was hopeless, and as, while they lived, they would consume a part of the little that was left, a council was held, and after a deliberation, at which the most horrible despair is said to have prevailed, it was decided to throw them overboard. Three sailors and a soldier undertook the execution of this cruel sentence. We turned away our eyes and shed tears of blood, on the fate of these unfortunate men; but this painful sacrifice saved the fifteen who remained; and who, after this dreadful catastrophe, had six days of suffering to undergo, before they were relieved from their dismal situation.' At the end of this period, a small vessel was descried at a distance; she proved to be the Argus brig, which had been despatched from Senegal to look out for them. hearts on board were melted with pity at their deplorable condition.-' Let any one,' say our unfortunate narrators, 'figure to himself fifteen unhappy creatures, almost naked, their bodies shrivelled by the rays of the sun, ten of them scarcely able to move; our limbs stripped of the skin; a total change See Saturday Magasine, Vol. IV. p. 103.

All

in all our features; our eyes hollow and almost | THE IMMENSITY OF THE WORKS OF THE savage; and our long beards, which gave us an air almost hideous.'

Such is the history of these unfortunate men! Of the hundred and fifty embarked on the Raft, fifteen only were received on board the brig, and of these six died shortly after their arrival at St. Louis.

Of the boats, the whole of which, as we have already stated, deserted the Raft soon after leaving the wreck, two only (those in which the governor and the captain of the frigate had embarked) arrived at Senegal: the other four made the shore in different places, and landed their people. The whole party suffered extremely from hunger, thirst, and the effects of a burning sun reflected from a surface of naked sand; but with the exception of two or three, they all reached Senegal.

CREATOR.

Ir is extremely difficult to devise any means of conveying to the mind a correct idea of the magnitude of the scale on which the Universe is constructed; of the enormous proportion which the larger dimensions bear to the smaller; and of the amazing number of steps from large to smaller, or from small to larger, which the consideration of it offers. The following comparative representations may serve to give the reader, to whom the subject is new, some notion of these steps.

If we suppose the Earth to be represented by a globe a foot in diameter, the distance of the Sun from the earth would be about two miles, the diameter of a sphere representing the Sun, on the same supposition, would be something above one hundred feet, and conThe governor, recollecting that the Méduse had on sequently his bulk such as might be made up of two board a very large sum of money, sent off a little hemispheres, each about the size of the dome of St. vessel to visit the wreck; but as if, it should seem, Paul's. The Moon would be thirty feet from us, and that no one part of this wretched expedition should her diameter three inches, about that of a cricket ball. reflect disgrace upon another, with only eight days' Thus the Sun would much more than occupy all the provisions on board; so that she was compelled to space within the Moon's orbit. On the same scale, return, without being able to approach it. She was Jupiter would be above ten miles from the Sun, and again sent out with twenty-five days' provisions, but Uranus (Herschel's planet) forty. We see, then, how being ill found in stores and necessaries, and the thinly scattered through space are the heavenly bodies. weather being bad, she returned to port a second The fixed stars will be at an unknown distance, but, time. On the third attempt she reached the wreck, probably, if all distances were thus diminished, no fifty-two days after it had been abandoned; but what star would be nearer to such a one-foot Earth, than were the horror and astonishment of those who the Moon now is to us, which is 240,000 miles distant ascended its decks, to discover on board three from us. miserable wretches just on the point of expiring!

It now appeared that seventeen men had clung to the wreck when the boats and the Raft departed; their first object had been to collect a sufficient quantity of biscuit, wine, brandy, and pork, for the subsistence of a certain number of days. While this lasted, they were quiet; but forty-two days having passed without any succour appearing, twelve of the most determined, seeing themselves on the point of starving, resolved to make for the land; they therefore constructed a raft, or float, which they bound together with ropes, and on which they set off with a small quantity of provisions, without oars and without sails, and were drowned. Another, who had refused to embark with them, took it into his head, a few days afterwards, to try for the shore; he placed himself in a hen-coop, dropped from the wreck, and at the distance of about half a cable's length from it, sunk to rise no more. The remaining four resolved to die by the wreck; one of them had just expired when the vessel from Senegal arrived; the other three were so exhausted, that a few hours more would have put an end to their misery.

About the time when this dreadful event occurred, the ALCESTE frigate, which had been sent by the King of England with an ambassador on a special mission to the Emperor of China, was also wrecked*. But how different were the consequences in the case of the English ship to those which occurred in that of the Méduse. The two frigates were wrecked nearly about the same time-the distance from the nearest friendly port pretty nearly the same-in the one case all the people were kept together, in a perfect state of discipline and subordination, and every one brought safely home from the opposite side of the globe;-in the other case, each seems to have been left to shift for himself, and the greater part perished in the horrible way we have just seen.

On such a terrestrial globe, the highest mountains would be about one eightieth part of an inch high, and, consequently, only just distinguishable. We may imagine, therefore, how imperceptible would be the largest animals. The whole organized covering of such an earth would be quite undiscoverable by the eye, except, perhaps, by colour, like the bloom on a plum.

In order to restore the earth and its inhabitants to their true dimensions, we must magnify the length, breadth, and thickness of every part of our supposed models forty millions of times; and to preserve the proportions, we must increase equally the distance of the sun and of the stars from us. They seem thus to pass off into infinity; yet each of them thus removed, has its system of mechanical, and, perhaps, organic processes going on upon its surface.

But the arrangements of organic life which we can see with the naked eye are few, compared with those which the microscope detects. We know that we may magnify objects thousands of times, and still discover fresh complexities of structure; if we suppose, therefore, that we thus magnify every member of the universe, and every particle of matter of which it consists; we may imagine that we make perceptible to our senses, the vast multitude of organized adaptations which lie hid on every side of us; and in this manner we approach towards an estimate of the extent through which we may trace the power and skill of the Creator, by scrutinizing his work with the utmost subtilty of our faculties.

Those magnitudes and proportions which leave our powers of conception far behind-that everexpanding view which is brought before us, of the scale and mechanism, the riches and magnificence, the population and activity of the universe—may reasonably serve to enlarge and elevate our conceptions of the Maker and Master of all; to feed an ever-growing admiration of his wonderful nature; and to excite a desire to be able to contemplate more An account of the wreck of the Alceste will be given in the steadily, and conceive less inadequately the scheme of his government and the operation of his power. L. C.

[Abridged from the Quarterly Review, 1817.]

present volume.