At the heart of the plot of the picture is a real incident that happened on July 2, 1816 off the coast of Senegal. Then on the shallows of Argen in 40 leagues from the African coast the frigate Medusa crashed. Considering that the ship could break, the passengers and crew panicked, and the captain decided to leave it immediately. Seventeen people remained on the frigate
147 man switched to a raft. On an overloaded raft there was little food and no controls and navigation.
In the conditions of pre-storm weather, the crew on the boats soon realized that it was almost impossible to tow a heavy raft; fearing that the passengers on the raft would start to get into boats in a panic, the people in the boats cut the towing ropes and headed towards the shore. All survivors on boats, including the captain and the governor, reached the coast separately.
Position on a raft, left to the mercy of fate, turned into a disaster. The survivors were divided into opposing groups - officers and passengers on the one hand, and sailors and soldiers - on the other. On the first night of the drift, 20 people were killed or committed suicide. During the storm, dozens of people died in the struggle for the safest place in the center near the mast, where the scarce reserves of food and water were kept, or were washed away by the wave overboard. On the fourth day only survived 67 a man, many of them, tormented by hunger, began to eat the corpses of the dead. On the eighth day 15 the strongest survivors threw the weak and wounded overboard, and then all the weapons, so as not to kill each other. The details of the swimming shocked modern public opinion. The captain of the frigate, Hugo Duroy de Shomarey, a former emigrant, who was responsible for most of the raft passengers' death, was appointed under the protection (he was later convicted, received a suspended sentence, but this was not reported to the public). The opposition blamed the government for what happened. The maritime ministry, trying to hush up the scandal, tried to prevent the emergence of information about the disaster in the press.
In the fall of 1817, the book The Death of the Medusa Frigate was published. Eyewitnesses of the event, Alexander Correar and the doctor Henri Savigny, described in her a thirteen-day raft wandering. The book fell into the hands of Gericault, who saw in history what he had been looking for for many years - the plot for his large canvas. The drama "Medusa", unlike most contemporaries, including his close friends, the artist perceived as a universal, timeless history.