It’s not as familiar an idiom as ‘your cross to bear’ which refers to Christ being made to carry his own cross to his crucifixion, but it basically means the same thing ...to have a responsibility or a difficult situation that you must tolerate.
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The Raft of Medusa is an oil on canvas painting by Theodore Gericault a French Romantic painter. It is currently on display in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The painting is large at 16 ft. 1 in. x 23 ft. 6 in. The dramatic scene captures a moment during the aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Meduse which ran aground off the western coast of Africa on July 2, 1816. The ship was en route to Senegal to re-establish French occupation of the African colony. There were over 400 people on board including soldiers and the appointed French governor of Senegal and his wife and daughter.
In order to make better time and shorten the voyage, the incompetent French captain of the Meduse, Viscount Hughes Duroy de Chaumereys, drifted off course by over 100 miles and grounded the ship on sandbar about 60 miles off the African coast.
De Chaumereys had been appointed as captain for this mission despite having no experience or ability. He was given his commission as a result of political preference, no doubt someone’s brother-in-law or best friend’s best friend. We all know how that goes. We see it everyday in our lives ...in our workplace, in government, politics, business, education, law enforcement, the military, religion, anywhere where a hierarchy and pecking order establish a rule of law and procedure ...everywhere that human self-interest can intervene.
Efforts to free the Meduse from the sandbar failed. The passengers and crew were frightened and in extreme danger. The crew used the Meduse’s six lifeboats to travel the 60 miles in rough open seas to safety. There was barely room for 250 passengers in the lifeboats. The 150 remaining passengers which consisted of crew members, some of the contingent of marine infantrymen intended to garrison in Senegal, and one woman, were put aboard a hastily built raft made of parts and timber from the disabled Meduse. The idea was that the lifeboats, containing the captain, of course, and other crew members, would tow the raft to safety along with the other passengers. 17 crew members opted to stay aboard the grounded Meduse.
They were only a few miles in tow when the raft was cut loose, probably because of the exaggerated effort and actual degree of difficulty to maintain the floating caravan.
The raft was doomed from the start. It began to break apart immediately. People drowned immediately. Provisions were grossly inadequate. The raft passengers became sick, scared, crazed, parched and starved. There were suicides. Mutineers were slaughtered. They killed the weakest and resorted to eating the dead. After a 13 day bloody odyssey the raft was rescued by a chance sighting. There were only 15 people left alive and barely alive at that.
News of the incident stirred outrage and public emotion. It became a huge embarrassment for the French monarchy only recently restored to power after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
Gericault’s painting of the incident was completed in 1819 and became an iconic artwork of French Romanticism. There was an artistic controversy about the painting, however, which shows the raft passengers frantically waiving to a passing ship which sails by not seeing them. The agony and horror of the “pile of corpses” on the raft was distasteful to aficionados of classicism who looked toward ideal beauty in art, whereas the realism expressed in the painting presented the paradox of how a hideous subject could be translated into a powerful painting, and how the artist could reconcile art, beauty and brutal reality.
But for me the painting is a stark reminder of how the integrity and competence of proper management leadership, no mater where, no matter what venue, can easily be breached and corroded by the human deficits of politics, ego, and self-interest. Misplaced and inattentive power-of-authority, complacency and laziness, lack of sound thinking and wisdom, and over-exuberant inexperience have either contributed or been the sole cause of disasters throughout history. Neither race, gender or ethnicity are immune. We even see it in the family structure, in parenting, in society generally. It’s just the way it is. It’s our one great fault as human beings.
It happens and it’s omnipresent. Just look around you. Look throughout history. It has shaped history. The sinking of the passenger ship Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1912 was not as much incompetence, although totally avoidable by the captain, as it was fate, of which we are constantly hunted and subsequently haunted. But nonetheless a poor management decision from which a series of inadequacies and events gave preference.
The Mutiny on the Bounty is another seagoing analogy where management concerns provided for a disastrous outcome. You can’t help from making the analogic connection between Captain Bligh at the helm of HMS Bounty and Captain Trump at the helm of America. You can only speculate on the outcome of this crisis currently in motion and still afloat.
Five of the 15 raft survivors of the Meduse died within five days. Only three of the 17 crewmen who opted to stay with the wreck survived. Captain de Chaumareys and most of the others in the lifeboats survived. The incident quickly became a scandal within the French government as the politicians attempted to cover it up. De Chaumareys was tried and found guilty of incompetent and complacent navigation and of abandoning the Meduse before all the passengers had been taken off. The verdict elicited the death penalty but de Chaumareys was sentenced to only threes years in prison as the court martial was said to be a whitewash of the incident and of his neglected responsibility.
The Meduse was a total loss and is one of the most infamous shipwrecks in the era of the sailing ship. A book was written by two of the survivors, the ship’s surgeon and an officer. French folk songs, legends and stories commemorated the incident, and an opera followed in 1838. The French film ‘Le Radeau de la Meduse’ (‘The Raft of the Medusa’) was made in 1990 by Iranian film director Iradj Azimi. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164839/
If you’ve ever experienced the stomach churning dread of knowing that you could have easily prevented an accident if you’d only paid attention to detail, a small accident or a horrific disaster as mentioned above, you know the critical responsibility and gripping obligation of a wise decision maker, a competent leader, manager, and management team. When you have to man the lifeboats it’s already too late. Maybe not for you but for everyone else under your command.
Look around, are you on your own Raft of Medusa, critically exposed and vulnerable to the incompetence of others ...or did you opt to go down with the ship? Maybe you are one of the chosen in the lifeboats with the incompetent captain.
...or maybe you are the captain.
John Kushma is a communication consultant and lives in Logan, Utah.
