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Sat 04 Apr 2007A catastrophic craftHistory:French artist Théodore Géricault's powerful masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, is a potent image of shipwrecked people abandoned on a raft, but how many of us ever registered the fact that the painting records a real and terrible event?The raft in question was a makeshift wooden raft hastily constructed to help evacuate passengers from the French government ship, the Medusa, headed for Senegal, after it failed to avoid a treacherous sandbank off the west African coast in 1816. Although the raft was initially towed by the ship's lifeboats, the ropes were then shamefully cut and its occupants left to drift towards inevitable starvation and death. Of the 146 men and one woman on board, only 15 men survived the 14 days of horror. After experiencing riots, suicides, murder, thirst, hallucination, cannibalism and despair, the survivors told tales that would send shockwaves through contemporary 19th-century Europe and beyond. They still have the power to shock today.