les ténèbres 1816
Marker: recorded wreck position (Age of Sail).
Key facts
| Name | les ténèbres | Wikidata label |
|---|---|---|
| Year lost | 1816 | Wikidata P793 significant event, point-in-time qualifier |
| Era | Age of Sail | derived from year |
| Ship type | frigate | Wikidata P31 instance of |
| Nationality / flag | France | Wikidata P8047 country of registry |
| Operator | French Navy | Wikidata P137 operator |
| Sea / ocean | North Atlantic Ocean | Natural Earth marine areas (public domain), point-in-polygon |
| Nearest coast | Mauritania | Natural Earth (public domain); approx. 49 km from land |
| Position | 20.0500, -16.8100 | Wikidata P793 significant event, coordinate qualifier (CC0) |
About the wreck
Méduse was a 40-gun Pallas-class frigate of the French Navy, launched in 1810. She took part in the Napoleonic Wars during the late stages of the Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811 and in raids in the Caribbean.
In 1816, following the Bourbon Restoration, Méduse was armed en flûte to ferry French officials to the port of Saint-Louis, in Senegal, to formally re-establish French occupation of the colony under the terms of the First Peace of Paris. Through inept navigation by her captain, Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had been given command after the Bourbon Restoration for political reasons even though he had hardly sailed in twenty years, Méduse struck the Bank of Arguin off the coast of present-day Mauritania and became a total loss.
Most of the 400 passengers on board evacuated, with 146 men and one woman forced to take refuge on an improvised raft towed by the frigate's launches. The towing proved impractical, however, and the boats soon abandoned the raft and its passengers in the open ocean. Without any means of navigating to shore, the situation aboard the raft rapidly turned disastrous.
Diving & visiting
In 1980, a French marine archaeological expedition led by Jean-Yves Blot located the Méduse shipwreck site off the coast of modern-day Mauritania. The primary search tool was a one-of-a-kind magnetometer developed by the CEA.
The search area was defined on the basis of the accounts of survivors of Méduse and, more importantly, on the records of an 1817 French coastal mapping expedition that found the vessel's remains still projecting above the waves. The background research proved to be so good that the expedition team located the shipwreck site on the first day of searching.
Location
- Recorded position: 20.0500, -16.8100 (Wikidata P793 significant event, coordinate qualifier (CC0); may be approximate)
- Sea / ocean: North Atlantic Ocean
- Nearest coast: Mauritania
Wreck positions on this site are for interest only and are not for navigation. Many wrecks are war graves or legally protected: never disturb human remains or remove artefacts, and check local law before diving.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article French frigate Méduse (1810) (revision 1367907340), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section and section(s) “Shipwreck site”; condensed by selecting paragraphs and trimming at sentence boundaries; citations and formatting removed. No text added. This excerpt is available under the same licence.
Wreck facts from Wikidata (CC0).
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Browse more: Africa wrecks · North Atlantic Ocean · Age of Sail