Raft of Dead Men

Culture has a great many allusions to death on the high seas. Well, not always on the high seas, but is it just me, or are there a lot of literary and motion picture equivalents to the famous "Raft of the Medusa" painting by Theodore Gericault, one of the earliest and most controversial of the Romantic era painters in France.

The subject of the painting itself, the tragic shipwreck of the French Naval frigate Meduse, and the subsequent deaths of all but 15 of the survivors of a makeshift raft that sailed the sea for 13 days before their rescue, was chosen for its potential to shock and horrify. This worked. The painting was extremely controversial. The survivors and the dead endured horrifying conditions, including dehydration, starvation, cannibalism, and madness before their rescure. The painting itself looks very classical, and is horrifying.

All this brings to mind many subsequent works in the cultural annals of mankind in times since. Bram Stoker's Dracula also told a horrific tale of madness and horror on the high seas in his seminal "Dracula" written in 1897. In the book, as in the film from 1992, the tale of Dracula's internment in the earth of his homeland whilst sleeping in a crate in the gallows of Russian freighter ship "Demeter" headed for England, and to his beloved Mina, is rife with imagery reminiscent of "Raft" and many other thematically-related stories. In fact, in Chapter 7 of the original book, the poem is referenced upon the doomed freighter's arrival. Dracula subsists during this long voyage by feeding on the crewmen of the ship, who are unaware of his status as a stowaway in the ship's cargo. When the ship enters the harbor in England on itsdirectionless arrival, dracula, in beast form, abandons the ship before it haphazardly runa aground. The imagery is horrifying, as the ship is described as sort of creeping in slowly from the thick fog before "docking." Upon investigation of the seemingly abondoned ship, the police find bodies of the deceased, along with a horrific sight of a crewmember, long dead, with his wrists broken and tied with rope to the steering wheel of the ship, a grotesquely contorted monument, a a twisted altar to the Count's unholiness. Harrowing.

Most famous fo all, perhaps, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's chilling account of a crew onboard the high seas in his "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The long-form poem, some 17 pages, includes imagery of a doomed crew, of an dangerously prophetic albatross, reanimation of the dead, and carries with it the famous line "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink . . . " Speaking of which, this line was later used in another famous story, originally run in E.C. Comic's "Crime SuspenStories," issue #15, by George Evans. Evan's allusion to Coleridge and Gericault is in two parts. The first, titled "Water, water Everywhere . . . " involves two men stranded in a boat in the ocean who resort to rather horrifying acts in order to survive. The seconds half, called " . . . and Not a Drop to Drink!" involves the same to men displaced in a desert and stranded with nothing to drink. The cleverness of the stories is that both involve water, one even taking place in the middle of an ocean, and yet the men suffer the same fate in both stories.

Speaking of comics, not only is Bill Everett's Sub-Mariner based on Coleridge's poem, but Alan Morre's recently film-adapted comic series "Watchmen" includes a story-writhin-a-story entitled "Tales of the Black Freighter," in which a shipwrecked man alone on an island builds a similarly doomed raft that floats on the bloated bodies of his dead comrades, wherebye he begins a nasty voyage back to the mainland during which he hallucinates, is accosted by seagulls snacking on his friend's bodies, engages in cannibalism, and is attacked by hungry sharks. Upon reaching the mainland, he attempts vengeance on the ones responsible for his misfortunes. It's supernatural occurrences and the mariner's impending doom mark this story as another in a long line of depictions of voyages of dead (or nearly dead) men. This story is especially disturbing in the motion comic DVD released to promote the live action film last year.

LAst of all, we have real-life occurrences. No citation of the Titanic here, because that story is not only different, but is, by now, so familiar as to become hackneyed. Instead, I reference the Spanish conquistadores. Lope de Aguirre and some other conquistadores have been mentioned, either in fantastical accounts of their lives, or in historical records, as having been stranded on the high seas in rafts, their crew members and they themselves succumbing to hunger, dehydration, cannibalism, sickness (often from drinking salt water), and, eventually madness and death. These stories often involve the search (fictional or otherwise) for the Seven Cities of Cibola or the city of El Dorado, or of simple colonization and exploration. I don't know all the specifics yet. Aguirre searched both for thegolden city of El Dorado, and engaged in brutal practicies both in his treatment of prisoners, interpretors, and of his own men (he even murdered his daughter Elvira, when surrounded by Spanish soldiers after being captured due to his brutal crimes and opposition to the Spanish crown. He said he'd rather her die than fall into the hands of "uncouth people." The wonderful Werner Herzog film "Aguirre: The wrath of God," references something the real Aguirre was supposed to have said:

"I am the Wrath of God,
the Prince of freedom,
Lord of Terra Firme and the provinces of Chile."

The famous Neo-German Expressionist's film also stars the violent, brooding, and wonderful Klaus Kinski in the title role. Ironically, Klaus also starred in Herzog's update of M.F. Murnau's classic "Nosferatu," originally a "Dracula" knock-off only because Murnau, also a trendsetting German Expressionist, was unable to get the Stoker family estate's permission to call the film "Dracula" and to name its characters accordingly. "Aguirre" the film was released in 1972, and its climax involves Aguirre, in madness, proclaiming himself leader of the group of explorers and embarking on a trail of murder and brutality. It ends with Aguirre the ruler of a group of slowly starving, hallucinating men, who observe things like a massive wooden ship perched in the treetops along the sides of the river. An Indian attack kills all remaining survivors, including Aguirre's daughter, while Aguirre remains alone of the sloywly circling raft, which becomes overrun by monkeys. Almost reminiscent of the much later Apocalypse Now, the river becomes a metaphor for madness and death as the lust for powerand greed has driven Aguirre insane and left him the proud ruler of a raft full of monkeys and dead men. He tells his "men" thus: "I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God!"

The images of a single man overtaken by madness, king of a raft of corpses, in extrmeley dynamic, but the overall theme of madness and death among the high seas seem to pervade culture, both high and "low."