The French frigate Meduse ran aground on the Arguin Bank off present-day Mauritania in July 1816 because of navigational incompetence. About 147 people were placed on a makeshift raft that was abandoned by the ship's boats. Only fifteen survived the resulting thirst, violence and starvation.

The catastrophe entered poetry through the enormous cultural influence of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa and through later French and postcolonial verse. Poets have used the raft as an image of political abandonment, class privilege and societies reduced to desperate survival.