Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: The Grisly Shipwreck About this episode Holly talks about the many survivor accounts of the Medusa shipwreck, which were questioned regarding bias and intent. There's also a follow-up on what happened to Géricault's son.
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0:00 Holly Frey? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argentix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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2:08 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:19 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.
2:21 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
2:23 Holly Frey? We talked about shipwrecks, which are often people's favorite stories, although I don't know how much they'd love this one.
2:31 Tracy V. Wilson? It's a particularly gruesome one.
2:34 Holly Frey? It's grisly. It's rough. And I mean, I cut for time a lot of grisly things. So.
2:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:41 Holly Frey? And then we talked about, you know, the aftermath of that shipwreck and Theodore Jericho, whose work I am in love with anyway, and got to talk about him and his own little grisly fascination with this whole thing.
2:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
2:53 Holly Frey? Which is a little bit yucky.
2:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, I, I mean, I understand, like, becoming kind of morbidly fixated on something like this.
3:04 Holly Frey? Yeah.
3:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Like, I'm sort of thinking about how, when the submersible imploded.
3:11 Holly Frey? Yeah, everybody wanted all the details.
3:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Everyone wanted all the details. And then when the hearings happened about the implosion of the submersible, with the Titan, is that what it was called? Like, the hearings happened and like, everyone wanted all the details from the hearings. Not everyone, obviously. We know what I mean. And like.
3:30 Holly Frey? Yeah.
3:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Then, you know, documentaries about it, people, I feel like this, if the Medusa had happened now, similarly would have been like a thing that everybody was fixated on trying to get on their tail of.
3:46 Holly Frey? For sure. I mean, it's really interesting, too, because we do have very detailed survivor accounts.
3:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
3:55 Holly Frey? We didn't explicitly mention it in the episode, but we did talk about there being counter accounts and whatnot, and people trying to put forth their own version of events. But like, all of these accounts have been questioned in terms of the bias of the narrative. Like, there are even people who have accused Coriar and Savany of making the raft sound worse than it was, even though everyone found these men, skin and bones, like an absolute mess, when they finally were rescued. Like, there was no doubting that they had been through this terrible ordeal, but there are still people that question the, the accuracy of
4:40 Holly Frey? their version of events.
4:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah.
4:44 Tracy V. Wilson? I was struck by just the kid falling overboard near the beginning. And how people still fall off ships today. And it, it can be really hard to find people because ships move fast. If you're on a ship, you see somebody fall overboard. You need to point at them and look at them and yell to someone else that someone has gone over. Like, don't take your eyes off them.
5:12 Holly Frey? Yeah, don't break your visual line if you can avoid it.
5:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh, cause it's really hard to find people in the ocean. So like, it doesn't surprise me at all that they couldn't find him and they had to give up.
5:24 Holly Frey? Yeah, me either. It's just heartbreaking, though. Like, the many things that happened on this whole thing. The one thing that is, I think, really compelling about the various Survivor accounts.
5:36 Holly Frey? Right, like, Charlotte Picard's account, which she wrote a little bit later down the road. She didn't write it right after they were rescued, because she was still quite young then. Really does validate the experience of, like, the crew members' account. And it's good because it's from a very different point of view. You know what I mean? It's like, one of the wealthier families that was gonna be part of this, like, new, you know,
6:02 Holly Frey? poorly intended, but, you know, this new colony setup. For her to be like, oh, yes, we all recognized that Chomare was, like, dicey as hell, was very good. It made it seem not just like people that were maybe bristling against command or, you know, not...
6:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
6:18 Holly Frey? Like, for her to also be like, he trusted this guy that we all knew was a crazy loser. Like, we knew he did not have any kind of actual information or expertise, but he trusted him, even though we all were like, what are you doing?
6:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
6:31 Holly Frey? That's the other thing that really, really gets me in this. And we mentioned it a little bit, but there were so many people saying to Chomare, yo, we're in trouble. Like, I, I am a, you know, lifelong sailor. I have been on a lot of ships. I'm telling you right now, we're in trouble. And him going, no, we're not. My friend Richford says, fine, we're not, it's fine. I'm like...
6:59 Holly Frey? You know, in a world where people are disregarding experts in things in favor of of their own opinions being made into what they think is fact, it was a little, a bit of a gut punch at times reading some of those accounts.
7:15 Tracy V. Wilson? I also feel like I've obviously never been in a situation like this where we were on a ship with people's lives in our hands at all, right? My jobs have always been way more inconsequential.
7:30 Holly Frey? Sitting in a chair on a computer.
7:33 Tracy V. Wilson? In terms of life and limb, but I have 1,000% had many occasions where there was a decision being made or a change being contemplated. And a lot of people have been like, hey, this is a bad idea and here's why. And that was like, just not listened to or heard.
7:54 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yeah, it stinks. One thing that I did not include that is also harrowing, even after the raft group was rescued and they were put aboard the Argus, the Argus was still carrying people from the boats, the other lifeboats.
8:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
8:14 Holly Frey? So it was quite crowded and some of them had to sleep in like these makeshift quarters that were like down in the, you know, lower parts of the ship. There was actually a fire onboard that threatened their lives. And like they mentioned in the, the crew account, like, so they, we kind of got saved twice because some of their crew was on it and like put out the fires, but they were literally not put in like cushy, oh my gosh, you've been through so much, like, let's make sure you're taking care of conditions. It was literally like, there's a corner over there by the boiler. You could probably curl up over there if you want. Like, these poor men. It's interesting, that book that we
8:57 Holly Frey? mentioned by Jonathan Miles, if you want an in-depth.
9:02 Holly Frey? Dig in on that. I was kind of using that to triangulate. Like, I was going off a lot of the Coriar and Seven Yi and the Charlotte Picard accounts. And then I would triangulate with that and be like, is he interpreting this the same way I am? So that I would like, kind of get, like, the whole thing with guns versus cannons. That book says it's cannons. That they were trying to shoot off and it didn't have powder. But I don't, I said, that was one of the, the things that I was looking at. But one of the, the big things that he points out is that there had been, prior to this, instances of shipwrecks or similarly harrowing circumstances where people had turned to cannibalism to survive.
9:45 Holly Frey? And how there was like this precedent that like, obviously that's not great, but people give a little bit of grace, understanding the situation. But I think that too, added this whole other layer of like grim fascination to the whole thing.
10:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
10:01 Holly Frey? And even in the Coriar and Seven Yi account, there's a really, really upsetting passage where they talk about having to survive off of the body of a person who had been holding their hands like two days earlier. And it's just so upsetting.
10:20 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
10:21 Holly Frey? Like that he was one of their crewmates that was like, we're gonna get through this. We're gonna, you know, that they were all trying to, and that didn't work out.
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11:21 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
12:06 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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13:53 Holly Frey? There's an interesting story here about Jericho and abolition that I also didn't get into because he was an abolitionist. All right. And what's very interesting is his choice, because he did study this whole case so in-depth, as we noted, he talked to the survivors, he made diagrams of the raft so he understood what he needed to paint, but he made a very deliberate choice in changing up the details of what went on when he created his painting, which is that in the painting Raft of the Medusa, there are three black men on the raft. There was only one black man on the raft.
14:33 Holly Frey? And that has long been perceived as part of his effort to draw attention to the need for abolition. And as we said, he was planning to do a big, a large-scale painting, possibly as big as this one. Right. About the slave trade. So that was kind of an interesting. Yeah. Interesting thing. And he had actually hired a model. I didn't write it down and I don't remember where he was from, but he hired a black man to model for him, who is the model of two of the people on the boat, but like they're at different angles, so it doesn't look like a repeat person. But that was kind of interesting, just an interesting detail about him. Yeah.
15:17 Holly Frey? There's another interesting thing about his son. Okay. So he and Alexandrine had this son that was surrendered as unknown parents.
15:32 Holly Frey? But of course, people knew. And when Jericho, and some people had clearly kept up with what was going on with that boy, because when Jericho knew that he was dying, he made his will. And he made his will so that his father, who was still alive, would inherit everything. But his father, in turn...
15:54 Holly Frey? Made a new will of his own where everything that Jericho had willed him went to that boy.
16:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Oh.
16:01 Holly Frey? So that even though there had been a disconnect, he still got his father's legacy, which is kind of cool.
16:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
16:09 Holly Frey? It's a cool little trick. There is a very sad detail
16:14 Holly Frey? about Coriard that was also fascinating to me.
16:18 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
16:19 Holly Frey? As we said, Seven Yi, it seemed like wanted to not, even though he was, he was a participant in the multiple editions of the book that kept being published year after year after year. But he, he just was not as like, he did not get as politically active as Coriard and whatnot. So I, I feel like I don't have as much information about what his life turned out to be, but apparently Coriard had gotten married, clearly adored his wife, but he did this very weird thing after his wife died. Where he had like a dress mannequin that he kept in his room and he changed her clothes, like with his wife's clothes all the time.
16:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
16:59 Holly Frey? Cause he just wanted to feel like she was close to him.
17:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:03 Holly Frey? And it's so sort of odd and a little like from a Hitchcock film and then also sort of endearing in a strange way.
17:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, based on the gruesomeness of the episode, when you started describing this, I took it to a very different.
17:18 Holly Frey? You were way more worried that it was going to be a different thing. Yeah, no, no, no, it's benign in that regard. It hurts no one.
17:23 Tracy V. Wilson? When you said clothes, I was relieved.
17:28 Holly Frey? This is not the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover in any kind of way. Yeah, yeah, it's so sweet and sad and a little creepy, but also I can understand it.
17:37 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
17:37 Holly Frey? I don't know. It just, he did not have an easy life and like there was, I mean, he got called in front of the court so many times for, you know, his treasonous printings.
17:50 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
17:51 Holly Frey? Like his life was not easy and he clearly, I mean, that's the thing that isn't talked about much in any of these, even though it's discussed in some ways, but not at the depth that we would understand it today. These people that survive this experience like trauma that will change your brain.
18:10 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
18:12 Holly Frey? And like, there isn't a ton of discussion about their mental.
18:18 Holly Frey? Condition and their mental health in the years that follow. But that's where I really like that whole three years in prison. And then you get to go live your life in the country. I'm like, cool, cool, cool. There are other people that are never gonna outlive like the hell you put them through.
18:39 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
18:40 Holly Frey? Because sometimes inept people don't actually get as punished as they should be, which is frustrating to all of us.
18:50 Holly Frey? Anyway, I'm fascinated by this case and we'll probably keep reading more things about it because I can't stop because I'm fascinated. And also the art, and I will say, if you get a chance to go to the Louvre and you see this piece of art, it will rock you back. It is so striking and so moving and also just huge. Listen, I'm a girl who loves huge art. I love it. And so this is very much up my alley. Anyway, I remember studying this in high school and being like, what is that? Like, I immediately was obsessed with it in my art classes. So I'm glad I got a chance to talk about it because
19:30 Holly Frey? it's very good. And then you find out why it's so good and it's like,
19:34 Holly Frey? still really good. So now I want to go back to Paris just to see it again because it's been a minute. That's what's up. May we never live through such harrowing moments.
19:42 Tracy V. Wilson? That's a good wish.
19:43 Holly Frey? May we all have goodness. Yeah. If you are coming up on your weekend where you have time off, I hope that quite the opposite happens, that you have delightful moments and you have time of joy and laughter and rest and relaxation and hopefully fun with your friends or whoever's close to you. And that you pet a kitty, if that's your thing, and that you eat delicious stuff. Maybe have some cake. Cake is delicious. If it's not your weekend coming up, I bet you could still sneak a sneak a piece of cake in there. Or whatever it is that you eat that makes you feel very happy and that delights your palate. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode. And then on Monday, we will have something brand new.
20:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
20:45 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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