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There are many ways to die. Starving to death on a raft at sea is among the nastiest.

Such was the fate of 147 survivors of the French frigate Medusa. Adrift for two weeks on a cobbled-together raft, they were forced to eat leather and fabric, murder each other, and even use the body of a deceased colleague to "nourish those who, only short while before, had clasped his hands in friendship" - in other words, to cannibalize.

"The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century," is Jonathan Miles's account of this debacle that shocked and shook Restoration France. On July 2, 1816, the Senegal-bound Medusa slammed into a reef. The captain, Hugues de Chaumareys, whose incompetence doomed the voyage, fled for the Medusa's lifeboats, along with a few choice passengers and crew. The captain promised the raft would be towed behind the convoy of lifeboats, but he cut the tow ropes. His group made landfall and wandered the Sahara before being rescued. As for the 147 stuck on the raft, only 15 survived.

In an effort to re-animate the events, Miles follows the intersecting stories of two key players in the drama: Alexandre Corréard, a survivor of the raft who went on to write a best-selling exposé of his ordeal, and Théodore Géricault, a troubled painter whose canvas immortalized the disaster.

The narrative begins promisingly enough. In a macabre scene, Géricault sneaks through the streets of Paris, a severed head, obtained under mysterious circumstances, under his arm. Still smarting from an impossible love affair with his aunt, the painter is searching for a subject whose horror might match his tortured heart. In the catastrophe of the Medusa, he finds his calling. Raiding the morgue, he fills his studio with body parts. He listens to Corréard's account, and paints the half-decomposed arms and legs.

The studies become "The Raft of the Medusa" - a painting so controversial that, exhibited at 1819 Salon, it is renamed "The Scene of the Shipwreck." In a clichéd story of artistic suffering, Géricault himself dies young, anonymous, and penniless, but today, his masterpiece hangs in the Louvre.

The artist and the survivor's efforts to turn tragedy into something tangible are intrinsically compelling. But in telling the tale, Miles, who also wrote "David Jones: The Maker Unmade," seems somewhat marooned among history's details. He recounts the events of the shipwreck well enough, recounting the rafters' chilling decision to kill off the weakest among them. However, just when the author develops narrative tension, or we begin to see the events through a single passenger's eyes, the author piles on more back story or mires the reader in French politics.

The impressive level of detail about the events and individual behavior on the raft - the deliberations, the riots, the cannibalism - suggests an intimate knowledge of the events or, at least, an imaginative leap from the source materials. So why not go the extra step and narrate the book like fiction, paced to build suspense and peppered with dialogue? Miles may be a fastidious historian, but his storytelling lacks the skill to emotionally hook the reader.
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His ponderous style does not help, either. "The relaunching of the French monarchy promised a turbulent passage fraught with conflict, and it was against such an unpropitious background of stormy division and strife that the new repainted Medusa . . ." reads but one of many examples.

The repetitive and conventional descriptors "turbulent," "fraught," "stormy," etc., all unnecessarily clamor for attention. Likewise, in a single paragraph describing the castaways' landfall, Miles's prose takes on a purple hue. "Scorching shore," "lacerating July sun," "immense expanse of undulating sand," "heaving sea," and "menacing desert" are the many stock phrases trotted out to convey a sense of crisis. Miles does not trust his descriptive powers; he overcompensates with too many adjectives that aren't all that effective anyway, when one or two would do.

Another drawback: Other than the partially obscured image on the jacket itself, the book contains no full-color reproduction of the painting. But other black-and-white illustrations do give the reader an idea of Géricault's vision, and Miles does nicely analyze the historical significance of the painting.

After the first third of "The Wreck of the Medusa," the shipwreck itself is over. What follows is the aftermath: the trial, a lenient prison term for Captain Chaumareys, the political wreckage of the corruption charges that reached as high as the Bourbon king, and the making of the painting. Whether this is enough to hold one's attention largely depends upon the tastes of the reader. Clearly, Miles has researched his topic.

But clunky, amateur closing statements such as "Our inability to discover the truth behind the terrible events that have been variously recounted according to the interests of differing writers remains problematic" make it hard for the reader to care much.

Lovers of seafaring dramas and French history will find "The Wreck of the Medusa" a suitable, if flawed, addition to the growing body of nautical literature. But for the rest of us, Jonathan Miles makes for tough rowing.

Ethan Gilsdorf is a Boston-based writer. Contact him at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.