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| Wreck of the Sultana |
Just released from Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville and Cahawba, Union soldiers board the Sultana to being their trip home. The Sultana, a wooden Mississippi paddlewheeler weighing 1,719 tons, was contracted by the government to carry the troops, weakened by incarceration and associated with illnesses. The Sultana would never complete her journey, ending in the worst maritime disaster in United States history.
Captain J.C. Mason and the Sultana left New Orleans on April 21, 1865 with 100 cabin passengers, deck passengers and livestock headed for St. Louis. She took on more passengers at Vicksburg, Mississippi and had had a leaking boiler patched rather than replaced. Repairing the boiler took only one day and replacing it would have taken three.
Soldiers at the port did everything they could to get on board. Threats were made, bribes were passed and stronger men simply forced their way on, flooding the ship with over two thousand men, far above the legal capacity of 376. The decks were completely packed with people and every available berth was jammed.
The Sultana made her way north, overcrowded and top heavy, following the twists and turns of the rivers, listing from side to side. As the side-by-side mounted boilers tipped sideways, the water would run out of the highest boiler, leaving a fire going in the now empty boiler, and create hot spots. When the ship would tilt in the other direction and the water would rush back into the boiler and turn to steam when it hit the hot spot, creating a sudden surge in pressure. This could have been alleviated by maintaining high water levels in the boiler.
Seven to nine miles north of Memphis, at around 2:00 a.m., a mighty explosion tore through the Sultana, sending some of the passengers on deck into the water a demolishing a fair portion of the ship. Burning coals were scattered by the explosion, igniting the superstructure and creating an inferno that could be seen in Memphis.
An hour after the explosion, the Bostonia II arrived and rescued many survivors. The remains of the Sultana drifted to the west bank and sank at dawn as other ships showed up to aid in the rescue. The Navy sidehwheel gunboat USS Tyler, manned by volunteers as her regular crew had been discharged several days earlier, even came to the rescue.
Those who survived the explosion then had to deal with getting through the aftermath. The ship was not safe to be on and the flooding waters of the Mississippi were hardly a better option. Many initial survivors died from drowning and hypothermia. Other survivors were found clinging to the tops of trees. Bodies of victims were still being found months later as far south as Vicksburg. Many were never found.
Five hundred survivors, many with horrible burns, were treated in hospitals in Memphis. As many as 300 of these victims perished later from the burns or exposure.
No exact death toll is known but estimates put then number between 1,300 to 1,900. The United States Customs Service puts the number at 1,547 and modern historians simply say the number was up to 1,800. Estimates of the survivors range from 700 to 800. Captain Mason was not among the survivors.
While the official cause of the explosion was the boilers, in 1888, a St. Louis resident, William Streetor, claimed that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a deathbed confession to having sabotaged the Sultana by coal torpedo.
Coal torpedos were iron casings filled with an explosive powder that, when shoveled into a boiler, would cause damage.
Louden, a former Confederate agent and saboteur, operated in and around St. Louis. He had the opportunity and the motive to make such a sabotage and may have had access to the means. Eyewitness reports state that a piece of artillery shell was observed in the wreckage but most scholars still support the official explanation.
In 1982, an archaeological expedition uncovered what is believed to be the hulking wreck of the Sultana. Found 32 feet under a soybean field about four miles from Memphis, burned wooden deck planks and timber were dug up. The Mississippi River has changed course several times since 1865, leaving the wreck buried on land.
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