Look up the noun, “sultana,” in your favorite dictionary or encyclopedia. Depending upon the size of the reference work, you will find that it means (a) the wife or daughter of a Sultan; (b) an odd sort of bird found in Australasia; and (c) a type of seedless grape. What you will not find is that Sultana was also the name of a Mississippi river steamboat, a name that deserves a place in maritime history beside that of the Titanic. Because of a trick of fate, the story of the Sultana is virtually unknown—yet the explosion of the Sultana as the result of a stupid military order cost the lives of more men than any other single catastrophe in the annals of America.
Compared to the Titanic, the Sultana was as a dinghy to a battleship. She was certified to carry only 376 passengers, a frail wooden side-wheeler with tall twin stacks on either side of her pilot house—a typical river steamboat. When the great White Star liner, Titanic, sank after ramming an iceberg in the black waters of the north Atlantic on her maiden voyage in 1912, she carried 1,517 men and women to their deaths, and more than $12,000,000 in cargo went to the bottom. The Sultana, small and obscure as she was, claimed the lives of 1,450 men when she blew up! Catastrophe overtook her in April, 1865, and even today, after two World Wars, her death-toll is surpassed only by that of the Titanic, a British ship, and two recent marine disasters in China.
Grant had just captured Vicksburg, after a long and terrible siege, when the Sultana was built in 1863. She was launched at Cincinnati, and her owners were James C. Mason, W. A. Thornburgh and Dameron C. Logan, all of St. Louis. Since steamboats were badly needed in those dark days of the Civil War, the Sultana was pressed into military service by the Federal authorities almost before her paint was dry. Mason, who had a three-eighths interest in her, was master.
During her short life, the Sultana saw hard service. Hers were no peaceful journeys up and down the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi. Not for her were the thrilling races against rival steamboats, or romantic moonlight nights with Negro roustabouts singing on the f’ocsle. Hers were races against time, churning down stream and back under forced draught, to hurry supplies and troops where they were needed. There was never time for overhaul or for any substantial repairs.
The Sultana lay at New Orleans, loading sugar, on April 21, 1865. Mason, her master, must have sighed with weary relief when he saw the last sack on board and gave the order to get under way for Vicksburg. The Civil War was over—Richmond had capitulated, Grant had met Lee at Appomattox Court House on April 9. In the Capitol at Washington, a nation mourned—Abraham Lincoln had been dead less than a week. But the war was not over for the Sultana. Ahead of her was a long, hard journey up-river, and her condition was rapidly going from bad to worse. Her hull needed paint, her paddles were splintered by the river snags, and her boilers, weakened with scale and rust, were leaking at every seam.
When she put into Vicksburg three days later, repairs were imperative. Workmen were brought aboard to patch her flimsy boilers just enough to stand the pressure of the northward trip, but Destiny had other plans in store for the Sultana.
In spite of the protests of Capt. Mason, the Sultana was ordered to embark on a large detachment of released prisoners of war, as well as two companies of infantry en route to Cairo, Illinois, to be mustered out. Accompanying them were 60 horses and mules. When she was finally ready to cast off, the Sultana was burdened with 2,200 men and 60 animals—her rated capacity, remember, was only 376.
On April 26, the Sultana limped into Memphis, leaking steam like a teakettle. The patching job at Vicksburg was just a makeshift, and the terrific strain of pushing upstream with six times her rated load was beginning to tell. Capt. Mason discharged as much of his cargo as possible on the Memphis dock, and went to make another protest to the Federal authorities. He might as well have saved his breath, for he was told, “Patch up your boilers as best you can, but sail you must!” The Union officer-in-charge was anxious to get the returning prisoners of war to a place were they could receive proper medical care, and Capt. Mason’s vigorous objections were overruled.
Picture to yourself what conditions must have been aboard that poor little side-wheeler. Into every available space were jammed not only two full companies of able-bodied soldiers and 35 officers, but 1,969 sick, half-starved veterans who had dragged out months of war in the stinking confines of Andersonville, the most infamous of all Confederate prison camps. Clothed in tatters, fed on little more than garbage, forced to exist in crude shanties or dig themselves holes in the ground like animals, these pitiful creatures were desperately in need of clean air, good food, and above all, medical attention. Yet, crowded almost beyond endurance aboard the Sultana, they were, if one can believe reports, laughing and happy—they were going home!
So it was that the Sultana put out into the stream and headed north from Memphis on April 27, 1865. She lay low in the water and her paddlewheels groaned as they churned the muddy waters of the Mississippi.
Seven miles above Memphis the channel winds among a group of small islands and sand bars, known to pilots of the day as Paddy’s Hens and Chickens. Just as she came abreast of the first island, the Sultana was rocked by a terrific explosion—one of her four boilers had blown up. Shattered by the blast her decks erupted like a mad volcano. Quickly she lost headway as the flames shot up. The air was filled with screams of dying men. Those nearest the rails were crushed by the mass of clawing, fear-maddened victims behind. Those who could leaped into the river and were carried away, but only a few reached the shallows. Some, driven by panic, swam incredible distances only to go down in the boiling current.
Stronger men might have saved themselves, but what chance had those poor devils who were hardly able to stand, let alone swim. One brief newspaper account of the disaster relates how five hundred souls huddled in the bows of the vessel to escape the flames driven aft by the wind, but the stricken Sultana drifted with the current and the flames were reversed—all perished.
The pilot, Caton, escaped injury when the pilot house was blown clear and he fell into the river. He, and others, spread a rumor that the Sultana had been blown up by Confederate sympathizers, among her engineers. They were alleged to have concealed a torpedo in her coal and then escaped by small boat. One report even declared that they were captured and shot. However, official investigation disproved this tale. The engineers perished in the explosion, and it was proved that the Sultana’s boilers were badly fouled with sediment, and that the repairs had been faulty. If anyone was shot, it was probably one of the ghouls who came to prowl among the dead in search of loot. The shattered hulk went aground on a sand bar and burned to the waterline.
No one knows for certain how many men perished that night. All survivors are gone now, and even the records of the former Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation have been reduced to a summary on file cards in the National Archives. This source sets the death toll at “more than 1,500”; another estimates it as 1,450. Because of the death of Abraham Lincoln, the details of his funeral cortege and the nation-wide search for his assassins, newspapers of the day relegated the tragedy of the Sultana to what would, today, be the stock-market page.