Titanic, on a river?
It amazes me sometimes what tragedies are remembered and which ones aren’t. In my lifetime most people can tell you where they were the moment that they heard Princess Diana died, yet I would bet that half of those people (if not more) couldn’t tell you where they were the moment they heard that Mother Theresa had died. Why is it that people remember the death of a commoner elevated to royalty and no one remembers a woman who is likely to be sainted by the Catholic Church? Which was the one guaranteed to improve ratings and sell papers (this being back before the interwebs had all but annihilated the newspaper industry)? Most of the world has some fascination with royalty and while Diana was certainly a decent human being, she isn’t even in the same time zone as Mother Theresa in regards to how much she dedicated herself to others.
Why do I bring this particular subject to light, especially fourteen years after the fact (God just typing that makes me feel like an old ass man)? It is because often we don’t hear about things of an important nature, not so much because they aren’t important but because they aren’t deemed marketable. In this day and age of constant media and information it is relatively easy to ignore the sensationalism pushers and go on to more viable and useful news sources that cover a number of things that you will never hear about on your local news. At best many of those important items would be lucky to make a footnote on MSNBC, Fox or even CNN. The fact of the matter though is that today we have options, but in 1865 people didn’t.
27 April, 1865, the American Civil war has recently ended and many veterans are eagerly trying to get home. After one of the worst and bloodiest wars in world history up until this point in time, men who had never left their hometowns had been witness to unspeakable carnage and death. Almost all of them were eagerly trying to get home by any means possible. It didn’t matter to them. They would get home by foot, by boat, by train, by horse, by anything that could take them back. One of these ways of getting home was on the SS Sultana, a steamboat heading up the Mississippi River. After stopping in Vicksburg, Mississippi the captain, trying to make as much as possible on this trip, crammed about 2,400 men on board in every available space he could find. That wouldn't be catastrophic if it weren’t for two important facts:
1) The listed capacity for passengers on this ship was 376, which put the ship at approximately 638% capacity.
2) The Sultana had just repaired, instead of replacing, a bad boiler with a spot patch and another with some bulging boiler plates replaced by thin patches. This might not sound bad but it is important to visualize this properly. Imagine a teapot that has no hole to vent the steam when the water boils. The pressure in the pot will increase until the weakest spot in the container will give. In the case of the teapot it would be the top, in the case of a boiler it would be a patch. Back to that fateful day in April…
The Sultana, already over capacity with one of its four boilers in less than tip-top condition, is steaming up the Mississippi just a few miles from Memphis. Around 2:00 AM a massive explosion lights up the night sky throwing debris, hot coals, bodies and other cargo into the night’s sky. The hot coals land on the ship’s superstructure and what is left of the boat catches fire. Three of the Sultana’s four boilers exploded, turning what was to be a joyous homecoming for veterans weary of war turns into one of the most tragic disasters to ever occur on water. Of the 2,400 men on board, the official death toll was 1,547 killed although most recent evidence indicates that the actual death toll was closer to 1,800. How is it that this disaster which killed more people than the most famous maritime disaster in history, the Titanic (1,517 dead) , is never covered in most history classes and has never inspired James Cameron to make a ridiculous movie about it?
It is simple really. The Sultana disaster was overshadowed by the Diana death of its day. On April 14th Abraham Lincoln had been shot and the day before the Sultana disaster was the day that John Wilkes Booth was shot and killed by Union soldiers. I don’t want to make it look like I think the assassination of one of the greatest American leaders in history is unimportant. It was extremely important in more ways than I have time to write about here. However the true tragedy of all of this in the end is the fact that the tragic deaths nearly 1,800 soldiers on their way home was not only less covered but largely forgotten to history. The media of the day, the newspapers, barely covered the Sultana disaster which is truly sad in the end for all those men who survived the war only to meet a tragic fate that they had no way of preventing.