SS Sultana

1865

The forgotten American maritime disaster Location: Mississippi River, north of Memphis, Tennessee · Coordinates: 35.24°N 90.07°W · Casualties: ~1,167 · Survivors: ~761 · Depth: destroyed · Cause: boiler explosion — Three of four tubular boilers exploded simultaneously at approximately 2:00 a.m. on 27 April 1865. Likely caused by a combination of faulty repair, low water level, and extreme overloading. Fire consumed what remained of the ship. · Fate: destroyed · Type: sidewheel steamboat · commercial · Tonnage: 1,719 tons · Crew: 85 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1863 Mississippi steamboat carrying Union POWs home from Confederate prison camps. Designed to carry 376; 2,100 were aboard. Three of four boilers exploded at 2 a.m. north of Memphis. More Americans died than on the Titanic. Lost beneath news of John Wilkes Booth's death the same week. The Vessel The SS Sultana was a Mississippi River sidewheel steamboat, 79 metres long, 1,719 tons gross, built in Cincinnati in 1863 by the John Litherbury yard and owned by a syndicate of St Louis merchants. She was classified as a cabin steamer of the second class, with first-class accommodations on her upper decks, a capacity of perhaps 380 passengers and crew, and a boiler installation consisting of four tubular high-pressure boilers on her lower deck. Her commercial role in 1864-65 was the cotton and general-freight trade between New Orleans and St Louis, with scheduled stops at Memphis, Vicksburg, and Cairo. She was one of some 200 commercial steamers working the Lower Mississippi during the Civil War years under the military transport system overseen by the United States Quartermaster Department, which requisitioned civilian steamers for troop movements at a per-head contract rate. In March 1865 one of her four boilers developed a bulging seam from overheating; the ship's engineer R. G. Taylor had her put into a repair yard at Vicksburg for a proper rebuild, which would have taken three weeks. Her master, Captain J. Cass Mason, under commercial pressure to maintain his schedule, accepted a patch repair of the single boiler: a rivet-mounted steel plate over the weakened seam. The repair took 24 hours. The boiler inspector who certified the patch was under contract from the owners. The Disaster At 02:00 on 27 April 1865, three of her four boilers exploded almost simultaneously. The inquiry afterward determined that the starboard middle boiler, the same one that had been patched in Vicksburg, was the point of initial failure; the shock of its rupture propagated through the adjacent boilers in the same brick setting within milliseconds. The explosion destroyed the centre of the ship and collapsed the three upper decks into the firebox. The Sultana's wooden superstructure caught fire from the exposed coals immediately. The ship had no lifeboats that could serve her actual passenger load; she carried a skiff and a yawl sufficient for perhaps 80 people. The Mississippi current at that season was running at 6 knots in flood, and the water temperature was 12 degrees Celsius. POWs too weak to swim from Andersonville died in minutes in the current. Those who could swim were pulled under by those who could not. The burning hulk drifted downstream for four kilometres before grounding against a wooded bank near the mouth of Second Chickasaw Bayou at 06:30. Rescue steamers from Memphis arrived within an hour of the first alarm. The Bostonia II pulled 100 survivors out of the water on the way downstream. The Silver Spray, the Pocahontas, and the small gunboats Essex and Tyler worked the river bank through the morning. Survivors were taken to Memphis hospitals; many of the POWs, already at the edge of starvation, died in the following days from exposure and exhaustion on top of th