Out of the Depths by Alan G. Jamieson

Author:Alan G. Jamieson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

The overloaded steamship Sultana at Helena, Arkansas, 26 April 1865, the day before it was lost, photograph by Thomas W. Bankes.

Captain James Cass Mason of the Sultana met Union officers at Vicksburg and agreed to carry around 1,400 released Union prisoners of war northwards up the river. However, when the Sultana was loaded, a much larger number of freed prisoners came aboard. Officially, when Captain Mason left Vicksburg on the night of 24 April 1865 his ship was carrying 2,137 people, but it has been claimed that the vessel was in fact carrying many more. In any case the Sultana was grossly overloaded.

On the evening of 26 April the Sultana reached Memphis, Tennessee, and after a short stop it departed near midnight. The Mississippi was experiencing its spring flood and the Sultana had to force its way northwards against a strong current, straining its boilers. Around 2 a.m. on 27 April, when the ship was just 7 miles (11 km) north of Memphis, its boilers exploded and set the ship on fire. Hundreds died immediately, while others leapt into the cold waters of the river and perished later. The blazing vessel drifted southwards, then hit the western bank of the Mississippi and sank. Official estimates of the dead varied from 1,100 to 1,500, although some people believed many more were lost. Around nine hundred people survived the sinking, but Captain Mason and most of his officers were not among them.

In 1982 what were claimed to be the remains of the Sultana were found on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, about 4 miles (6.4 km) from Memphis. The blackened wooden deck planks and timbers were found at a depth of 32 feet (9.7 m) under a soybean field. The course of the Mississippi has changed many times since the disaster, so it is not surprising that the remains of the wreck were found on land about 2 miles (3.2 km) away from the modern course of the river. The death toll of the Sultana disaster makes it the worst shipwreck in U.S. history, yet at the time it occurred in April 1865 it received comparatively little notice. The Civil War was over, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated and the deaths of more than one thousand people seemed a small loss compared to a conflict that had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

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