The Death Toll Rises

Most people have never heard of the Sultana, although her wreck is the worst one in U.S. history. Other news, like the assassination of President Lincoln, overshadowed the tragedy.

The Sultana
The Sultana was a passenger steamship on the Mississippi River. In April 1865, the Civil War had just ended, and Sultana was carrying thousands of Union POWs back North after their release from captivity. After the war, the government paid passenger ships for each soldier they ferried home. Sultana was approved to carry 376 passengers. When she cast off from New Orleans in April, headed for Cincinnati, she was carrying as many as 2,500, most of them ex-POWs who were weak, sick or injured. She also had several troubled boilers onboard. They'd been leaking on previous voyages and were always quickly repaired. On this trip, Sultana had to repair her boilers several times before the ship docked at Memphis for a regular stop. At Memphis, the crew again repaired the boilers, and Sultana left for Cairo, Illinois, just after midnight on April 27. Most of the soldiers would disembark at Cairo.

Sultana was moving against a strong current, severely overloaded, and she was making little headway. The boilers couldn't handle her load: At about 2:00 a.m., they exploded, breaking the ship in half. The force of the explosion killed many passengers and threw others hundreds of feet into the water. The ship was immediately a ball of flames, and there were no life boats, so anyone still alive jumped into the water. Many of the soldiers couldn't swim, and those who could were weakened by their ordeal during the war. Hardly any of them survived. More than 1,500 and possibly as many as 1,900 people died. The exact number is unknown because there was no accurate passenger manifest.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress Sultana passing Helena, Arkansas, on April 27, 1865 (left) and artist's rendition of the explosion of the Sultana on April 28, 1865

The Sultana shipwreck got hardly any press -- the Civil War had just ended, President Lincoln had been assassinated a week and a half before and there was a manhunt on for John Wilkes Booth. The deaths of a shipload of soldiers just released from POW camps hardly registered in the public's awareness at the time.

The Titanic
Contrast the Sultana with a shipwreck that occurred almost half a century later in the icy waters of the North Atlantic, just south of Newfoundland. When the "unsinkable" Titanic wrecked in 1912, the whole world noticed. The steamship was the biggest and most luxurious passenger liner of her time, and some of the world's rich and famous had booked a room for her maiden voyage. On April 10, 1912, the Titanic left England with about 2,200 people onboard. Two nights later, on April 14, a lookout spotted an iceberg right ahead. Titanic reversed her engines and tried to turn away, but it was too late.

When Titanic hit the iceberg, it gouged 250 feet (83 yards) of the hull and popped out at least six rivets below the water line. Holes from those rivets flooded the first five watertight compartments at the front of the ship. Titanic could have stayed afloat if only four of those compartments had been flooded. Some surmise that Titanic would've remained afloat if she had hit the iceberg head-on instead of trying to turn, because then only the first and maybe second watertight compartments would have flooded.

The weight of the flooded compartments pulled Titanic head-first into the ocean. It ultimately took more than two hours for her to sink, with the ship breaking into at least two pieces in the process. There was a ship in the vicinity, just 10 miles away, but her wireless operator had already left his post for the night, so he didn't pick up Titanic's calls for help. More than 1,500 people died in the disaster. Many went down with the ship or died of hypothermia after jumping overboard into the frigid water. Fewer than 700 people survived the wreck of the Titanic.

It's possible that many more passengers could have survived, but Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats to accommodate everyone. She only carried enough lifeboats for 1,178 people, about half of the passengers onboard. At that time, laws about lifeboats were different -- the number of required lifeboats was determined by a ship's weight, not her passenger capacity (the disaster of the Titanic helped changed the laws regarding lifeboats). Titanic actually had more lifeboats than required by law. One of the many factors that made matters worse was that most of the available lifeboats were launched only half or a quarter full, and then only two out of the 18 launched lifeboats returned to rescue passengers from the water after the wreck.

Photo courtesy The Smithsonian Institution; Emory Kristof/National Geographic; NOAA—IFE/URI Clockwise from top left: The Titanic; bow and railing of the Titanic shipwreck; steering motor on the bridge; port side forward expansion joint on the boat deck of the bow section

In 1985, a crew led by Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic. She remains on the ocean floor 323 nautical miles from the southern coast of Newfoundland.

The Doña Paz
The Doña Paz shipwreck in 1987 left nothing at all to be discovered after the fact. In the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history, the Doña Paz passenger ferry collided with an oil tanker in the Tablas Strait off the coast of the Philippines. Doña Paz was allowed to carry 1,518 passengers and crew, but as many as 4,500 were onboard at the time of the shipwreck. En route from the Philippines to Manila, the passenger ship hit a tanker carrying 8,800 barrels of oil products. The collision resulted in a ball of flames that immediately engulfed both ships and incinerated almost all evidence of the disaster. More than 4,000 people died, although no one knows the exact number because there was no accurate passenger manifest. Twenty-six people survived the wreck of the Doña Paz. Many of these people reported that at the time of the collision, they saw crew members drinking beer and watching movies.

The Joola
Poor seamanship may also have contributed to the wreck of another passenger ferry in 2002, this one off the coast of Gambia. The Joola, a ferry owned and operated by the government of Senegal, was licensed to carry 550 passengers. She was carrying almost 2,000 when she headed out of her allowed operating range and into a storm. Joola immediately capsized in high winds and choppy seas. Many passengers died when the ship capsized, but most probably drowned in the water waiting for rescue, which didn't come until the morning after the wreck, hours after the accident. More than 1,800 passengers died. There were only 64 survivors.

An investigation after the wreck surmised that the Joola capsized due to poor ship maintenance, too much weight and her sailing beyond the coastal waters she was approved for. But no one knows for sure. It's usually difficult to pinpoint the exact cause when a ship goes down in a storm. War-time shipwrecks, on the other hand, are typically far easier to explain.

Heroes and Villains The wreck of the French ship Medusa is one of the most chilling examples of "every man for himself" and was a tremendous embarrassment to the French government. In 1816, Senegal was transferring control of one of its ports to the French, who sent the passenger ship Medusa as part of fleet meant to supervise and observe the transition. When the Medusa ran aground off the west coast of Africa, all hell broke loose. There were not enough lifeboats, and the captain decided to abandon ship. The dignitaries and high-ranking officers onboard took the lifeboats and left everyone else, more than 150 people, to drown or else starve on a thrown-together raft. A few of the crew stayed on the Medusa to await rescue. The people in the lifeboats started to tow the raft but quickly gave up and headed for shore, leaving 150 people floating on the ocean with hardly any supplies. Murder, suicide and cannibalism ensued. After 13 days, the raft was discovered by a ship that happened to be in the area. Only 15 people were still alive. At the other end of the spectrum is the wreck of the Madeira in 1905, which produced a true hero. The Madeira crashed into a rock formation in one of the biggest storms in Great Lakes history. In this one storm, 20 ships were damaged or completely lost. While waves were smashing Madeira to pieces against the base of a cliff, one of her crew members grabbed a rope and jumped off the ship. Fred Benson, battered by rain and winds, climbed the 60-foot rock wall. He tied a rock to the bottom of the rope and dropped it down to the battered ship. Eight men climbed to safety before the Madeira sank. One man died in the wreck.