The last voyage of the steamboat Sultana

At approximately 2 a.m. on April 27. 1865, just a few weeks after the end of the Civil War, there was an explosion aboard the steamboat Sultana. The explosion and resulting fire claimed the lives of 1,800 passengers and crew, more than died on the Titanic 46 years later.

The story starts in Vicksburg, at a prisoner exchange camp named Camp Fisk. The camp was located on the railroad at Four Mile Bridge, which is where Paxton Road crosses the railroad today, near the Vicksburg Campus of Hinds Community College.

Four Mile Bridge with Camp Fisk in the background.

Camp Fisk was a new idea: Union troops guarding Union prisoners waiting for a ride north. The troops at the camp had come from the Confederate prison camps of Andersonville in Georgia and Cahaba in Alabama.

Steamboat was the preferred mean of transport, and the Sultana was one of many used for this purpose. The owners were paid by the head: The more prisoners they could get on the boat, the more money they made.

Capt. J. Cass Mason of the Sultana was particularly greedy and took on more prisoners than was safe. On a boat built for 376, Mason crammed more than 2,100 men. The last known picture of the Sultana shows the decks crowded with passengers.

The Sultana had a new type of tubular boilers, which were connected by pipes. One of the boilers had been leaking and was hastily patched in Vicksburg.

Many conspiracy theories floated around after the fatal explosion, one even blaming the Confederate Army of hiding a bomb in the coal bin. But the Court of Inquiry found that on the night of the April 27 the Sultana’s engineer let the water get low in the boilers. Then, when the boat took a sharp list to one side, as it did frequently on account of the overcrowding, the outside boiler went dry. When the boat swayed back, water rushed into the dry, overheated boiler causing the water to flash to steam, which in turn, caused the initial explosion.

The Arkansas field where remains of the Sultana were found.

Eventually, three of the boat’s four boilers exploded, ripping the Sultana apart. She burned down to the waterline.

With more than 1,800 dead, the Sultana remains the deadliest U.S. maritime disaster in history.

What remains of the boat now rests in an Arkansas field, and in Marion, Ark., there is a museum dedicated to the Sultana disaster.