Forgotten tragedy

Joseph Bonney | Apr 7, 2009 1:17PM GMT

What was the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history?

It happened 144 years ago this month. On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana sank on the Mississippi River just north of Memphis after its boiler exploded. The boat was crammed with 2,400 people, mostly Union soldiers returning from the Civil War. An estimated 1,700 died.

Amazingly, this enormous tragedy soon faded into relative obscurity. News coverage was different then, and a lot of other things were going on — Lincoln had been assassinated only days earlier, and the Civil War had just ended. Today the Sultana is largely forgotten.

Writer Alan Huffman brings the story to life with a terrific new book, "Sultana" (click here for more information from the publisher, HarperCollins.). Drawing on diaries and other documents and research, he follows the stories of a group of survivors and provides a gripping, harrowing description of what they endured.

Only a small part of "Sultana" deals with the boat’s sinking. The book’s central theme is its story of survival — how people achieved it, and what it did to them. Most of the soldiers had endured hellish combat and had only recently been paroled from Confederate prison camps. For them, the Sultana’s explosion and sinking was only the last in a series of unspeakable ordeals.

Huffman is a skilled reporter and gifted storyteller whose talents I first admired years ago, when we worked a few feet apart in a newspaper newsroom. In "Sultana" he’s produced a gem of a book.

And "The Burning of the General Slocum" is readily available through abebooks.com - the used book exchange.

- By William B. Cassidy on 4/8/09

The General Slocum went down the East River in 1904, with the loss of more than 1,000 lives, mostly women and children out for a church picnic. The best book on this disaster was "The Burning of the General Slocum," by Claude Rust, published in 1981 by Elsevier/Nelson Books. A more recent one is "Ship Ablaze," (even though it was a steamboat, not a ship) by Edward T. O'Donnell, published in 2004 by Broadway Books, New York.

- By Joseph Bonney on 4/8/09

I've come across two books on the 1904 General Slocum disaster - a shipboard fire that killed more than 1,000 people in New York's East River. One is "Fire on the River: The Story of the Burning of the General Slocum" by Werner Braatz and Joseph Starr, published by Krokodiloplis Press in 2000. The other is "Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum" by Ed O'Donnell, published by Broadway in 2003. "Fire on the River" may be hard to find, but "Ship Ablaze" is available through Amazon.com and Abebooks.com.

- By William B. Cassidy on 4/8/09

Anybody have any recommendations on a good book about the Slocum disaster?

- By spock on 4/8/09

Thanks for the review, Joe - as a Civil War and nautical history buff, "Sultana" will go high on my reading list. It is somewhat surprising the tragedy isn't better remembered - but when you think of the carnage the nation had just suffered at that time, perhaps it's not so remarkable. After all, 23,000 died at Antietam (or Sharpsburg, where I now live) in one day in 1862. The Sultana incident puts me in mind of the Iolaire, a British troop ship that sank a mile out of harbor Jan. 1, 1919 while carrying Scottish troops who fought in the First World War back to the Hebrides, killing 205 of the 280 aboard. It was one of the worst maritime disaster in U.K. territorial waters in the 20th century.

- By William B. Cassidy on 4/7/09