Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  The Sultana’s main reason for stopping in Memphis was to discharge one hundred twenty tons of sugar, ninety-seven crates of wine, and the herd of hogs. With the cargo went most of the boat’s ballast, and Mason, still anxious about the overloading, was reportedly a frequent visitor to the Sultana’s bar. No doubt the Irish bartenders, McGinty and O’Hara, were nervous, too. But as Chester Berry later wrote of the paroled soldiers aboard the boat, “A happier lot of men I think I never saw than those poor fellows were. The most of them had been a long time in prison, some even for about two years, and the prospect of soon reaching home made them content to endure any amount of crowding.”

  MEMPHIS WAS THE FIRST sizeable city most of the men had seen in months—in some cases years—and though they were told to remain on board, the flickering gas lights leading up the bluff from the waterfront beckoned. Half an hour after the boat docked, hundreds of men disembarked into the city. They made their way to the Soldiers’ Home, one of several way stations operated in major cities by the U.S. Sanitary Commission, where soldiers could find a bed or a meal, or nosed their way around the riverfront saloons. As roustabouts unloaded the Sultana’s cargo of sugar beneath oil lamps, George Robinson pitched in to help, and afterward he and a friend headed into town for supper. Two boy-soldiers, William Block and Stephen Gaston, the latter of whom had served in the 8th Indiana with Tolbert and Maddox, took advantage of several broken sugar casks, loading their pockets, haversacks, and hats.

  Memphis was the final destination for some of the passengers, including the Chicago troupe, and a few new ones boarded, no doubt with some trepidation, including U.S. Representative-elect W.D. Snow of Arkansas, (whose election Congress had not yet agreed to recognize). According to Elliott’s grandson, when Snow visited the clerk’s office to pay his fare and receive his stateroom assignment, he “expressed curiosity” over the number of people aboard. Among the other private passengers boarding at Memphis were two women, one of whom Elliott’s grandson described as “a great beauty”—she no doubt drew much attention from the passengers—and a man he described as “the finely-groomed J.D. Fontaine of Dallas City, Illinois.” Elliott also wrote that his grandfather, “on an impulse” the night before, had given his cot to a sergeant he had met at Camp Fisk, and so slept in a chair. Now, as J. Walter Elliott sat reading beneath one of the cabin chandeliers, the sergeant approached and asked where he was going to sleep. Elliott pointed to a cot on which his hat lay, but the sergeant said it was in a hot and dangerous location above the boilers and suggested another cot (which presumably had already been claimed by someone else—it is doubtful there were any empty ones) near the end of the ladies’ cabin. According to J. Walter Elliott’s own account, he initially demurred. ‘“Give it to some poor fellow who had none last night,’ I said; but a moment afterwards he came and told me he had removed my hat to the cot selected by him, and that I would have to take that or none.” For the record, then, Elliott was coerced into sleeping outside the ladies’ cabin, where he would read in his cot until he fell asleep, “dreaming of the loved ones at home—a motherless daughter, a noble christian mother, two devoted sisters, and my brothers.”

  At about 10:30 p.m., the crew rang the bell on the hurricane deck to announce the Sultana’s impending departure, and guards began roaming the waterfront streets rounding up soldiers. Gaston and Block sat on the Texas deck gorging on sugar until, remarkably, they drifted off to sleep. William McFarland of the 42nd Indiana remembered seeing an unusually tall man from Tennessee who got drunk onshore and had to be escorted onto the boat by guards. “He was a thin seven-footer, and he came down to the boat shouting and cursing, at the point of bayonets, so drunk he could hardly walk. He was brought up to the hurricane deck, where he caused considerable disturbance.” Having been at Andersonville, McFarland did not know that the man went by the name Big Tennessee and had been a friend to the downtrodden at Cahaba. In fact, Big Tennessee’s identity is still subject to debate, but according to Elliott, he cursed the guards as he was forced onto the gangplank and onto the Texas deck. McFarland “poked fun at the Tennessean and, infuriated, the intoxicated trooper lunged toward his tormentor,” Elliott wrote. “But he succeeded only in stepping on a number of innocent men, and was soundly cuffed on all sides.”

  Private Epenetus McIntosh had arrived in Memphis on the Henry James but had tarried too long in town and missed the boat. He considered himself in great good luck when he was able to get on the Sultana. Several other Sultana passengers failed to make it back in time. Michigan soldier W.C. Porter found on his return to the boat that his space in an empty coal bin had been taken, so he moved to a spot between the smokestacks but was rousted from there and eventually settled down to sleep on the stair landing. The men in the empty coal bin pulled the hatch shut to stay warm, which would prove a fateful decision. Elliott recalled awakening as the Sultana backed away from the wharf, then falling back asleep.

  The Sultana crossed the river to a coal yard on the Arkansas side and loaded a thousand burlap bags of coal to fuel the furnaces. In a case where seeming bad luck would have actually been good, and where seeming good luck was actually bad, one of the men who had missed the boat in Memphis. George Downey of the 9th Indiana Cavalry (who had telegraphed home for money from Camp Fisk) paid a boatman $2 to row him to the coal yard, where he again boarded the Sultana. He was no doubt proud of this maneuver, which would cost him his life.

  At 1 a.m. on April 27, the Sultana left the coal yard and headed upriver. The guards posted at the Memphis waterfront watched the brightly lit boat steam around the bend, and would later recall that it presented a beautiful sight. The night was dark, the moon and stars shrouded by clouds that soon began drizzling rain. Pilot George Kayton was behind the wheel. At midstream he began to steer through the cluster of flooded islands known as Paddy’s Hen and Chickens, with Rowberry, the first mate, alongside him in the pilot house. Down below, Wes Clemens, the assistant engineer, was at his post by the boilers. The boat was traveling at about ten miles per hour. At fifteen minutes before 2 a.m., with most of the passengers asleep, Kayton began steering past submerged Island 41 in a broad reach of river that because of the flood was roiling along, close to five miles wide.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE DISASTER

  GEORGE ROBINSON WENT TO SLEEP THAT NIGHT ON the Sultana’s promenade deck, between the twin smokestacks that towered above the filigreed pilot house. He bedded down beside his companion, one of his previous partners in escape, John Corliss. During his many escape attempts Robinson had learned how to size things up and choose his moment. The moment was about to present itself again.

  At about 2 a.m. Robinson awoke with a start, in agonizing pain. Inexplicably, he lay in the Sultana’s coal bin, and Corliss was sprawled dead across his legs. His own chest and wrist were injured. His arms were scalded. He had trouble breathing. Someone nearby was screaming that he was being burned alive.

  Robinson had not heard the explosion. He had no idea what had happened. All he knew was that the world had come unglued while he slept, and his gut told him that this time he had reached the end. It hit him in high decibels, with blistering heat: There would be no way out. Then he heard a voice say to someone else, “Jack, you can get out this way,” and the drive to survive suddenly kicked in again.

  He climbed from the coal bin onto the wrecked deck. As he stood there, trying to figure out what was going on, someone placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “What will I do? I cannot swim.” It was soon to be a common refrain.

  Robinson, who may have been too stunned to answer, drifted off toward the bow of the boat, where he saw people being trampled in a rush for the rails. Hundreds of men, a few women and children, and horses and mules were racing back and forth on the decks and streaming into the cold, dark river, where people flailed about for anything to keep their heads above water and drowned each other in waves. Robinson quietly sat down and wrapped one arm around the Sultana’s jackstaff. He had to think. He would n
ot have long.

  Ben Davis was on the hurricane deck near the rear of the boat when the boilers exploded. A Kentucky cavalryman originally from Wales, he was one of the few passengers still awake at that hour and, feeling restless, had decided to have a smoke. Picking his way through the soldiers spooning wall-to-wall across the deck, he descended the stairs to the main level in search of a light, found a splinter of wood, stuck it into one of the fireboxes, lit his pipe, then retraced his steps. He was about to take a swig from his canteen when it whirled from his hands into the darkness. Pieces of metal, wood, and body parts began raining down through a cloud of superheated steam, and flames erupted from the heart of the boat. Davis had been sharing blankets with three fellow Kentuckians who had been with him at Cahaba, but he lost sight of them in the pandemonium. As he scoured the boat for something buoyant he came upon one of his friends, Joe Moss, who told him ruefully that he could not swim. Davis gave him a window shutter he had found, and Moss jumped into the river with it and drowned. Davis dove in and swam toward the invisible Arkansas shore. The river was darker than the starless night and bitterly cold with snowmelt from the north, swirling upon itself with implacable velocity and force, but Davis was confident he could make it. He was a strong swimmer.

  Perry Summerville awoke to find himself flying through the air. His first thought was that the Sultana had been running close to shore and he had been swept off the deck by an overhanging limb. When he hit the water he plummeted into the depths, came up about a hundred feet from the boat, and began swimming back toward it, calling for help, only to see that it was on fire. He instinctively turned downstream and swam away, which was not easy on his bum leg, with his shoulders and chest severely bruised by the blast and fall, and his back scalded by the steam. He found a section of the boat’s railing to hold on to, and he glanced back in wonder at the terrible scene, at the silhouettes of people clamoring on the decks, some being consumed by flames, while hundreds dove into the water, in most cases to drown.

  Joseph Stevens, the English sharpshooter, was sleeping near the stern with his brother-in-law, William Finch, and awoke to see a crowd surging toward the metal yawl suspended above the Sultana’s stern. Stevens tried to calm Finch, telling him they would survive if they kept their wits about them, though neither could swim. He watched men piling into the still-unlaunched yawl and trying to fend off anyone else who attempted to get in. Finch scrambled among them. After the lines were severed, the yawl hurtled into the water upside down, and most of the men hanging onto or inside of it, including Finch, drowned. Stevens dove in, tried his best to dog-paddle away, and was saved by a friend floating nearby on a bale of hay, who grabbed him by the hair. As they drifted into the darkness he saw the Sultana’s captain, Cass Mason, hurling shutters into the water.

  W.A. Fast had also been sleeping near the yawl when he felt “a jerk and jar” and hot water on his face and hands. Within moments, perhaps a hundred men were tugging at the yawl. Observing the panic, he moved toward the bow. He noticed that one of the Sultana’s side paddlewheels was wrecked and the other was hanging perilously overhead. Flames were racing through the remains of the pilot house, which was acting as a flue. He jumped onto the middle deck and entered the staterooms, searching for one of the boat’s cork life preservers, but found none. “The men were rushing out from the lower floor or deck, and pouring over the prow into the dark water like a flock of sheep through a gap in a fence,” he later wrote.

  J.W. Rush, who had grown up on the shores of Lake Erie, had seen his share of boat disasters and knew he had to get off the Sultana “before the crowd realized the peril they were in,” but it was already too late. As he watched the mob attempting to launch the yawl he saw a woman begging to be allowed on. Though she appeared to be the wife of one of the men already in the boat, she was left behind. With the help of a friend, Rush launched a smaller boat from the upper deck, but it was quickly overwhelmed. “These boats were turned over and over,” he wrote, “and many were drowned in trying to get into them, as every time they would turn bottom side up they would bury from fifty to seventy-five, who were trying to climb in from the opposite side. This was kept up until the crowd had thinned out and the boats drifted off.”

  Rush and his mate began throwing anything that would float overboard. They then tried to force a mule into the water, hoping to ride it as it swam, but it would not budge. He saw Mason exhorting people to remain calm. He saw a group of women on their knees, bowed in prayer, their heads resting against the rail.

  M.C. White’s first thought was that a Rebel battery had fired on the boat. He heard officers shouting orders for everyone to remain calm, saying the Sultana would head to shore, but it was obvious that with the pilot house gone the boat was out of control. It was every man for himself. The flames were spreading rapidly, illuminating hundreds of faces gasping for breath in the roiling water, horses breaking through the rails, a woman fastening a life preserver on a little girl, mangled men crawling among the frenzied crowds, soldiers stripping their clothes and diving in. The acrid smoke and steam carried the scent of burning flesh. It was a hallucinatory scene. Everyone’s brain and body chemistry was going wild.

  Unable to find a life preserver in the staterooms, Fast pulled a door from its hinges and in a moment of brilliant restraint decided to wait for the drowning masses to subside before diving in. He had observed the terrible ebb and flow: Hundreds of people grasping for anything afloat, drowning each other en masse, after which there would be a brief intermission before the next group dove in. He gathered fifteen or twenty feet of rope and tied it to his door, leaving several loops to use as handholds. All around him, men were “struggling, swimming, sinking. My plan was to stick to the boat as long as I could and until the swimmers were well out of my way.” He observed people cursing Lincoln and Jeff Davis and Grant, “any and everybody prominently connected with the war. Some were crying like children.” Others prayed loudly and beseechingly, or formally and gracefully, “all in dead earnest.” Now and then his gaze landed on a strangely calm face. A few retreated from the crowds and absently sang old familiar songs. As Fast waited for his moment, a group of dockhands tried to wrest his door from him. He backed into a stairway, wedged the door between some timbers, took out his small jackknife, and drove them away. As the crowd in the water thinned he undressed; checked his pocket watch, which was tied to his underwear, and saw that it was 2:30 a.m.; tossed his door; and jumped in after it. He was immediately set upon by drowning men, and he struggled to pry their hands from the door one after another until he was exhausted. Within minutes he lost his hold. At that point his memory of the disaster ended. “From the time I lost that door until daylight there is in my life an entire blank, I do not know where I was or what I was doing,” he wrote.

  Chester Berry was sleeping forward of the boilers, near where he had sung his hymn at sunset. When the boilers exploded he was struck in the head by a piece of flying wood, which fractured his skull. Dazed, he lay on the deck until a shower of boiling water soaked his blanket and scalded his uncovered bunkmate to death. He found a piece of a board and started forward but changed his mind about jumping when he saw that the water was filled with drowning people. Trying to maintain his presence of mind, he roamed the deck in search of friends and came upon a man who said he could not swim. Berry told him to pull a board from the debris to hang on to. The man found a board, but someone promptly took it from him. Berry told him to get another. He did, and it was taken from him, too. Berry lost patience, shoved the man away, and said, “Drown then, you fool”—words he would regret the rest of his life. Then he moved on.

  Albert King was sleeping with a group of friends about thirty feet from the stern, beside the engine room partition. After the explosion he and his companions tried to pry loose part of the partition but were driven away by a frantic rearing horse. His friend Adgate Fleming shouted that he could not swim, and King told him to stay close and away from the crowd at the rail. It was good advice, but Fl
eming was carried overboard anyway and drowned. King leaped from the starboard rail, bobbed up near the rudder, and was dunked by several men. Seeing an opening in the foundering crowd, he tried to swim away but was submerged by another man. He resurfaced, and a woman grabbed him by the shirt, but King fought her off and swam away. When he came upon a floating board he returned for the woman, and the two paddled away “out of the circle of firelight into the night.” The woman was Anna Annis, and as with most of the others on board, her life’s travails seemed to have been building to that harrowing moment.

  Annis, her husband, and their young daughter had occupied a stateroom. Lieutenant Annis had been stationed with the U.S. Colored Troops at Vicksburg after being captured at Shiloh and paroled. He was Anna’s third husband; incredibly, the first two had drowned in shipwrecks, one of which she had survived. Harvey Annis was too ill to make it home to Wisconsin alone, so Anna had traveled to Vicksburg to escort him. After the explosion they put on their life belts, and Harvey led his family to the stern, where he placed his daughter on his back, descended a rope to the water, and told Anna to follow. As she descended the rope a man jumped from above and knocked her off and into the hold of the boat. She climbed out and again descended the rope. Once she was in the water, her life belt began to slip off, and she grabbed the boat’s rudder, remaining fixed to it as she watched her husband and daughter drown. She held on to the rudder with several others until the flames forced them to let go. Her arms were burned from the backs of both hands to her shoulders. She drifted off, struggling to remain afloat. As King passed she tried to cling to him, but he fended her off. Then he came back for her.