Final Voyage (5 page)

Whilst many of those who couldn't escape the river's flow drowned, some managed to keep their heads above water for 10 miles or more. A teenage boy reached Memphis, where baffled sentries helped him ashore. There he told them what had happened to the
Sultana
, and putting his story together with the fiery glow they could see in the distance, they raised the alarm and spread the word.

At 3am, an hour after the explosion, the captain of the steamship
Bostonia II
saw the same fiery glow from the other direction as he came down the river toward Memphis. By this time the
Sultana
was drifting helplessly, at the mercy of the current, just like many of her passengers. The
Bostonia II
turned a bend in the river and suddenly her captain realised that glow he'd seen wasn't buildings or woodland on fire. After overtaking the
Sultana
the
Bostonia II
's captain ordered the crew to weigh anchor, then launched the ship's boat to pick up survivors. It was a dark, moonless night, and the only light his crew had to work with was the orange glare of the fire reflecting off the water. In total the
Bostonia II
pulled only about 100 men from the river.

With word now spreading in Memphis other vessels powered north and joined the rescue efforts before morning, including other steamships, the
Arkansas
and the
Jenny Lind
, as well as the ironclad gunboat USS
Essex
. The side-wheel gunboat USS
Tyler
, which had seen action
at the Battle of Shiloh and later the Siege of Vicksburg, also came to help. Her wartime crew had already been discharged, so she was manned by volunteers. But there was some reticence amongst other boat owners, who didn't want to risk launching their vessels in the freshet current at night. Even without them, the other rescuers managed to save 500 people from the water.

Her search for her family was ultimately in vain. Their bodies were never found.

Ann Annis was found hours later floating on a wooden board from the
Sultana
. Cold, exhausted and barely conscious, she supposedly gave the man who pulled her from the water her wedding ring out of gratitude, though that was from his account of the rescue; she had no recollection. After recuperating in hospital in Memphis she spent over a month in the city trying to locate Harvey and Isabella. She had survived being dragged away by the current, after all, so she had every reason to believe they could have survived too. Her search for her family was ultimately in vain. Their bodies were never found.

The
Sultana
stayed afloat for several hours after the explosion. By the time the fire burnt through the outer hull she was only several miles north of Memphis. What still remained of her gutted shell drifted toward the Arkansas side of the Mississippi and sank there, near Mound City, just before dawn.

According to the US Customs Service the official death toll from the disaster was only 1,547, but that toll was based on the tally taken by the army officials at Vicksburg.
Survivors from the group of 400 men the army officials missed attested to the fact that they weren't on any list, and nor were friends of theirs who had died. With Captain Mason and the rest of the
Sultana
's senior officers also dead, there was nobody who could confirm just how many had been on board the ship when she left Memphis. The most realistic estimate, therefore, is that about 1,800 perished. That's about the same as the number of men both sides lost at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, at that point the deadliest battle ever fought on American soil. For months after the disaster, bodies continued to be found downriver, some as far south as Vicksburg.

Of the 500 survivors, up to 300 later died either from their burns or from the effects of exposure in the near-freezing water. Many others never made a full recovery either, and died within a matter of years. Those that survived into the long term numbered very few, and every year most of them reunited in Tennessee on the 27th April. The last reunion was held in 1928, when only four survivors were left.

Even at the time, the loss of the
Sultana
quickly became a footnote to history.

Even at the time, the loss of the
Sultana
quickly became a footnote to history. News of Abraham Lincoln's assassination had finally spread through the South, and the day after the
Sultana
exploded the biggest story was about his assassin John Wilkes Booth being hunted down and killed. Almost 620,000 Americans died during the Civil War, with the biggest battles in the second half of the war claiming thousands of lives a day. Another 1,800 at the tail end of such bloody conflict just wasn't a significant enough number to warrant special attention. Ironically it was the
people of Memphis, who had been the enemy only a week before, who had lived through occupation by the Union army for almost two years by that point, who responded to the tragedy with the most charity. Food, clothing and money was collected for those who had lost everything.

Meanwhile in the North, when they covered it at all, newspapers turned the disaster into a sensational story of Confederate conspiracies, sabotage and revenge against heroes of the victorious Union. Such theories didn't go away. As late as 1888 a St Louis man claimed his former business partner (a Confederate agent during the war) made a deathbed confession to having blown up the
Sultana
by hiding a coal torpedo (an iron casing filled with an explosive powder) amongst the steamship's coal stores. When shovelled into the furnace the coal torpedo would have caused the boiler to explode. But the claimed confession was not taken seriously.

Ultimately nobody was held to account for what happened. Legal charges brought against the army officials who allowed the
Sultana
to become so fatally overcrowded were dropped. The worst punishment given to anyone involved was a military discharge, and even then it was an honourable discharge. Blame for the actual explosion did not fall on Captain Mason or the boilermaker in Vicksburg. The
Sultana
's second engineer, one of the most senior crewmembers to have escaped the burning ship, claimed that water levels in the boilers were more than sufficiently high enough. He died of his injuries before he and his testimony could be cross-examined.

In 1982, archaeologists excavating under a soybean field a couple of miles inland from the banks of the Mississippi
on the Arkansas side discovered a large amount of burnt timber some 30ft (9m) below the ground. When they charted the course of the river in 1865 they found the Mississippi had shifted a couple of miles eastward over the intervening 120 years. There wasn't much left of her or those who went down with her, but they had finally found the last resting place of the SS
Sultana
.

The loss of a ship, the devastation of a city

By the early twentieth century Halifax, Nova Scotia, had become an Atlantic hub, the gateway for trade between North America and Europe. For American ships the port was the last stop on the way to Britain, and for European ships it was the first stop with a direct link over land to every city in Canada and the United States. The railway lines that ended in California on the western side of the continent ended in Halifax on the eastern side. Halifax's harbour was known as one of the world's deepest natural harbours which never froze. Situated in a large protected basin, 5 miles long by 3 miles wide (8km by 5km), and
accessible only by an easily defended narrow channel, the harbour made the city important strategically as well as economically.

Halifax had always proved a useful naval base for the British, but during the 1776–83 War of Independence, due to Britain's inability to base any of its ships within firing range of American vessels, Halifax became an essential outpost. It was sufficiently far away and more than sufficiently well defended to make a futile target for the new Continental Navy, yet was close enough for the Royal Navy to use as a safe haven to gather, repair and rearm the fleet, as well as to launch fresh attacks from. In the second war between Britain and her former colonies (1812–15) ships that sailed from Halifax took part in the successful invasion of Washington DC, which resulted in the Capitol building being severely damaged and the White House almost completely destroyed.

As late as 1935 the American military kept a contingency plan updated in case of another war between Britain and the United States. Though the Royal Navy had moved its western Atlantic base of operations to Bermuda after the War of 1812 (and where it remained until the late 1950s), in the event of hostilities breaking out again the American government didn't want to risk Halifax falling back into British hands. The war plan involved bombing Halifax with poison gas and then occupying the city with troops.

In both world wars Halifax served as a waypoint for Atlantic convoys. It was particularly crucial during the early years of the Second World War, after France had fallen and Britain fought on alone against Nazi Germany. Merchant vessels bringing vital supplies from the United
States were a target for German U-boats, so they went via Halifax. Royal Navy cruisers and destroyers based there accompanied the vulnerable ships the rest of the way, as they had during the First World War when Halifax became a key city for the Allies despite being over 3,000 miles from the frontline.

By 1917 the population of Halifax had grown to nearly 60,000 because of the city's growing importance. Nearly all of the 400,000 Canadian troops who travelled to Europe to fight on the Western Front passed through Halifax, and it was soon made a requirement that every neutral ship travelling between Britain and the United States (in both directions) stop at Halifax for inspection prior to continuing. Submarine nets were installed outside the harbour to make the city just as unviable a target for the Germans as it had been for the Americans a century before. But with record traffic coming and going, the harbourmasters struggled to keep control. Collisions in the crowded harbour had become so frequent that perhaps the Halifax Explosion was inevitable.

Collisions in the crowded harbour had become so frequent that perhaps the Halifax Explosion was inevitable.

The city had already been touched by another maritime disaster five years before. On 17th April 1912 the
Mackay-Bennet
, a British-owned ship which repaired undersea telegraphic cables between Europe and the American continent, was sent out to the area where the
Titanic
sank. There her crew pulled about 300 bodies from the water, including John Jacob Astor's. Some were already in such a condition that the captain ordered them buried at sea.
Between 150 and 200 were brought back to Halifax, and almost all of them were buried in the city's cemeteries.

Despite the name, the SS
Mont Blanc
was actually built in Middlesbrough, which in the latter half of the 19th century was at the heart of northern England's iron and steel industry. The 3,131-ton freighter was one of more than 600 similar steamers constructed by Teesside's notable Dixon brothers over a 50 year period. Launched in 1899, the 320ft (98m) steamer was registered in St Nazaire, France, and before the First World War broke out she carried various types of cargo all over the world. After the outbreak of war the French government bought the
Mont Blanc
. Because she was going to continue crossing the Atlantic, and would be ferrying wartime supplies, two defensive cannons were installed on her decks. They wouldn't provide much defence against U-boats or enemy warships, but they would ward off small-scale privateers hopeful of finding something valuable to the French government aboard.

In her holds she carried 200 tons (some 400,000lb) of TNT, 10 tons of guncotton, 35 tons of benzol and 2,000 tons of picric acid.

In November 1917 the
Mont Blanc
was chartered to carry a particularly dangerous cargo from New York to France. On the 1st December the
Mont Blanc
left New York, her captain Aime Le Medec ordering her helmsman to set course for Halifax, where they would join the next convoy to cross the Atlantic. In her holds she carried 200 tons (some 400,000lb) of TNT. She also carried 10 tons of guncotton, a highly flammable propellant that needed to
be kept wet because stored dry it was too dangerous. She also carried 35 tons of benzol, which could be used as fuel or in the production of more TNT. But her main cargo consisted of over 2,000 tons of picric acid, an explosive used in artillery shells that was so sensitive to shock or friction that, like guncotton, it was best to store it wet (though 600 tons of it aboard the
Mont Blanc
was carried dry). It couldn't be stored in metal containers because the metal surface would encourage picrate salts to develop, and the salts could cause a spontaneous detonation.

Despite carrying all of this military-grade explosive material, when the
Mont Blanc
left New York she did not fly the regulation red flag to indicate the nature of her cargo. Le Medec did not want to make his unaccompanied and unprotected vessel a target for any U-boats who might intercept her on the way to Halifax. After all, a French ship carrying explosives was ultimately destined for only one place. The
Mont Blanc
reached Halifax late at night four days later, but as she entered the protected harbour at 8.40am the next morning she still wasn't flying the red flag.

Having refuelled with coal at Halifax, the SS
Imo
was cleared to leave harbour at 7.30am on 6th December. The 430ft (131m) Norwegian steamer had been chartered by the Commission for Relief in Belgium, an American organisation led by future US President Herbert Hoover, to carry a cargo of urgently needed aid to Europe. Her captain, Haakon From, had meant to leave for New York to pick up his cargo the previous evening, but after being
delayed at the busy wharf awaiting coal he missed his departure window. When night fell, the submarine nets were raised to prevent any U-boats waiting outside the harbour from surreptitiously slipping in under cover of darkness; a suicide mission for their crews, but one which would invariably result in the destruction of many of the vessels moored at Halifax. The
Imo
would now have to wait until the next morning to leave.