Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  At this point, perhaps five hundred people remained on board, including Boor, George Robinson, and the newlywed Hardins. Most had been driven toward the bow by the flames. As long as the remnants of the Sultana’s wheel housings remained upright, the hull had drifted downstream stern first, perhaps because the housings funneled the brisk north wind and kept the bow pointed upstream. But the currents were pushing the boat slowly downriver. Once the wheel housings collapsed, the boat’s wind and water resistance changed, and the resulting pivot sent the flames racing in the opposite direction. Soon thick clouds of smoke, laden with burning cinders, were rolling toward the refuge of the bow. As the flames approached, two Kentucky cavalrymen hurriedly looped a cable and heavy chain to a mooring ring for use as a handhold, thinking that they might be able to lower themselves into the river and escape the fire while holding on to prevent drowning. Boor finally decided it was time to dive in, and when he did, he heard a sizzling sound and realized his bundle of clothes had caught fire. Seth Hardin, who was separated from his bride in the confusion, was also driven into the water, where he swam through the crowd calling her name. On the forecastle stood one of the Sisters of Charity, entreating those in the water to avoid drowning one another. Some survivors later said her words did have a calming effect. She would survive in their memories as a totem figure who eventually went up in flames.

  When George Robinson at last dove in, he felt his confidence and stamina flagging almost immediately. Fear normally causes a surge of adrenaline, but it can also sap energy incredibly fast. Fortunately, Robinson caught sight of a dead mule, which was to be the vehicle of his final—and only successful—escape. He climbed on the floating carcass, which was still warm, and drifted away down the river, which must have been both unnerving and, under the circumstances, sublime. As he floated Robinson was apparently calm enough to notice that “some amusing things transpired.” He came across a man going over and over on a floating barrel; the man would crawl upon the barrel, pause briefly to pray, then go over like a clown in a bizarre circus sideshow. Robinson also heard someone calling out, “Morgan, here is your mule,” which had new meaning for him now.

  Hiram Allison was drifting in the dark river when he came upon two men holding the ends of a horse trough and praying with their eyes clenched shut. Neither stopped praying when he grabbed the middle of the trough and spoke to them. For a few moments Allison lost track of where he was, and when he looked back both men were gone. He was now alone in the darkness of the open channel.

  William Marshall had managed to grab the tail of a swimming horse. His friend Samuel Pickens also grabbed hold of one but let go after the animal panicked and headed back toward the Sultana. Pickens then climbed atop a dead horse and drifted away.

  George Young managed to float on his rubber blanket until someone grabbed his shirt sleeve: “To break that hold required a great effort, but, drawing myself up, I put my fist into his side, gave a strong, sudden push and broke from him, and a moment after freed myself from another drowning person who was dragging me beneath the water.” As he floated away Young snagged a pair of pants floating in the water, which he decided he would need when he got out. Determined to survive, he fashioned a better raft from half a cork life belt, his rubber blanket, and a cracker box. He later gave the cracker box to a drowning man to ward him off. “I was very watchful for drowning men,” he recalled, “and the least movement made me cautious.” He eventually came upon a man floating on a log, who warned him not to come closer. Young suggested that they work together to reach the flooded trees. “This met with his approval enough for him to come nearer, but not close enough for me to become a partner with him in the possession of the log.” Together they made their way to the trees, where a voice instructed them to come closer, saying it was possible to touch bottom. The voice belonged to an Arkansas man in a dugout canoe, who had heard the explosion and ferried the two men ashore.

  Unable to break free of the currents, Summerville watched the dim outline of the islands and the flooded timber on the banks moving past. He found a large plank about two miles above Memphis and positioned it across his rail. He held the rail with his feet and the plank with his hands. At one point a gunboat passed but did not stop. He also saw a snorting horse swimming downstream with six or eight men hanging on. “When I heard him coming I tried to get to him, but when I saw his load I kept clear for fear some of the boys would get all I had at the time in the world—my rail and plank,” he recalled.

  Later, a Michigan cavalry man named Jerry Perker floated close to Summerville on a barrel. Several other men were clinging to debris nearby, and Perker “would cheer the boys by telling them to hold out and we would get out.” Summerville recalled that he was still wearing his socks, which “bothered me more than anything else. They worked partly off my feet and would catch on my rail which caused me to almost sink.” In fact, some men drowned because they could not get their fitted long johns past their feet and became entangled in them. Summerville floated in his annoying socks alongside a man named Kibbs, who he said “was cheerful except when talking of his little girl. There were three of us from Brazil, Ind., two were lost, I being the only one of them saved.”

  J.W. Rush was also drifting down the river, driven by the currents so hard against a floating stump that he would bear the scars of puncture wounds for the rest of his life. “Those who have any knowledge of trying to handle a round piece of timber in the water can realize how difficult it is to support one’s self,” he wrote, “especially in the current of the river, upon a piece of wood of such ill shape as a stump with roots protruding in all directions.” Unable to balance himself on the stump, and fearing that the effort would wear him out, he eventually let go.

  Ohio soldier L.W. McCrory held on to his valise, with the new civilian clothes he had bought at Vicksburg, and his pocketbook containing $100. With his wallet between his teeth, gripping his valise with one hand, he had jumped eighteen feet from the boiler deck into the river. He proved to be a strong enough swimmer to swim three miles with baggage. But when the man he was swimming alongside said he could go no farther and disappeared beneath the water, McCrory lost his nerve and let go of his valise. He held on to his wallet and swam about two miles farther before reaching land.

  While he was still on the boat, Ben Davis, whose canteen had flown from his hands, had fretted about where the Sultana’s alligator might be, and now, in the darkness, men were likewise fearful of encountering it. At one point a group scattered when a horse threw its head over the log they were floating on and they mistook it for the alligator. Everyone was at wit’s end, wary of everything. Truman Smith was floating alone in the darkness when he heard someone cough. “As I came near he kept swimming away,” he recalled. “I called him and asked what regiment he belonged to. He asked what I wanted to know for.” Smith told him he would write to his parents if he drowned, but the man told him not to come any closer. They swam at a distance from each other until someone called out, “Halt!” It was the voice of a guard on the Tennessee shore.

  Simeon Chelf managed to hold on to his diary and pictures of his wife and children, though he was otherwise naked in the water. He had been sleeping on the bow of the boat when the boilers exploded, and a friend beside him had been instantly killed. As he watched others jumping into the water he searched for a bucket to fight the fire. Unable to find one, he changed his focus and began looking for something that would float. He found a board, then traded it for a pole to a friend who could not swim. He and his friend then said a prayer and jumped in. When Chelf was halfway between the Sultana and the Arkansas shore, a boat—probably the Bostonia II, which was the first to arrive on the scene—mysteriously appeared, and its crew began dumping hay bales in the river. The boat’s wake nearly drowned him.

  The Bostonia II had been about two miles upstream from the Sultana, headed toward Memphis, when its crew noticed the vivid glow on the horizon. The captain thought it was a forest fire until the Sultana came into view.
The Bostonia II slowed as it plowed into a mile-long string of victims, and the crew began scattering the hay bales and anything else that would float. But the boat did not immediately stop.

  As he drifted Chelf shared his pole with another naked man until they reached a cluster of flooded saplings. Finding that he could not touch bottom, Chelf swam back out into the river, thinking he might be picked up by one of the rescue boats that were starting to arrive.

  At half past three the alarm had still not been sounded at the Memphis waterfront, where a dozen boats—packets, gunboats, and other vessels—were moored along the long wooden wharf. Inside the wharf boat, with the door ajar, two men sat in straight chairs beside a pot-bellied stove. Hearing a noise outside, they looked at each other quizzically and stepped onto the deck. It was a cry for help from the river. The first survivor had reached Memphis—at least, the first one to drift close enough to be heard at the wharf. One of the men jumped into a skiff and rowed out into the river. In the dim light of his lantern he saw a partially clothed boy, Wesley Lee of the 102nd Ohio, clinging to a pair of boards. Lee had wasted no time getting off the Sultana. As he explained after he was pulled from the water, he jumped in with two planks he had pried from a stair. Hearing his story, one of the men immediately tapped out the news on a telegraph. Afterward it would be said that the first report of the disaster came from the General Boynton, a military courier boat that had started upstream from Memphis a short time earlier and turned back when its crew discovered the river was full of people. Elliott, in fact, watched, floating on his mattress, as the General Boynton approached, then turned, blew its whistle, and headed back toward the city. According to Lee, the Boynton arrived at the waterfront several minutes after him, carrying a few survivors, and with his permission claimed the bounty that was routinely paid for the first report of a boat disaster.

  Lee said that as he drifted alone in the river he had been buoyed by thoughts of home and the desire to simply live as long as he could. As he was warming himself by the wharf boat’s stove, the city’s master of river transport ordered three steamers—the Jenny Lind, the Pocahontas, and a ferry named Rosadella—to fire up immediately and head upstream.

  By 4 a.m. the riverfront was clogged with swimmers, many badly scalded or otherwise injured, all numbed by exposure and exhausted. Lifeboats; small craft from the U.S. ironclad Essex, the U.S.S. Grosbeak, and the U.S.S. Tyler; and a dozen or more steamboat yawls and skiffs soon left to aid in the rescue.

  As the boats were leaving Memphis a skiff and a dugout canoe from Arkansas were picking up survivors on the opposite shore. In the skiff were William Boardman and R.K. Hill, who operated the wood yard in Mound City. In the canoe was Frank Barton, a Confederate lieutenant who had been camping close by. Still wearing his Confederate Army jacket, Barton rescued Ben Davis and several others, but watched as one man relaxed his hold on a willow tree and slipped beneath the water when the skiff was only a few feet away. As Elliott’s grandson later observed, “The difference between life and death could be measured. It was a matter of yards, feet, inches. It was the length of a reaching arm that was long enough, or a little too short.” Barton paddled his survivors to the wood yard, then went back for more. A shanty at the wood yard was soon crowded with shivering men.

  After dropping anchor downstream, the crew of the Bostonia II lowered her yawl and by the light of torches began plucking survivors from the water, among them young Gaston and, according to Elliott’s grandson, “the lady in the hoopskirt.” The boat gathered about a hundred survivors, then headed for Memphis.

  Robert Hamilton, who had been struggling to overcome the currents on a floating board, watched crestfallen as the Bostonia II departed at about 4:30 a.m. To make matters worse, the boat’s wake swamped many of the survivors still floating in the river. But Hamilton noticed in the gathering light that a few men, including those who had affixed the cable and chain to the mooring ring of the Sultana’s bow, were climbing back aboard. Most of the boat had burned down to the waterline, and the men had survived by lowering themselves into the water, holding on to the cable and chain, and submersing themselves when the fire got too hot, then coming up for air. It had been a stroke of genius. Two or three shivering, naked soldiers were now pulling others onto the bow, and Hamilton paddled in their direction.

  Rush, meanwhile, had joined a demented man floating on a door. “A yawl came near us when I called for help,” he recalled, “but as I reached with my right hand for the rope, my companion reached for me and got hold of my hair, which at the time was very long. He seized my hair with a grasp firm enough to pull me on my back and get me under water, but his hold soon relaxed, and as I came up the yawl passed out of sight, and I was again left in darkness and drifted along with the current of the river. I was a good swimmer, but realized the fact that I could do nothing but keep above water, so I made no effort only to float, in hopes the current would carry me to shore.”

  As the Essex drifted downriver from Memphis, picking up survivors, sentries at Fort Pickering twice fired on her. The Essex’s ensign, James Berry, would later lodge a complaint against the officers of Fort Pickering for not only refusing to aid but actually hindering the rescue. Sentries at a post about a mile upstream from Memphis also fired on survivors calling for help in the river.

  In his official report, Berry later wrote that he had been awakened with the news that the Sultana had blown up and was burning a few miles upriver, and that the river was full of drowning people. He ordered all the boats under his command to be manned, then boarded a cutter. “The morning was very dark, it being about one hour before daylight, and the weather overcast, and the shrieks of the wounded and drowning men was the only guide we had,” he wrote. “The first man we picked up was chilled and so benumbed that he couldn’t help himself, and the second one died a short time after he was taken on board. We soon drifted down to Fort Pickering, when the sentry on the shore fired at us, and we were obliged to ‘come to’ while the poor fellows near us were crying out and imploring us for God’s sake to save them; that they couldn’t hold out much longer.” Pulling close to the bank, Berry hailed the sentry, who ordered him to come ashore. Berry refused. As the Essex backed out into the river and its crew began picking up more drowning men, the sentries fired on the boat again. “It was not daylight, and though our two boats and a steamboat’s yawl, which came out to lend us a hand, made a large mark to shoot at, I would not leave the poor fellows in the water to attend the sentry on shore,” Berry wrote. “When the day began to dawn the cries of the sufferers ceased, and all who had not been rescued had gone down.” Berry went ashore, where a sentry pointed his musket at him. Berry asked for the officer in charge, who told him that he was under order to fire on any skiffs in the river. “I told him that these boats were not skiffs; that they were a man-of-war’s gig and cutter, and again reminded him of what had happened, and of the drowning men whose cries he could not help hearing, and for the sake of humanity why could he not execute his orders with some discretion in a time like this. He said that he had as much humanity as any one, and in firing at me he had only obeyed orders. I saw a number of skiffs and other boats laying hauled up out of the water, and from appearances no one had made any attempt to launch them, and I reminded him that that did not look much like humanity.”

  Though his charges were later contested, Berry claimed that no one at the fort offered to do anything for the survivors in his boats except the watchman of the coal barges, “who, with the assistance of some of my men, built a fire on the shore, and I left a few of the rescued men by it, who wished to remain, and the others I had put on board vessels near by, where they were well cared for. I then crossed the river, and after looking carefully around I returned on board, having taken out of the water sixty men and one lady.”

  After the scalded swimmers were pulled from the water, they were sprinkled with flour to relieve their pain and given water and whiskey. Among them was George Robinson, who was plucked from his mule. He had dr
ifted fourteen miles to near Fort Pickering. By then he was “nonsensical,” and he awoke to find himself in the care of an elderly woman.

  Like Robinson, many survivors floated past the city before being rescued. Joseph Bringman saw the gas street lights ascending the bluff, heard the shouts of rescuers and the ringing of wharf bells, and saw dozens of boats departing to participate in the rescue, but he could not make his presence known, though he “hallooed for help.” He soon lost consciousness and drifted by. “I was so chilled that I was powerless, and a kind of drowsiness came over me,” he later recalled. “I felt that I was going to sleep, and I seemed as comfortable as if in a downy bed. I soon dropped to sleep, or unconsciousness, with the music of the bells of the steamers ringing in my ears.” He would never know how he survived.

  Eventually Joseph Taylor Elliott and the other men on the floating stairs drifted up to a man on a log, and the four floated together until Elliott, in a semiconscious state, was somehow separated from the others. He remembered passing Memphis and seeing the same gas lights climbing the bluff, but after that his memory was blank until he heard the splash of an oar. He tried to call out, but his voice failed. “It was some such feeling as when one tries to call out in a nightmare,” he recalled. But one of the crew members from an Essex cutter saw him, dragged him into the boat, and gave him a shot of whiskey.

  After trying to swim ashore and being continually defeated by the currents, Chester Berry was ready to give up—“to shorten my misery”—when he thought of home and in his mind was transported there. He imagined himself walking up the path from the road through the gate to the house, “but, strange to me, when I reached the door, instead of entering at once, I sat upon the step.” His mother was very religious, as his father had been, but because his father was deaf and dumb his mother always read the family devotionals, and he imagined her at that moment praying for him. “As I sat upon the step I thought it was nine o’clock in the evening, and as plainly as I ever heard my mother’s voice I heard it that evening. I cared but little for the prayer until she reached that portion that referred to the absent one, when all the mother-soul seemed to go up in earnest petition—‘God save my boy.’ For ten long weary months she had received no tidings from her soldier boy, now she had just learned that he was on his way home and her thoughts were almost constantly upon him; and for him her earnest prayer was made.” Bolstered by his vision, Berry renewed his efforts, almost immediately heard “a glad cry,” and turned to see the bow light of the Essex. His struggles were not over—the Essex continued past—but he managed to make his way to a snag, where he was eventually rescued by the Pocahontas.