Lost to Time

by Martin W. Sandler

  KANE. AN ENGRAVING BY T. Pillsbrown, after an 1850s daguerreotype by Mathew Brady.

  He was still only thirty-five years old. But the deliberately chosen rigors of the life of this man with a rheumatic heart, a man who had contracted cholera in China, typhoid fever in Egypt, bacterial infection in West Africa, and scurvy during his Arctic endeavors, finally caught up with him a year after his return. In October 1856, he traveled to London to deliver, as he had promised, a report of the second Grinnell expedition to Lady Jane Franklin. While there he became seriously ill and sailed for Havana, hoping that its warm climate would facilitate a quick recovery. En route to Cuba, however, he had a severe stroke. Early in February 1857, he was stricken again and died in Havana less than a week later.

  What followed was unprecedented in America’s history. Upon Kane’s death, the governor of Cuba personally escorted his funeral cortege to New Orleans. From New Orleans the cortege made its way more than two thousand miles, traveling slowly to allow the public to pay respects to America’s first Arctic hero. From New Orleans to Cincinnati, the banks of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers were lined with thousands of mourners, as were both sides of the train tracks between Cincinnati and Philadelphia. It was the longest funeral train of the century, except for that of Abraham Lincoln eight years later.

  The adulation did not end with the funeral. For the next six months, the nation’s magazines and newspapers were filled with emotional eulogies and accounts of Kane’s accomplishments. “Kane,” the New York Tribune exclaimed in its eulogy, “was a man of whom the country became more proud with every new revelation of his character . . . Gallant, brave, heroic, smitten equally with a love of science and a passion for adventure, he possessed the mental forces to convert the dreams of imagination into reality.” Several states and a number of scientific societies mounted campaigns to have memorials built in Kane’s honor, many of them requesting that donation amounts to the funding be “fixed so low that even those of limited means might have the pleasure of contributing.” At one point there were more poems written in praise of the “Archangel voyager” than any other individual.

  Elisha Kent Kane sailed farther north than any other explorer of his time. He discovered the largest glacier in the world. The route through the Arctic that he blazed became the avenue followed by those whose efforts would lead to the discovery of the North Pole. Each of the books that he wrote about his Arctic expeditions not only became best sellers but, in the words of author Frank Rasky, “humanized the Arctic in terms that Americans could appreciate.” Perhaps more important, at a time of mid-century turmoil in the United States, Kane’s firsthand accounts of the adventures and sufferings of his expeditions reassured an entire nation that the indomitable American spirit was still alive. Not to be overlooked is the fact that generations of explorers who followed Kane—including Charles Francis Hall, Adolphus Greely, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Peary—publicly credited Kane’s experiences and his writings with having directly inspired them to become explorers.

  Yet in the twenty-first century he is nearly forgotten. Far more places in the Arctic are named for lesser explorers than the one basin that bears Kane’s name. In almost all lists of American explorers his name is left out. It is a serious oversight, as mysterious as the land upon which he left his indelible mark.

  SEVEN

  THE SULTANA

  Death on the Great River (1865)

  The pages of history are filled with accounts of shipwrecks and other disasters at sea. Most schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic are familiar with the story of the Titanic. When, in 1912, that supposedly unsinkable ocean liner went down after striking an iceberg, it took with it the lives of an estimated 1,518 people. What has in great measure been lost to time is the fact that less than fifty years earlier another peacetime maritime disaster, this one involving a steamboat named the Sultana, resulted in the death of even more people than those who were lost in the sinking of the Titanic.

  April 1865 was an extraordinarily eventful month, particularly as far as the American Civil War was concerned. On April 9, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant and his combined Union armies. Five days later, on April 14, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. On April 26, the president’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was caught and killed by Union troops. That same day, General Joseph Johnston surrendered the last remaining Confederate army. The long, tragic conflict was finally over.

  THE DOCKS AT VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI, 1864. In 1865, after the Civil War ended, thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers who had been prisoners of war were sent to the docks to begin their voyages homeward. For most of those who boarded the Sultana, it would be their last trip.

  With the conflict ended, both the North and the South began releasing the tens of thousands of men they had held as prisoners of war. Thousands of Union soldiers and officers who had been held in Confederate prison camps were being taken by train to Vicksburg, Mississippi. There they were to be put upon steamboats and transported up the Mississippi River to Cairo, Illinois, where they would board trains that would take them home. The vast majority of the men who were scheduled to take this journey were in terrible physical shape, victims of the hunger, exposure, and disease that had plagued both the Confederate and Union prison camps. As Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote,

  To become a prisoner in the Civil War, on either side, was no short cut to survival—Quite the opposite; and to understand how appallingly lethal were the prison camps, North or South, one need only reflect on this bit of simple arithmetic; about two and a half times as many soldiers were subjected to the hunger, pestilence, and soul-sickening of the prison camps as were exposed to the deadly fire and crossfire of the guns at Gettysburg—and the camps killed nearly ten times as many as died on the battlefield.

  The Union soldiers who were about to board the steamboats had suffered more than most. Many had been held in Camp Sumter, Georgia’s infamous Andersonville prison, where, during the course of the war, some 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners held there had died. At one point the stockade, built to hold 10,000 men, contained over 32,000 prisoners. Conditions had been so bad at Andersonville that after the war Henry Wirz, the prison’s superintendent, was tried on charges of war crimes, found guilty, and hanged—the only Civil War combatant executed for war crimes. Other released prisoners had spent long months in Alabama’s Cahaba Prison, a facility built to hold 500 prisoners that, by 1865, was holding 5,000, many of whom had died from the unsanitary conditions there.

  Physically weakened as many of them were, the soldiers who arrived at the Vicksburg docks were happier than they had been for a very long time. “Glad shouts of joy rent the air when news came to pull out of camp,” Private George S. Schmutz of the 102nd Ohio Infantry later stated. “We were soldiers, prisoners of war, who had been shut up in prison pens, some for six months, some for twelve, some for eighteen months. One might think how glad all were to get home.”

  The U.S. government had hired the steamboats to take the soldiers up the Mississippi and was paying the vessels’ owners 5 for each enlisted man and 10 for each officer transported. In 1865 these were relatively large sums of money (approximately 70 and 140 today), and the owners of the steamboats were eager to take as many men aboard their vessels as they could. They were so eager, in fact, that they were not above bribing the government and army officials whose job it was to assign the released prisoners to specific steamboats.

  IMAGES OF PRIVATION At Andersonville prison, drawn from memory by one of the inmates, Maine infantryman Private Thomas O’Dea.

  OF ALL THE STEAMBOATS waiting at the Vicksburg dock, none was more impressive than the 260-foot, 1,719-ton Sultana, a ship that the Cincinnati Daily Commercial had described as one of the best steam vessels ever constructed. Built in Cincinnati in 1863, the Sultana was designed to carry cotton along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from St. Louis to New Orleans, and it had been doing so for two years. Her owner
s were particularly proud of the latest safety features that had been installed on the vessel, including state-of-the-art safety gauges, designed to detect flaws in the operation of any of the boat’s four boilers that supplied the steam to propel the vessel. No one, however, seemed concerned about the fact that the Sultana carried only one lifeboat and only seventy-six life belts, or that the army had not provided the ship with a single doctor to give medical help to the troops should the need arise.

  The part owner and captain of the Sultana was thirty-four-year-old J. Cass Mason, one of the most experienced and skillful navigators of the often treacherous Mississippi. By 1865 he had owned and operated a number of steamboats and was regarded as the perfect mariner to captain so large a vessel as the Sultana. But in April 1865, Mason was also a man with a problem. Due to a series of setbacks, he was in dire financial straits. Perhaps more than any of the other owners of the steamboats waiting to make the voyage to Cairo, he was eager to pack his vessel with as many passengers as he could.

  Acting with the cooperation of Union boarding officials, Mason managed to have soldier after soldier assigned to the Sultana. Soon, the ex-prisoners were jammed aboard both decks of the ship and were sandwiched into what seemed like every available space below. At the same time as this loading was taking place, some one hundred civilians asked Mason if they could book passage on his ship. Mason not only took them aboard, but as if his ever-growing human cargo was not enough, he arranged to make the voyage even more profitable by filling the Sultana’s hold with 250 barrels of sugar and ninety-seven cases of wine, to be delivered to Memphis. Mason also loaded some one hundred mules and horses and an equal number of hogs onto the main deck at the very rear of the ship.

  Later, William Butler, a cotton merchant standing on the Pauline Carroll, a steamboat docked next to the Sultana, described the scene aboard Mason’s vessel:

  On every part of her the men seemed to be packed as thick as they could well stand. They were on the hurricane deck, on her wheelhouse, forward deck . . . and a person could go from one part of the boat to another only with much difficulty. A gentleman who was standing by me . . . said it was a damned shame to crowd men on a boat in that way; that he did not believe the men would have as much room to lie down as was allowed to slaves on slave-ships.

  The Sultana had been built to carry a maximum of 376 passengers, including its crew. It would never be known exactly how many men were finally packed upon the vessel. What was documented was a conversation held between the Sultana’s first clerk, William Gambrel, and one of the dockside Union officials. Boasting that “if we arrive safe at Cairo, it will be the greatest trip ever made on the western waters,” Gambrel told the official that there were more people aboard the Sultana than had ever been transported on any other single vessel on the Mississippi River. Asked just how many people he meant, Gambrel stated that, as it prepared to leave Vicksburg, the Sultana was carrying 2,400 soldiers, 100 civilians, and a crew of 80—a total of more than 2,500 people, this on a ship designed to carry 376.

  Still, as the Sultana prepared to depart for Cairo, Captain Mason insisted that there was no cause for alarm as far as overloading was concerned. There was, however, another issue. The Sultana had docked at Vicksburg on April 23, having made its way up from New Orleans. During that journey, the vessel’s middle boiler had ceased functioning. Inspection at the Vicksburg dock revealed that a bulge had developed on one of the boiler’s walls. Informed that a proper repair would take days, Captain Mason became disturbed. Fearful that such a delay would enable other steamboats to arrive from New Orleans and pick up soldiers that might otherwise be assigned to the Sultana, he ordered, rather than a full repair, that a simple patch be welded over the bulge. It would have to do, he told himself. He could not afford the delay.

  At nine o’clock on the evening of April 24, the Sultana backed out of its Vicksburg berth and headed up the Mississippi. Despite being jammed together as they were, the released prisoners had only one thought. They were on their way home.

  On April 25, the Sultana made a brief stop at Helena, Arkansas, where an incident took place that might well have abruptly, if not tragically, ended the voyage then and there. As the Sultana approached the dock, the sight of so many people crammed aboard one vessel attracted the attention of almost the entire population of the town. Among them was a photographer determined to capture an image of the spectacle. As he began to set up his tripod and camera, he was spotted by many of those aboard, who, eager to be included in the picture, hurried to the side of the boat facing the cameraman. Soon so many soldiers were crowding the railing that the Sultana began to list severely, in real danger of going over. Only the quick action of a Union officer who herded the men away from the railing prevented a calamity.

  From Helena, the Sultana proceeded up the Mississippi. On April 26, it landed at Memphis, where Mason’s cargo of sugar and wine was unloaded. While the steamboat was docked, William Michael and a group of fellow officers from the Union gunboat Tyler paid the vessel a visit. Michael later wrote of what he encountered:

  I . . . mingled with the living skeletons who had been rotting in southern prison-pens for months, but who were now happy at the prospect of soon meeting the dear ones at home. We cheered them with kindly words and rejoiced with them at the bright prospects before them. Some of the men were too weak to walk without being supported by more fortunate comrades. Others were compelled by sheer weakness to lie on cots or blankets spread upon the decks, while their wants were cheerfully provided for by devoted companions, who loved them because of the sufferings they had passed through together.

  THE SEVERELY OVERCROWDED Sultana is shown here in a photograph taken a day or two before the explosion.

  THE SULTANA REMAINED IN MEMPHIS only a few hours, and at eleven o’clock that evening it steamed across the Mississippi to Hopefield, Arkansas, where it took on over a thousand bushels of coal. By 1:00 a.m. on the twenty-seventh the Sultana was back on the river, headed for Cairo. As the vessel approached a bend in the river some seven miles out of Memphis, engineer Samuel Clemens, continually aware of the patch that had been placed on the faulty boiler, kept checking the safety gauges to make sure that they were operating properly. In the wheelhouse, pilot George Kayton prepared to steer the Sultana around the bend.

  It was now 2:00 a.m. Suddenly, and without warning, three of the Sultana’s boilers exploded with indescribable force, filling the air with a sound that was heard as far away as Memphis. “The explosion came with a report exceeding any artillery I had ever heard,” Private Benjamin Johnston of the Michigan cavalry later exclaimed, “and I had heard some that were very heavy at Gettysburg.” Hundreds of passengers, many of them asleep, were killed immediately by the blast.

  Just as immediately, thousands of hot coals scattered by the explosion turned the Sultana into an inferno, one that passenger Andrew T. Peery would never forget. “The fire shot up and I saw sights so terrible and heart-rending. I fail to have language to explain,” Peery would later write. “Oh the awful sight! The lower deck for a considerable distance all around the boilers was covered with the dead and wounded. Some were scalded; some seemed to be blind, some of them would rise up partly and fall, and some were pinned down with timbers of the wreck. I saw hundreds in this frightful plight, crying, praying, screaming, begging, groaning and moaning.”

  A HARPER’S WEEKLY ILLUSTRATION depicts the gruesome scene of the burning Sultana surrounded by men struggling to stay afloat in the cold water.

  With the Sultana now fully engulfed in flames, and with the fiery upper structures of the steamboat crashing down upon them, those who had survived the explosion realized that their only hope for survival was a slim and terrifying one. They had no choice but to jump into the freezing water. Soon there were hundreds of men leaping into the Mississippi from every part of the shattered vessel. The water around the wreckage became filled with the horrific sight of men struggling to stay afloat, most sinking beneath the waves, never to reemerge.
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  Throughout the long night that followed, there would be death upon death and, as in the case of most disasters, incidents of both bravery and far less admirable behavior. Among the additional passengers that the Sultana had taken aboard in Memphis were several women members of the Christian Commission, a Union organization formed to give aid and comfort to Northern soldiers. In his 1892 book Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors, Chester Berry described the heroic sacrifice made by one of the women:

  When the flames at last drove all the men from the boat, seeing them fighting like demons in the water in the mad endeavor to save their lives, actually destroying each other and themselves by their wild actions, [this woman] talked to them, urging them to be men, and finally succeeded in getting them quieted down, clinging to the ropes and chains that hung over the bow of the boat. The flames now began to lap around her with their fiery tongues. The men pleaded and urged her to jump into the water and thus save herself, but she refused saying: “I might lose my presence of mind and be the means of the death of some of you.” And so rather than run the risk of becoming the cause of death of a single person, she folded her arms quietly over her bosom and burned, a voluntary martyr to the men she had so lately quieted.

  As described a month after the tragedy by the Memphis Argus, some of the greatest heroics following the explosion were performed by the Sultana’s captain.

  Captain Mason rushed into the steam-filled main cabin from the broken hurricane deck and instantly began to help people there. While others ran about in fear, Mason began to hand out chairs, stateroom doors, pieces of wreckage—anything that would float—to the passengers and soldiers and tried to pull wounded and scalded people from the burning debris. His dream of the “greatest trip ever made” on Western waters was suddenly a nightmare. His efforts to get [as many people on board as he could] and the deals he had made were suddenly for naught. Now, during the last minutes of his beloved Sultana, as she burned around him, he worked to redeem his wrongs.