Titanic of the East
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, China was growing rich off the back of ever-increasing British demand for what was becoming one of China’s core commodities: tea. In 1793 the Chinese Emperor proclaimed that henceforth only silver would be accepted from foreign merchants who wanted to buy Chinese produce. Buying tea, which only had one use and no intrinsic value, with a precious metal that could then be traded with anyone anywhere, gave the Chinese economy a massive boost, but proved a massive drain on the British economy, especially because the British had insufficient silver, so had to buy it from other countries with gold.
Everything changed when the British East India Company, already so successful with its trading monopolies on the Indian subcontinent, turned the tables on the Chinese. The Company flooded China with opium, which was legal for European merchants to trade, even if it was illegal in China. The Chinese economy suffered on two fronts. Not only was the British East India Company using its opium profits to buy the silver the Chinese demanded for their tea (essentially getting the Chinese to pay for the British to take their tea), but that silver then bled out of the economy as it was used to buy the illicit opium. These events would lead to the First Opium War in 1839, but even by 1822 China’s economy was already in free-fall, hardship was widespread, and many sought to leave the country.
The sugar cane fields of Indonesia offered the promise of stable employment to Chinese coolies and others who risked starvation if they stayed in China. Desperate emigrants descended on ports like Amoy (now Xiamen) and crowded onto junks heading for Java. On 14th January 1822, more than 1,600 of them boarded the Tek Sing.
At 165ft (50m) long and displacing over 1,000 tons, the Tek Sing was one of the largest ocean-going junks operating in the South China Sea. Constructed almost entirely from wood, she had a square bow, a high stern and three masts, the tallest of which was over 90ft (27m) high. Her name meant ‘true star’. For her latest voyage she carried a cargo comprising over 350,000 separate pieces of porcelain, from teapots to opium containers and urinals, plus raw silk, bamboo furniture, brass, bronze, mercury and much more besides. She bore so much cargo, in fact, that there wasn’t room for all of it in her holds, and some of it was strapped to the outside of her hull.
Merchants, couriers and students joined the 1,600 emigrants and between 200 and 400 crewmen on board. Entire families travelled together, ranging in age from six years old to almost 80. The junk was so overcrowded that most of the passengers spent the voyage outside on deck, where each person had room only for their rolled-out bamboo mat. Everyone on board had to bring enough food to last them the journey, which was expected to take a month.
Three weeks into the voyage, on 6th February, the Tek Sing’s captain, Io Tauko, decided to take a shortcut through the Gaspar Strait, going to the west of Belitung Island rather than the usual route, passing it to the east. Tauko was considered an experienced and knowledgeable master, having made this journey with the Tek Sing numerous times. Why he made the ultimately catastrophic decision to take this shortcut when he knew the dangers of the Belvidere Shoals has been much speculated upon in China since. He may have been trying to escape pirates, or he may simply have been concerned that the supplies of fresh water aboard would run out before reaching Java if he took the longer route to the east of Belitung.
Entire families travelled together, ranging in age from six years old to almost 80.
As the Tek Sing passed through the Gaspar Strait her crew had to contend with a strong northwesterly monsoon wind, which created a considerable swell on the surface of the sea. This made the foamy crests of the wind-swept waves indistinguishable from those breaking over the reefs of the Belvidere Shoals until it was too late for the crew of the Tek Sing to avoid them.
The Tek Sing struck the barely hidden reef at such speed that the impact would have felt like an explosion to those on board. The junk’s planked hull broke open in much the same way as the Titanic’s iron hull split apart at the seams when she struck the iceberg. Water rushed into the Tek Sing’s holds, and as she slipped lower and lower into the sea, the rising tide and the monsoon wind dragged her over on to her side. Only an hour after running aground, the Tek Sing’s wreck lay 100ft (30m) below the surface, and the stormy waters above were full of debris, cargo, and over a thousand passengers.
The Tek Sing struck the barely hidden reef at such speed that the impact would have felt like an explosion to those on board.
Survivors of the ‘True Star’
The next day, the British merchant vessel Indiana passed the Belvidere Shoals on her way from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Borneo. That her captain, James Pearl, also opted to go through the Gaspar Strait – despite it being the less direct route for him – lends credence to the suggestion that he was smuggling half a million pounds worth of opium into Borneo. When the Indiana’s crew first spotted the floating debris from the Tek Sing at a distance, they thought what they could see was the reef breaching the surface. But as the Indiana drew nearer, the scale of the previous night’s disaster became clear.
As Pearl himself put it, the sea was covered with humans for miles all around. Hundreds of survivors were struggling in the water, clinging to pieces of shattered wood that had broken away from the junk as she went down. Every empty box, piece of bamboo furniture, bundle of umbrellas or fragment of hull bore several survivors. Some of those the Indiana brought aboard later claimed they had survived by standing in the shallow waters washing over the very reef that sank the Tek Sing.
The sea was covered with humans for miles all around.
Pearl ordered the Indiana to hove-to, despite the fact they were dangerously close to the reef themselves. Manning them with his best officers and most able seamen, Pearl lowered the ship’s boats and started pulling people from the water. Unfortunately his crew spoke very little Chinese, and the poor Chinese migrants spoke no English, and this mutual incomprehension hampered the Indiana’s rescue efforts. In the end he managed to rescue about 190 of the Tek Sing’s passengers before continuing on to Borneo.
A further 18 were rescued some distance away by the crew of a wangkang, a type of small Chinese junk, about a quarter the size of the Tek Sing. The wangkang’s crew discovered all 18 clinging to a large section of one of the Tek Sing’s masts that had snapped off as she capsized. When the wangkang set course for port, that sealed the fate of any other survivors still out there. Upwards of 1,600 people who left the port of Amoy aboard the Tek Sing would never be accounted for.
In 1999, British professional wreck salvager Michael Hatcher discovered the Tek Sing by accident. Divers from his ship, Restless M, sent down to investigate a mysterious sonar blip discovered an odd mound on the seabed 100ft (30.5m) down. It didn’t take much excavation before the divers uncovered the almost miraculously preserved contents of the Tek Sing’s holds. The subsequent salvage operation brought over 350,000 intact pieces of porcelain up to the surface, along with items dating back to before the 16th century (later theorised to have been antiques brought aboard by passengers). None of the human remains found within the wreck were removed. The following year the Tek Sing’s treasures went to auction, and Hatcher allegedly made $30 million from it.
Individual items from the Tek Sing’s cargo still regularly come up for auction online, with a porcelain soup spoon recently going for less than £15 and a boy fetish (an ornamental figurine which a woman would hold in one hand, rubbing the spot on its belly with the other, in the hope that fate would favour her with a son rather than a daughter) having an asking price of £850. Indeed, most internet searches for the Tek Sing will lead to websites about her treasure. Searches return little information about the vessel or her passengers, despite the catastrophe having been the single deadliest maritime disaster in history up to that point, an undesirable accolade it kept for almost half a century afterwards.
2 America’s Titanic
Triumph and tragedy aboard the Sultana
On Palm Sunday, 9th April 186
5, General Robert E Lee received Lieutenant General Ulysses S Grant in the sitting room of a private house in the village of Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. There, Lee signed the document that agreed the surrender of the Army of North Virginia, the largest component of the Confederate States of America military, which Lee commanded. When Grant, commander of the entire Union army, accepted Lee’s signature, the American Civil War effectively came to an end. Pockets of Confederate resistance would continue to fight on, some of them until June, but politically as well as militarily, after four years of bloody conflict, the Union had won.
Five days later, 26-year-old actor John Wilkes Booth took advantage of his celebrity to pass unhindered through Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. Fresh from his victory, Abraham Lincoln was enjoying a performance of Our American Cousin when Booth, a Confederate sympathiser, slipped into the balcony box where the President sat and shot him in the back of the head with a small pistol. Lincoln died from his injuries the next morning. Following the assassination, all telegraphic communication between the Union and the Confederacy was cut off. Many in the defeated South did not learn of Lincoln’s death until news was brought down the Mississippi River by ships sent to aid in the repatriation of Union prisoners of war newly released from Confederate camps.
Conditions in those overcrowded prisoner of war camps had been notoriously bad throughout the Civil War, but in the final year of the conflict, as events turned against the Confederacy, they had grown even worse. The Confederate armies found it increasingly difficult to provide sufficient food and medicine for their own troops, let alone tens of thousands of prisoners. In the infamous camp at Andersonville, Georgia, 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners died either of starvation or disease. Many of the prisoners were young (some had been only 14 when captured, having enlisted as musicians rather than soldiers, or lied about their age) and many had been wounded on the battlefield prior to capture. By the time the war ended, many of those who had survived prolonged captivity were reduced to a skeletal state, picking undigested wheat and oats out of animal dung because there was little else to eat.
With most of Mississippi now under direct Union control, army officials negotiated the immediate parole of prisoners of war from camps throughout the Southern states. Over 5,000 men from Andersonville and another camp, Cahaba in Alabama, were brought to Camp Fisk, east of Vicksburg, Mississippi, to await repatriation to the North. The Union officials decided to prioritise the ill and the half-starved for transport aboard Northern steamships that came down the river and docked at Vicksburg.
Despite being weakened by their imprisonment, war injuries, hunger, sickness and sometimes cruel torture, the men who waited on the wharves at Vicksburg were in good spirits. Some had walked for 50 miles without shoes or food to reach Camp Fisk. Many of the men were from Ohio and were desperate to get back home. They would return not as freed prisoners but as heroes, victors revelling in glory. But many of them would never make it. On 12th April 1865, the SS Sultana was inspected in St Louis, Missouri, and approved to join the repatriation efforts. When she left St Louis shortly thereafter, it was the beginning of her final voyage.
Despite being weakened by their imprisonment, war injuries, hunger, sickness and sometimes cruel torture, the men were in good spirits.
Warning signs
Constructed in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1863, the Sultana was a 1,700-ton wooden paddle wheeler built with the Mississippi cotton trade in mind. Whilst many steam-powered paddle wheelers operating at the southern end of the river had stern-mounted wheels, the Sultana had side-mounted wheels, which made her wider (some 42ft, or 12m, at her widest point), but also increased her manoeuvrability – especially important in the twisting stretches of the river and its tributaries further north.
As well as carrying cargo, the 260ft (79m) long steamship had enough berths or cabins for up to 376 people, including 85 crewmen. Twin funnels towered over her three whitewashed decks. Being such a new ship the Sultana had what was at the time the most modern safety equipment available, including gauges in the four boilers that locked open if pressure reached dangerous levels. There were also fire-fighting pumps, buckets, axes and a hose longer than the ship herself.
For the Sultana’s captain, J Cass Mason, war had been good for business.
For the Sultana’s captain, J Cass Mason, war had been good for business. In the two years since the ship’s launch he had run back and forth between St Louis and New Orleans regularly (the Mississippi River having been under Union control since the successful Siege of Vicksburg in May–July 1863). The War Department of the Union frequently commissioned him to carry troops aboard, which may have made the Sultana a target for the Confederate armies, but Mason considered it worth the risk. After all, the War Department paid him $5 for every enlisted soldier (and double that for every officer) he transported downriver towards the frontline. Mason probably wasn’t alone amongst steamship captains in offering military officials a $1.50 per head rebate (some might have called it a bribe) if they ignored the Sultana’s legal capacity limit. Mason often left St Louis with far more than 376 aboard his vessel. The end of the war was going to hit his income hard.
On 19th April, the Sultana arrived in New Orleans, where she stayed for two days. When she left on the 21st, she carried about 100 passengers, including merchants taking their livestock to market in St Louis. The Sultana had almost made it as far north as Vicksburg when crewmen in the engine room discovered a potentially dangerous problem. One of the boilers had developed a crack, and super-heated steam was escaping. Mason had no choice but to slow down to ease the pressure in the boilers. Though only 10 miles south of Vicksburg at the time, the Sultana crawled the rest of the way, docking in early evening on the 23rd.
Whilst his primary concern was to find someone cheap to repair the leak, when Mason went ashore he learnt that another steamship, the Olive Branch, had recently left Vicksburg with 700 prisoners of war from Camp Fisk aboard. Another 1,300 had already departed on the Henry Ames. Several thousand former prisoners were still waiting at Camp Fisk, and the uncontracted but empty Pauline Carroll could probably take most of them. Mason realised he not only needed someone cheap to repair his leak, he needed someone who would do the job fast. He had already been delayed getting in to Vicksburg, and now he stood to lose thousands of dollars to another captain.
The local boilermaker that Mason hired to do the repair job initially refused to do it. He told Mason that the boiler needed replacing completely, which would take up to four days. When Mason insisted a temporary patch over the crack would do, the boilermaker insisted that it wouldn’t. The boilermaker eventually capitulated after Mason promised the boiler would be replaced as soon as the Sultana reached St Louis. The boilermaker just removed a bulged section of boiler plate and riveted a thin patch over the top. The job took him only a day. Mason was still hopeful of being ready on time to take most, if not all, of the remaining prisoners.
The boilermaker just removed a bulged section of boiler plate and riveted a thin patch over the top.
According to a former member of the Sultana’s crew who had left the steamship in New Orleans only a few days previously, this wasn’t the first time Mason cut corners with the maintenance of his vessel. On two previous occasions a damaged boiler had been patched up rather than replaced, once before at Vicksburg, and once at Natchez, further south along the Mississippi. Mason still considered his two-year-old ship new, however much wear she had accrued constantly traversing the river’s often rough waters. Perhaps because the Sultana hadn’t suffered any significant problems from Mason’s piecemeal approach to maintenance in the past he thought the same would be true this time too.
Like bees about to swarm
The army officials drawing up the list of men to be transported wanted to split the freed prisoners between the Sultana and the Pauline Carroll, but Mason was having none of it. He had a longstanding contract with the War Department for transporting troops, he argued, which the captain of the Pauline Carroll did n
ot. The Sultana also had a proven track record of carrying significant numbers of men, so obviously that would make it fine to overload her on this trip too. Mason even persuaded the officials that rather than draw up a complete list of men before boarding, the former prisoners could simply give their names as they came aboard, thereby saving everyone – but especially Mason himself – precious time. The army officials finally acquiesced to Mason’s wishes. Consequently, the precise number of men aboard the Sultana when she left Vicksburg is unknown.
The precise number of men aboard the Sultana when she left Vicksburg is unknown.
The first to be brought aboard were 398 men from the military hospital in Vicksburg. A brief hospital stay could not make up for years of neglect in the camps, but if the doctors believed the men could survive the trip, they let them go to the Sultana. Many of the sickest and weakest had to be carried aboard. Legally, the Sultana was now already overloaded. The first trainload of men from Camp Fisk arrived shortly thereafter, bringing 570 men, and two more trains followed. One of them derailed en route, injuring a lot of prisoners, but all except the most seriously hurt continued to the Sultana; they had come this far, and nobody wanted to miss their ticket home. The third train reached Vicksburg in late afternoon on the 24th. It carried another 800 men.
Had Mason survived the return journey he would have found himself shortchanged. Because of his insistence that the men only be counted as they boarded rather than a comprehensive list of those he was to carry be drawn up beforehand, the army officials trying to coordinate the operation from the Vicksburg docks missed at least 400 off the final tally, simply by not being present when they arrived.
Final Voyage Page 2
