Booknotes: Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana

New Arrival:
• Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana: The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History by Gene Eric Salecker (Naval Inst Press, 2022).

Epic disasters have always been subjects of popular interest and recognition, but I've often wondered how deeply knowledge of the Sultana tragedy has penetrated beyond our Civil War sphere. "The Sultana was a sidewheel Mississippi steamboat carrying almost two thousand recently-released Union prisoners-of-war back north at the end of the Civil War. At 2:00 a.m. on April 27, 1865, when the boat was seven miles above Memphis, her boilers exploded. Almost 1,200 people perished in the worst maritime disaster in United States history."

The most highly regarded book-length Sultana histories are those written by Gene Salecker and Jerry Potter in the 1990s, with Salecker's  Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April 27, 1865 (1996) arguably the standard work on the subject. Salecker's ongoing research has now produced a brand new study, Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana: The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History. More from the description: "Almost every author who has written about the Sultana has relied on the words of a few survivors or referred to the works of previous authors to get their story. Advancing the scholarship," Salecker "has visited the National Archives in Washington, DC to comb through the handwritten transcripts of the three investigative bodies that looked into the disaster or poured over the handwritten testimony from the court-martial trial of Capt. Frederic Speed, the only person tried for the overcrowding of the vessel."

Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana "covers this disaster in detail and dispels the many myths that have been connected to the Sultana for too long." Not a revised edition of the 1996 study, this volume begins anew by freshly examining a greatly expanded body of primary source materials. "After almost twenty-five years of continued research on the Sultana, and all those involved in the disaster, Salecker has gleaned unparalleled knowledge into every aspect of the disaster. His research, covering the National Archives, and thousands of pages of newspapers from around the world and government documents, including pension records and service records, has allowed Gene to tell the story of the Sultana as completely as possible."

I have vague childhood memories of my grandmother mentioning the Sultana every once in a while (we had direct descendants who had the misfortune of being on that terrible last voyage), but I regretfully never asked her about any family stories. I did find their names in Salecker's index, so I'm looking forward to finding out more.