(Mirrors. This excerpt takes approximately four minutes to read.)

Sultana stayed in civilian service for a while, but did pick up extra cash transporting troops and military supplies on these civilian voyages. […] Upon hearing that the already legendary Sultana was up for sale, it immediately was snatched up by a group of four investors led by Captain James Mason, the captain of the Bell Memphis that raced Sultana out of Memphis. With Lwick stepping down, Captain Mason would be Sultana’s new master.

[…]

Mason wasn’t just reckless. He was also always out for himself, using the people around him, and ready to take a gamble with other people’s livelihood if he could make a buck from it. One of his earlier boats was confiscated after Mason was caught smuggling uniforms and weapons past blockades to the Confederacy. I don’t think [that] he was a Confederate sympathizer. He had no real loyalty except to himself and was always out to make a buck. The Confederates were willing to pay him.

[…]

Mason was desperate to make up for his previous financial losses. He was so desperate that he sold off most of his shares in the Sultana, but still remained on as captain. He also enlisted the Sultana in a union of boats that formed up a rag tag shipping line called the Merchant and People’s Steamship Company. The Civil War continued, still raging in the South. Commerce was weak along the river, and Mason struggled to find any significant cargo to carry.

[…]

The series of costly repairs made to Sultana over the previous few months included multiple repairs done to her boilers. They were often cheap and rushed in order to get the boat back into service as quickly as possible. One of the repairmen noted that the metal of the boilers was scorched, which indicated that the boilers were running hot with insufficient water inside. Running with less water allowed the boat to run faster, but greatly increased the risk of damaging the boilers. So, it was a bit of a balance that the engineers had to strike. And Sultana’s crew tended to lean more on the riskier side.

[…]

[O]n April 1st, the large prisoner of war camps of the South, such as Kahaba April 1st, the large prisoner of war camps of the South, such as Kahaba Prison near Selma, Alabama, began parrolling their inmates to Union Care in temporary camps near Vixsburg, readying for release. All those exhausted, famished prisoners once released, would need to be transported up the Mississippi River to the northern states.

The merchant and people’s steamship line, which the Sultana belonged to, entered into a contract with the federal government to carry these prisoners. And so, in early April, Sultana prepared to make her way south to pick up the poor, miserable, but lucrative cargo.

[…]

Captain Ruben Hatch […] sought Mason out with a special proposal. The federal government was paying the boats of the merchant and people’s line to take these recently released prisoners up to the northern states, giving a decent fee for each soldier with more offered for the officers. Hatch was willing to guarantee Mason a minimum of a thousand men in exchange for a cut of the pay, a kickback.

With a handshake, the two parted ways. Mason would still complete his current run down to New Orleans and deliver the news, but he would stop in Vixsburg again on the way back up and pick up his freight of soldiers. […] Sultana would pick up a thousand troops in Vixsburg, but Mason wanted his boat bursting at the seams with paying cargo and passengers as well. Around 40 passengers signed up for the voyage and somewhere around 150 tons of cargo were loaded on board, including over 100 head of livestock.

[…]

Those were the boats that were not offering him a kickback. Captain Mason, upon returning to town, then added a scheme of his own to pressure Hatch’s superiors into sending all the remaining prisoners of war at the nearby camp Fisk on board the Sultana.

Um, there’s been talk of bribery, but nobody connects the Sultana to the bribes. Nobody connects Mason to the bribes. Nobody connects Hatch to the bribes. So, all the other Union officers say, “You know, the Sultana just arrived. We heard there’s bribery. We’re going to put every last person out at this parole camp on the Sultana.” So Mason doesn’t get 1,000 men. He gets close to 2,000 men, which on a boat that’s supposed to legally carry 376, it was grossly over overcrowded.

Sultana was going to be seriously overloaded, but so were the wallets of Mason and Hatch. […] Mason and Hatch kept these poor prisoners of war in limbo just a little bit longer so that they could cram them all onto Sultana like cattle in order to line their pockets. This was greed at its worst.

By now, the link here between the profit motive and the oncoming tragedy should be easy to see (unless you are an antisocialist). With nearly two thousand passengers in addition to a great deal of cargo, this was almost certainly the most crowded steamboat in all of history — it was so crowded, in fact, that it would tilt if too many passengers went to one side.

Meanwhile, the engineer on watch […] grew frustrated with the boilers. He wanted to let enough water out of the boiler in order to give the boat enough power to make it through the next rough stretch. He released some water, but the water inside of the boiler gauges was likely bubbling and foaming, which causes the water to expand, and that pushes the gauges a little higher.

So, it’s now reading to the engineer that the water level is higher than it actually is. Seeing the gauge, Samuel cried out to himself, “Damn it, that’s not enough.” And he let out more water.

He closed the valve, and as he did, the boilers made a terrible whistling sound. The water was too low, uncovering some of the flu, and pressure was building up rapidly. The safety features began kicking in, but slowly, too slowly. The whistle startled many of the men on the main deck who woke up and began pushing back in the crowd to move away from the boiler.

Sultana snaked its way across to the Arkansas side, straightening out to move parallel to the shore past Red Man point. As it did so, she rolled back onto an even trim. The water in the boilers sloshed back, covering the exposed superheated flu inside. And then the seam expanded instantaneously in the already overpressured boilers.

Three of the four boilers of Sultana exploded almost simultaneously. It wasn’t the patch that failed, but the boilers themselves. The explosion tore through the upper deck, through the Texas deck, and blasted away most of the pilot house. […] The explosion was not a fiery one, but a violent steam blast. Fire didn’t begin until the wooden débris rained back down onto the boat with wood landing on top of the now decapitated boilers. The fireboxes were exposed now and pieces of the splintered Sultana fell down and ignited quickly.

This is a good spot to end this lengthy excerpt. The documentary that I quoted is nearly two hours long, but it is good if you want a comprehensive understanding of this event. At least 1,167 people perished because of this unnecessary disaster.