0:00 In 1982, the wreckage of a massive steamboat was found buried under thirty feet of soil in an Arkansas soybean field.0:09 Last week, we uncovered the forgotten inferno of Halifax, a city erased by a shipload of explosives.0:18 The steamboat Sultana was lost for a different reason: it was buried, first by the river, and then by history itself.0:27 The file on this case is thin, not because the crime was small, but because it was convenient to forget.0:36 The scene is Vicksburg, Mississippi, in late April, 1865.0:41 The Civil War is over.0:43 Union soldiers, skeletal and sick from Confederate prison camps, are finally free.0:49 All they want is to go home.0:52 They crowd the docks, waiting for transport north.0:56 The Sultana, a 260-foot-long paddle-wheel steamboat, is waiting for them.1:02 It’s rated to carry three hundred and seventy-six passengers.1:07 But there was a problem.1:09 And the problem was money.1:11 The U.S.1:12 government was paying a bounty for each soldier returned home.1:17 Five dollars for an enlisted man, ten dollars for an officer.1:22 The Sultana’s part-owner, Captain J.1:25 Cass Mason, saw an opportunity.1:28 He wasn't just offered a few soldiers.1:31 He was offered thousands.1:33 And he took them.1:34 All of them.1:35 More than two thousand men were crammed onto a vessel designed for a fraction of that number.1:43 But there was another problem, one that only a few people knew about.1:49 One of the ship’s four massive boilers had a leak.1:53 A serious one.1:54 At Vicksburg, a boilermaker named R.G.1:57 Taylor inspected the damage.2:00 He told Captain Mason the truth: the bulging iron plate needed to be fully replaced.2:07 It would take days.2:08 Mason, with his human cargo waiting and the government’s money on his mind, refused.2:15 He ordered a temporary patch.2:18 Just enough to get them up the river.2:21 Taylor did as he was told, knowing it was not enough.2:25 He warned that he wouldn't take the ship to St.2:29 Louis for all the money in the world.2:32 The patch was a death sentence, hammered into place with greed.2:37 At two o’clock in the morning on April twenty-seventh, 1865, just north of Memphis, the patched boiler gave way.2:47 Then the others went with it.2:49 The explosion tore the Sultana in half.2:52 Hundreds were killed instantly by the blast and the scalding steam.2:58 Hundreds more were thrown into the Mississippi, which was swollen with spring melt and nearly five miles wide.3:07 In the darkness, survivors clung to debris, to floating mules, to anything that would keep them above the freezing water.3:17 Many, weakened by war and imprisonment, simply drowned.3:22 Of the roughly two thousand four hundred souls on board, an estimated one thousand eight hundred died.3:30 It remains the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history.3:36 More people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic.3:40 So why have you never heard of it?3:43 Because on April fourteenth, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated.3:49 On April twenty-sixth, just hours before the Sultana exploded, his killer, John Wilkes Booth, was cornered and killed.3:59 The nation’s attention, its capacity for grief, was already exhausted.4:05 The newspapers were full.4:07 As one historian put it, America was so beaten down by the horrors of the war that the loss of one more boatload of soldiers… almost passed without notice.4:20 There was no major investigation.4:23 No one was held accountable for the overcrowding, for the faulty repair, for the raw, calculated greed that sent so many men to their deaths.4:34 It took until 1871 for the government to create the Steamboat Inspection Service, a direct response to this kind of disaster.4:45 But for the victims of the Sultana, it was far too late.4:49 The river buried the ship.4:52 The headlines buried the story.4:54 And for more than a century, that’s where it stayed.
