Certified for 376, Carrying OVER 2,000!! — The Sultana, 1865

On the night of April 27, 1865, the Mississippi steamboat Sultana exploded seven miles above Memphis with more than two thousand people aboard a boat certified for three hundred and seventy-six. Somewhere between eleven hundred and eighteen hundred died — the worst maritime disaster in American history, and almost no one remembers it. Most aboard were Union soldiers just released from the Confederate prison camps at Cahaba and Andersonville, going home at last. A boiler patched thin at Vicksburg to save two or three days, a quartermaster kickback that funneled every prisoner onto one boat, and a count no one kept met in a single week. This episode walks the causal chain plainly — the money, the machine, and the reckoning that never came. Last Known Position tells the stories of ships and the people who sailed them — what happened, why it happened, and what changed because of it. Calm, careful, and researched from the official record. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 1:38 The boat and the deal 4:21 The men aboard 5:48 The loading, and the patch 9:19 The river, and the explosion 10:55 The rescue 12:02 The reckoning that never came 13:48 What changed 15:39 Coda 📖 ABOUT THIS EPISODE The steamboat Sultana was a wooden side-wheeler built at Cincinnati in 1863, running the lower Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans under Captain James Cass Mason. In April 1865 she took on freed Union prisoners of war from Cahaba (Castle Morgan) and Andersonville at the Vicksburg levee, loaded by chief quartermaster Captain Reuben Hatch and Captain George Williams. A leaking tube boiler, patched rather than rebuilt, failed north of Memphis. The inquiries and the court-martial of Captain Frederic Speed followed; the conviction was overturned and no one was punished. This is the Sultana disaster explained — a Civil War steamboat explosion and maritime history documentary about how it happened and why. 🔔 SUBSCRIBE: @ownPositionDocumentary 📚 SOURCES Researched from the official inquiry record and public sources ("Sultana (steamboat)", "Cahaba Prison", "Andersonville National Historic Site", "Frederic Speed"). Original narration — not a reading of any source. Every episode is fact-checked line by line before narration; no recycled scripts, no invented details. 🎵 MUSIC Original ambient score. #maritime #shipwreck #documentary #history #Sultana