Episode 164: The Sultana Disaster

So it's it's 1048 Novus time.

Yes.

I regret to inform listeners this is the last episode of all there's your problem there will ever be.

We are all sockers are about to turn on each other like dogs.

Yeah, we might.

There'll be some people turning on each other later in this episode.

Oh, good.

I love it.

I love a good infighting episode.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, well, both both in forms of intrigue and also in forms of panic.

I just have to stress that this is not the last episode.

Please do not cancel your Patreons.

I need that money to live.

Yeah, listen to the lady.

Exactly.

I mean, it was nearly the last episode because you almost died.

Yeah.

I had a bit of a spill on the South Street Bridge.

Yeah, that mixing zone is not good.

No, you gotta, you gotta, I mean, I

just buy a gun and strap it to the strap itself.

Yeah, what you need is a kind of a claymore mine on every kind of like directional surface of the bicycle.

That accident was at least partially due to my own stupidity um oh you know and i didn't i didn't hit anything or get hit by anything i just lost my balance because i was trying to grab onto my hat that was about to fly off oh this is why you got to wear a helmet you know because it straps on

well you know that would have been that would have probably prevented this helmet ros because i i

need you to make rent roz i have to keep podcasting also you're my best friend roz there's there's a philosophical thing here.

Is it the vehicular cycling thing where you're like, you don't wear a helmet to ride?

In vehicular cycling, you have to wear a helmet.

Oh, okay.

One of the things about

urban cycling is

you're supposed to be safe enough that helmets are optional.

Now, whether that's actually the case is debatable.

The thing is, I was doing bike share, which does not come with the helmet.

That's true.

It really, really should do.

They should fucking have a magnetically attached helmet or on something.

There are places where they do that, and the result is no one uses it.

Yeah.

I mean,

I mean, I get it, right?

Like, obviously, I've had European woman dysphoria from, and I'll send Devon the picture of this to add to the episode,

the, like, beautiful Dutch woman in heels wearing, like, not a helmet, but, like, normal outfit, just, you know, peddling the step-through bicycle around.

And I think, oh, that's really cool.

I wish I lived in a city where, you know, that was possible and I could do that and not bash my entire brains in.

So I get the impulse, right?

This is a combination of factors involving,

okay, someone went around me in the mixing zone.

Also, my hat was about to fly off.

Also, the brakes didn't work very well on the bike.

What else?

Also, you know,

I mean, again,

this is a situation where had any one of those things not been the case,

this would not have happened.

But no, I just suddenly there was,

you know, the workload was too too much and over you go.

Well, don't don't die.

I'm fond of you being alive.

All I got was road rash, which, you know, sure, whatever.

Yeah.

Now it's painful, but it's not like any deep wounds or anything.

Banner week for cycling in Philly, I got to say.

So anyway, welcome to...

Well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Roznick.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

I was not murdered by the streets of Philadelphia.

My pronouns are he and him.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

As yet, I've yet to be murdered by anyone or anything.

And I'm hoping to keep that streak going for a long time.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

I'm regrettably coming to you from beyond the grave.

I have been murdered several times, and that's, you know, I had a good run, I think.

My pronouns are were he, him.

Yeah.

Your pronouns are was and were.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not what pronouns are.

I think I would know, but if you got murdered pretty hard, but not hard enough, so you were like clinically dead, but came back, could you then tell people fun fact, I got murdered?

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

In the same way as the thing I said about being like a plane crash survivor, if like one wheel goes off the end of the runway, I would be like, that's a good point.

Yeah.

Any, any person I talked to, I'd be like, hi, I'm November.

I was murdered.

I'm a murder survivor.

Yeah,

I was a plane crash survivor.

What was it?

Runway excursion.

They do that constantly now.

I'm a step away from saying that you should be able to say that you're a plane crash survivor if the plane was like delayed.

Yeah.

I'm a plane inconvenience survivor.

We had a delayed takeoff.

We had a delayed landing.

Give me, where's my ribbon?

Yeah, exactly.

COVID survivor.

I mean,

all of us did that.

You know, we should get a medal for that.

I heard the air traffic controller

speak, or I heard the pilot speak to the air traffic controller in an urgent tone.

Just that fits on a t-shirt, you know.

Not so well.

I survived like a United Airlines pilot using the frowny voice with air traffic controls.

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Oh, you know that's bad because United is where you fly the friendly skies.

Yeah, not the frowny skies.

Not the frowny skies.

If the frowny skies, something serious is going on.

I could double up on getting us legal threats by making us a come fly the frowny skies t-shirt.

Oh, come on.

I'm on the frequent flyer program.

I don't need that, even though I don't fly frequently.

Do it to upset him.

Do it to upset him.

Do it to upset him.

I'd be on the no-flyer program.

Anyway, what do you see on the screen in front of you is a steamboat.

Now, what you may notice here, and we'll talk more about this photo later, there's a lot of people on this.

Oh, shit, that's true.

That's not what I noticed first.

What I noticed first was that it's named the Sultana after either like a sort of a female equivalent or companion to a sultan or also a kind of raisin.

And that it's only smoking out of one of the smokestacks, which means it's like defective, probably.

Oh, we'll talk about that too later.

But

yeah, this is not supposed to be like this.

We are going to talk about the Sultana disaster.

Yeah.

The worst maritime disaster in American history.

The Sultana disaster when you get a bunch of Trail Mix and it's like mostly raisins.

Yes.

This is slander.

Raisins are by far the best part of Trail Mex.

Oh, that is a bold.

That's just MM's dissolution.

I'm sorry.

Who do you have in Trail Mex over the Humble Raisins?

MMs.

They're just an Eminem's

a deviationist

addition to TrailMix.

I'm not so enthused about really anything in Trail Mix, I'm going to be honest with you.

The raisins are nice.

I do like peanuts, but my wife would be a bit of a paper.

I don't go out of my way for pretty much any component of Trail Mix is the thing.

It's like,

all of it's fine.

I like raisins in a cinnamon raisin bagel.

That's like basically the only context I have them in.

I'm not a huge, huge like raisin head.

I like

a fan of raisins.

I'm not like a sort of a raisin stan.

Sure.

Particularly, I think we can all agree, the like deceitful raven, raven, the deceitful raisin, the raisin masquerading as a chocolate chip.

That's

pure evil.

Satanic, yeah.

But like in general, like in the aggregate, I like a raisin.

I like

breaks when they're turned into wine, not when they're squished.

I just thought of the most fucked up thing, I think, imaginable.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay.

You know how people on the West Coast get scooped bagels?

No, what the fuck is that?

Hold on,

I'm Googling scooped bagel right now.

And if it displeases me in any way, what the fuck is this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is just thinking you.

I am willing to get up there like the Israeli ambassador to the UN.

This is the greatest insult to the Jewish people.

I was just thinking that, yeah, if some of these sick freaks ordered like a scooped cinnamon raisin bagel and then there's just no raisins in it.

I would like a cinnamon-only bagel, though.

But you still want like a big early bagel shade that's a crystal of cinnamon.

I said the shell of a bagel.

Yeah, I don't like bread that much.

I mean, I like bread, but I don't know.

I've been on a big sourdough kick.

Welcome back to food chat.

Oh, that's a real like kind of lockdown bread, you know, like a real 2020 bread to get into.

Yeah, well, I really

got their sourdough starter.

No free advertising, but I will say La Colombe in Fishtown donates bread to Lutheran Settlement House daily, which is kind and good of them.

And

sometimes the seniors and people I work with don't take all the bread.

And I go in there like a raccoon and I take a bread and I come back to my house and my wife says, why are there six breads?

And I say, I don't know I don't know what happened here

yeah a man cannot live on bread alone but you can try but I'm gonna sure try yeah I can sure try yeah I no free advertising but I will give them a pass because they donate bread to people who keep it

so anyway before we talk about the sultana yeah let's talk about bread some more

or continue this this um I can talk about my friend's GoFundMe um my friend Blake she's doing a gofund me for for surgery um i'm gonna put a link in the description because she's great and she deserves it, and she's already raised like half the money she needs.

So, someone's gonna have to put down a note so I remember to put it in the description.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, I'll do another like yelling-at-you message in uh the group chat.

Okay,

that sounds good.

Um, before we talk about this continued tangent, we have to do the goddamn news.

Well done, Nova.

Good save.

Yeah,

I was typing on my phone.

Silly,

Big things happening in Israel.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, this is pretty gruesome.

It's not great, is it?

Yeah.

Protest erupted outside.

I don't know how to pronounce this.

Don't give them dignity.

Yeah.

One of the horrible prison camps they have in Israel where they detect the people.

Kind of the preeminent...

like horrifying that their attempt to do like Israeli guantanama yeah

exactly um because i think two soldiers were prosecuted for um

palestinian prisoners gotta have to bleep that but uh 27 prisoners from gaza have died uh at least uh

oh yeah there are like incontroversible reports of like absolutely routine torture of the worst kind of humanity yeah oh yeah and this is all stuff that you know if you like pay attention you're like you knew about this months ago ago yeah i mean so it's nothing that israel hasn't been doing or the us or even the u.

hasn't been doing for decades right but like it's something that's happening with like kind of unusual uh like

what's the word like not even bothering to flagrancy right right yeah but in this case there was then inorganic uh

and large protests which developed outside the prison of folks coming in and saying actually they should have the right to sodomize prisoners.

Yeah, I disagree with that.

That's good.

Yeah.

And to bear in mind, this wasn't because the Israeli justice system, and I put that in air quotes, like was sort of actually that concerned with the well-being of like Palestinian prisoners, right?

It's like, it's a fig leaf, right?

To say that, you know, one of the reasons why the ICC or the ICJA can't investigate us is because we have a like functioning legal system that like investigates and prosecutes abuses, right?

So the military police show up, they arrest like half a dozen people who are going to get like charges dropped or at worst, like a slap on the wrist.

And this is a bridge to already got the charges dropped.

Yeah.

And like, obviously, this is a step too far for Ben Gvir and

like his compatriots on the far right.

And I think what they ended up doing was pulling

battalions out of Gaza,

like full-time regular forces, because they didn't trust the reservist ones.

Because a lot of these protesters were reservists.

So, yeah, it really seems like

if you think about October 6th as sort of like Hamas's master plan to just kind of like psychologically destabilize Israeli society until the whole thing collapses in on itself, it seems like it's going quite well.

It seems like it's going pretty well because then shortly after this,

they have at time of recording bombed Lebanon and Iran.

Yep, yep, yep.

Something I genuinely didn't expect to happen is they killed Ismail Hania,

the political head of Hamas, in Tehran,

where

he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president when the last one got helicopter accidented.

And he's like the

guy doing the ceasefire negotiations.

Yeah, I mean,

Hania was kind of like out of um

out of influence with hamas in gaza and the kind of military side of it uh for a while there was this kind of divide between the the commanders like under daif in in uh gaza who like planned and executed the uh october 6th attacks um versus like the sort of like political leadership in qatar who had like uh sort of were not told about this and then had to kind of like make up ground about it.

And he was on that side, the Qatari side,

and was then killed in Iran, which is another like insane thing.

Not that

Israel hasn't been operating inside Iran and like killing Iranian scientists, et cetera, in Iran for years.

But like

this is a sort of like unhinged escalation and whatever the kind of retribution is going to be, I mean, this itself is a retribution for Hezbollah.

most probably, like accidentally killing about a dozen kids, like Drew's kids in the Galan Heights by like misfiring a missile aimed at like Mount Herman or something.

All in all, like

you have to look at where the escalation is coming from here, and time and time again, it's Israel, right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, they want to draw everyone into this horrible regional war.

Uh, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna.

I mean, there is no plan.

I don't, yeah, it's just

an annihilation, I guess.

I mean, listen, I don't,

you don't want to hand it to Hezbollah, not least because it would be illegal for me to hand it to Hezbollah as a prescribed organization in the United Kingdom.

But I do think that if Israel do what they want to do, which is open up a second front in the north and invade Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah, they will suffer badly on all sorts of levels and quite possibly lose, at least without the support of the US.

And so the US gets dragged into like another proxy conflict with Iran, which is cool.

And I have to.

Or even not a proxy conflict.

Well, yeah, exactly.

And then you open up the floodgates into all sorts of terrible things.

So, and again, the alternative to doing this was literally just to credibly, even credibly threaten to withhold weapons or like military support from Israel at any time.

And Biden hasn't done it.

So this is where we are.

Everyone under 26 who listens to this podcast, start your draft dodging plan now.

Yeah,

yeah.

Better to have a plan in place and not need it than need it and not have it.

You're not wrong is the thing.

I did not anticipate things getting to this point.

That's just gruesome.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the thing is that, you know, the genocide in Gaza remains like going apace.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

the kind of like...

universal sentiment amongst Israeli politicians and the Israeli military, if not the Israeli people, that is that like, not only is this good, but we want more of it.

Um, all right, that's always the fun part when it's like people are like, all right, it's just Netanyahu's regime.

Like, they replace him, it'll be with someone who's worse.

Turbo Hitler, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, and I mean, I they

presumably will not have as easy of a time doing the same things in Lebanon because Hezbollah is considerably better supplied

and more experienced in all of this.

It's just been, I come back to Qasim Soleimani, right?

And I mentioned this on Twitter, right?

That like being the kind of Iranian

like operator who is trying to calibrate very precise, like very measured, very proportionate things that mostly go off without a hitch.

You know, Hezbollah has been kind of like poking at Israel and this kind of like thing of killing some like Drew's kids is like the one real misstep they've had in months of doing it.

To do that takes like some expertise and some consideration, right?

And opposition in this is a guy who keeps escalating for no reason, right?

Um, the thing that I said on Twitter about it is it's like it must be like playing chess against a guy who keeps eating the pieces, you know.

Um, and Karsim Salamani was like the sort of guy who did that, like, uh, sort of uh par excellence, right?

And he got killed by Donald Trump, which is an incredibly insulting thing,

you know.

Yes,

so yeah, I don't know, I don't know where where, where this goes, what happens with this.

Nothing good.

Continued genocide of yeah, it basically like the only way this ends is like if the U.S.

is credibly able to restrain Israel, which it has shown absolutely

indications that it doesn't want to do.

I think so, yeah.

Capable of doing it.

So, yeah.

I mean, you know, the good news is for the listener, this will be coming out probably two weeks after we record this.

So you'll already know how it turned out.

Yeah, you will know whatever kind of response, like precisely calibrated response, Iran and Hezbollah, and possibly the Houthis, have kind of like implemented.

And you will know that in response to this, Israel has like, you know,

fucking bombed the presidential palace in Tehran or whatever.

You might already be on a plane to basic training

by the time you hear this.

Yeah.

Great.

Great times.

Great times everywhere.

Israel's doing so great in this war.

I fucking hate this place.

You know,

I just, I fucking hate.

Obviously, I've said it.

We'll keep saying it.

Big, big fan of not doing atrocities, especially atrocities committed in my name.

Please stop doing that, you fucking psychopaths.

I mean, it's got to be, even if you are like pro-Israel, you have to be looking at this and saying, these fucking morons.

What's

that?

You would think, right?

That's the rap.

That's the like.

I don't want to say Israeli like technocracy.

I'm going to stop you there, sir.

Because like Gaddi Isencott or like Yoav Galant, right, are the kind of guys in Israeli politics who are supposed to do that, right?

But the problem is that the baseline of like Israeli strategic thinking is already so fucking insane that the kind of like...

our career military like technocratic bureaucratic axis of like we're gonna do the smart thing

they think that the smart thing is

fundamentally still war with Iran.

It's just that they don't like that Netanyahu is like more personally corrupt and like dumber about it.

Yeah,

there is no Overton window.

It's just

a low whistle.

Please.

Yeah, I mean, you know, a deeply sick society, ultimately.

Aren't we all?

You know?

Yeah, well, this is true.

This is true.

Israel's just, I mean, like, this is the thing about like exceptionalism.

I think Israel is just like a lot of our societies with a volume dialed up, you know?

This is true.

Yeah.

it's kind of like, yeah, they're like, oh, you know, we can do, we can do anything we want.

And

yes, so far.

So far, they've been proven right.

So far, they're going to hit a wall at some point.

And it's going to be ugly for everyone.

I thought you were going to be able to do that.

They definitely hit a wall.

It just might, it just might take the rest of us out as well.

Oh, yeah.

We're going to get unconstrained nuclear war.

Yeah, they do whatever, the Samson option or whatever.

Oh, yeah.

Just glass Tehran and maybe like a bunch of Europe into the bargain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They just hurl a nuke at London for no reason.

I hope not.

I'm trying to move there, you know?

Yeah.

The rent will be really cheap after the nuke.

You say that.

I'm not sure that's even true.

It's like

zone two, moderate radiation exposure,

£2,500 a month for a studio, no bills included.

It will literally be Fallout London.

God,

I believe I saw a post from you saying it wasn't that good.

Yeah, I did not enjoy it.

It just,

there's, there's a tonally, it's a bit of a mismatch.

Well, we'll have to see how it compares with the reality in a few months.

Just like giving like a radiated London a bad review.

Yeah, two thumbs way down.

Um, in other news,

Before we talk about this, I do have to say I got a Tumblr ask.

It's not something I normally respond to from someone, I presume, a Venezuelan, begging us not to have takes on this.

I don't have a take on it.

I don't know exactly what's going on.

I don't have a take on it.

It seems like there's a very close election between two not very good candidates.

Imagine that.

Imagine such a thing.

Yeah, so this is the Venezuelan election.

Oh,

K-Hive is gonna is gonna seek it to your home and you, you're

you're getting, you're getting, you're getting a take whether you like

oh, old K-Hive.

Oh, OG K-Hive.

Yeah, you're going.

You are.

They're going to do stuff to you that they wouldn't do to you in Gitmo.

Speaking of Gitmo, once again, right, we're talking about like flagrant human rights violations.

So the allegedly socialist,

allegedly president of Venezuela, Nicola Maduro, has uh like won the uh most recent election, right?

And the opposition have like accused the the government of like widespread like electoral fraud.

Um, and this would be nothing new, right?

Um, and depending on how sort of campist your views are, because the Venezuelan opposition does include a lot of awful, like vampiric freaks, um, who want nothing more than to like uh institute some kind of like

uh US amenable far-right quasi-theocracy or whatever the fuck.

Yeah, it seems like the main, you know, one of the main things is, okay,

at least from a foreign policy perspective, Maduro wants to keep the oil company state-owned and Gonzalez wants to privatize it.

You know, I mean, yeah.

On the other hand, the Maduro government is insanely corrupt, personally, like genuinely very repressive.

And you just end up with this thing of like, you never want to hand it to a guy with the like secret police torture centers just because he's inconvenient for the Americans, right?

Or just because he calls himself a socialist.

But on the other hand, you can look at a lot of the opposition and say, man, these guys are some fucking creeps as well.

Right.

I don't know that there's a take arising from this.

Hey, you want Stalin or you want Pinochet?

Come on, pick one.

Yeah, great.

It's like a less competent Stalin, you know?

Yeah, less competent.

I don't want to hear less accomplished Stalin.

Yeah, I mean, this is a kind of situation where the Venezuelan economy is turbo fucked.

That isn't something that's inherent to it being a kind of like pseudo-left-wing government, right?

Because the Argentinian economy is turbo-fucked and they have an insane libertarian freak show in there.

Elon's boyfriend, whatever.

Yeah, no, Elon's boy is in El Salvador, but Javier Mille.

I thought Elon liked to be able to do it.

He probably does.

But

it's like, obviously, it's partially a situation like Cuba where you have like devastating sanctions, right?

But it's also a lot of like kind of personal corruption and mismanagement involved.

And like,

things are getting pretty unsustainable.

And the kind of one tool left in the toolbox to Maduro, who is the kind of like

shitty inheritor of Ugo Chavez after the CIA shot him with the cancer gun

is like more repression, more like more prisons, more secret police, right?

Which, yeah, is predictable.

And I think what's interesting this time is that the kind of like socialist

Latin American leaders, most notably Lula, have not quite gone along with this.

Like Lula's thing previously was always like, you know, this is like an internal Venezuelan problem.

He's been very slow to criticize Maduro for lots of good reasons in terms of like geopolitics and South America, right?

This time he's kind of with the U.S.

on the like,

expressing like serious concerns about irregularities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So maybe things are heading to another inflection point.

Who knows?

Maybe you get Juan Gaidot back in.

I was about to say, I mean, there's been a bunch of weird stuff going on.

I mean, this is this is all about like what?

They haven't released the actual ballots, I believe.

Yeah, but it's like a insanely insecure election system.

The way it works is it's an electronic voting system.

You press the button and the machine sends the thing to the central

voting authority, and then it prints out a paper ballot, which are then counted.

And the opposition are like,

can we observe the paper ballot counts?

And the government is like, no.

Oh, okay.

Which is not a good sign.

It's probably not a good sign.

Yeah.

And the thing is, previously, they had allowed international observers, and those international observers had said things like, oh, the elections seem pretty unfair to us.

Now

there's no international observers.

The other thing is, even the

official results don't seem too commanding for Maduro, you know?

It's like, what's the maximum you can kind of plausibly tip the scales, you know, before you're going into like Saddam Hussein Baath Party stuff where it's like

106% of the vote, 106%.

yeah it's not it's not like plausible if you're saying that you won with like a 99 majority and then you're having to like water cannon like a you know 100 000 people off the street you know

so yeah i

i guess it's just it's really grim um and

not to sort of like do my usual thing but you can lay a lot of this at the at the door of the us

uh a lot of this is the fault of like sanctions uh i think it was there was a time when it was possible to engage with ugo Chavez in ways that weren't shooting him with the cancer gun.

There were probably ways where it was possible to engage with Maduro, right?

Hey, we used to have a whole refinery here in Philadelphia that was built for Venezuelan crude.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

and like, it's not as if the U.S.

cares particularly about human rights violations for folks like, especially when it's getting its oil.

It's just that they don't like the human rights violations left inflected.

And so.

Exactly, exactly.

We don't want to interact with a state oil company um

uh you you you you can do all that rational and you you can do all that and stamp the word chevron on it or exxon mobile it's fine yeah yeah yeah um and and you have to let like um some like all of the richest people in your country with the most german surnames have to uh like still be in as opposed to like forcibly uh like expatriated to to Miami or wherever.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Goebbels von Hitler, but

yeah.

Well,

good luck to you if you're in Venezuela.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

Maduro is

he's a land of contrast because he is like unarguably a dictator and has done a lot of terrible things.

But on the other hand, he did during the State of the Union a few years back, get caught on camera eating an empanada he had stored in his desk drawer.

And if that's not relatable

good for him i yeah i i i get it that's that's a fan boy you know it's as far as my like critical support extends is that like storing a like sort of empanada in your desk drawer like empanada in the resolute desk functionally is that's that's the work of a kind of genius you know yeah no that would be pretty good and you put a you put like a you know you have like an elevator that comes out of the floor and goes into the desk to get you a fresh empanada it'd be like you know like how Trump had the button for the colour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

An empanada, but I would abuse the fuck out of that.

They would have to lift me out of that office with a crane.

I will not go quietly.

Gonna beat William Howard Taft.

Anyway, that was the goddamn news.

Okay,

before we talk about the sultana we must ask a question yeah what is a steamboat a guy a thing invented by a guy from lancaster county you're welcome is that true yes robert folden was from little britain there's a township in southeastern lancaster county didn't like his work with matt lucas very much i

i was waiting for that

Robert Fulton, engineer, inventor, and polyamorist.

Still a common overlap in the Venn diagram to this day.

Yeah.

He built the first practical steamboat in 1807, the Claremont.

This is a replica of it.

Why are the paddle wheels so small?

Because it was the first one.

Okay.

You see the John Ball.

Those wheels are tiny.

Yeah.

It looks like a couple of steering wheels.

He made it from New York City to Albany in just 32 hours, regardless of the current.

I mean, pretty cool to like triumph over wind power and like that.

To be like, oh, yeah, I don't even need to care about weather.

Because it was possible to get from New York City to Albany with

a wind-powered boat,

but you had to go with the tides because it's a tidal river all the way up to Albany.

But

the Claremont could just say, fuck you, I'm going.

At the cost of pumping out a shitload of fossil fuels, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It ran on, well, it ran on wood, I believe.

So that's biomass.

That's eco-friendly.

Okay, sure.

Were it done today, you'll be painting a big, like, green leaf on the side.

Exactly.

Now, Fulton soon went on to bigger and better things, conquering the mighty Mississippi River with a steamboat called New Orleans.

And where previously trade on the Mississippi River only could practically run one way with these single-use rafts, now the steamboat allowed the river to be a bi-directional highway of commerce.

Yeah, you can

import stuff through New Orleans and send it up the Mississippi.

Exactly.

I like delicious food.

What else does New Orleans have?

Daiquiris, incredible architecture.

Yes.

Yeah, just like a steamboat full of daiquiris and architecture heading north to like Ohio.

Exactly.

Nicest people I've ever met and the people who have gotten me the drunkest in my entire life.

And it sounds very good.

A bunch of guys complimenting your shoes.

Yeah, and then saying, you got them on your feet.

Now, give me a dollar.

Yes, I know.

Greatest city in the world, baby.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, again, before, before when you wanted to ship cargo down the Mississippi River, you built a raft, you filled it with cargo, you rode it down a river, you get to New Orleans, you dock there, and you disassemble and sell the raft, and then you got to walk back.

Sounds like it sucks.

It's number one.

It was really bad.

But now you have the steamboat, so you can go back up the river.

Now, it has paddle wheels, right?

Why did they use paddle wheels?

There were several reasons.

You couldn't forge a big screw propeller yet.

They're very difficult to manufacture.

Early paddle wheels could just be made of wood.

So you can just make it in your backyard.

Yeah, basically.

It's just a water wheel, but backwards, you know?

Screw propellers needed high-pressure steam boils, which weren't perfected yet.

And they required a bunch of draft, which the Mississippi River did not have.

It's like really shallow and really silty, right?

Like very much.

Very much both of those.

Yeah.

So just like essentially, you just have a big shovel that's like digging you through the water on each side.

Pretty much.

Neat.

This is side wheel steamboat.

There were also stern wheel steamboats.

Oh, like in the blood money level.

Yeah, just

a little bit later design.

Wait, actually, I think that steamboat had both.

Not important.

Yeah, sometimes you could have both.

You have belt and suspenders.

And, but yeah, the Mississippi River, though, was also pretty treacherous to navigate, even with, you know, these mechanical accessories, right?

Talk about the Mississippi River in 1865.

Yeah, this is a screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2.

Full of dead Confederates.

Because

I had to find images for a bunch of these slides 10 minutes before we recorded.

So what do you want?

I think we should have just left it and pretend that it wasn't.

It's just like, no, it's always looked like this.

Yeah, this is this is a like a contemporaneous photo of the Mississippi River in 1865.

Yeah,

not done on one of those tin plates or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, this is a this is a tin type of the Mississippi River.

It looks great, full color and everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Colorized it with AI.

Don't know why there's a bunch of of cops holding a Bible, but, you know.

Shrimp Jesus emerges from the Mississippi.

Shrimp.

So the modern Mississippi River is significantly tamer than the river in 1865, right?

It's been fully charted.

It's been controlled with levees.

It has locks and dams instead of falls.

There are bridges over the river instead of ferries you have to dodge.

They dredge it pretty frequently.

You know, it still has problems with like flooding and the fact that the whole thing could divert into the,

what's it, the Chachafaya River.

If you say so.

Yes, at any point.

Excuse me, Chachafalia.

I looked up how to pronounce this and then I forgot.

Yeah, because

at any time, if there's, you know, if there's a problem with the old river control structure, it could just...

explode the economy and everything.

Yeah, that's the one like Army Corps of Engineers project that like diverts, that's like functionally trying to keep it to the old channel, but like switches over to the one that it's supposed to hydrologically go to.

Yeah, the Chat Chafala has a has a steeper grade, so naturally the river should want to go that way.

And there's a big control structure that keeps it going through New Orleans and through all the oil refineries and stuff down there that depend on shipping and the chemical plants.

And

that delta is really weird, just the amount of like heavy industry that's built on the most delicate land imaginable.

Makes you feel proud to be American.

It truly does not.

For the purpose of waterborne commerce, though, the Mississippi River has largely been bent to man's will.

But in 1865, the situation is different, right?

The river floods every year.

When it floods, it often shifts channels.

So you get a new river each year.

If you're piloting a boat, you have essentially no navigational aids other than the stars and a compass.

It was very difficult or impossible to navigate at night.

There's no locks or dams.

These steamboats would actually have to climb up the various falls in the river.

I still have no idea how that works.

Just a notch eight.

Just run it.

Yeah, just run it.

I just go.

Yeah, the paddle wheel just pushes you up, I guess.

I have no idea.

Accidents are common.

Boats explode sometimes.

You have problems with the boilers.

This is why Mark Twain, after a few years of doing this, was like, fuck this.

I'm going to get into the like, the equivalent of podcasting of his day, which is being a humorist.

Jimmy off his goddamn river.

Moved to Virginia City.

Mark Twain would like,

would like do the fuck out of a podcast.

Oh, he definitely.

He was definitely like, Mark Twain was basically a Bernie bro.

This is is like a dangerous business, but it was still better than walking.

Right.

It is crazy how much of like human progress and civilization

is based on walking sucks, and I don't want to do it.

It's like me taking the trolley up to the Wawa this morning and found out they'd already stopped serving breakfast.

Still got a coffee, though.

This is the impulse that drove us out of the like, out of the trees and into like agriculture, right?

Fuck walking.

I didn't want to walk a mile to find out

they stopped serving breakfast.

I took the trolley.

You sure did.

You fool.

Yeah.

Well, the breakfast options in my immediate area are like irritating.

I also, wah wah breakfast is not very good.

See, because the place with the good sandwich doesn't serve coffee, and the place with the coffee doesn't serve a good sandwich.

Why don't you go to Goldstar?

How do you get the like the, what is it, the wolf, the lamb, and the beans across the river or whatever the fuck?

Exactly.

Can't do it.

Can't do it.

the podcaster the breakfast sandwich and the coffee exactly exactly i gotta replace my coffee maker i haven't done it yet well um

subscribe to the patreon no i i planned well no subscribe to the patreon i'm i'm poor yeah i'm definitely extremely poor uh can't afford a coffee machine yeah yeah he can he's just i do this for you people yeah i mean listen given given that you got yelled at by your landlords this week on top of also dying i think you're allowed to be like subscribed to the patreon you know that's a good point yeah when you don't have a landlord anymore that's that's when you're you have to be a bit quieter about the patreon you know that's a good point that's a good point anyway so we have to talk about a steamboat before the explosion yeah well that's spoilers uh sorry sorry this is well it's written there on the slide this is the sultana um

And a lot of this information, but not all of it, is from a book called Disaster on the Mississippi by Gene Alec, Gene Eric Salaker.

It was published in 1996.

It's on the Internet Archive.

You can check it out for one hour at a time for free.

This guy's a lifesaver, genuinely.

Yeah, that's why they're trying to make it go away.

Yeah, I know.

I do note here that there's a structural problem, which is that the steamboat is trying to support as superstructure the weight of the entire state of Texas.

The Texas roof, yeah.

Oh, and just Texas.

And just Texas, yeah.

Texas is like on the sort of the top deck, um, which I think is probably very dangerous and destabilizing because Texas

weighs a lot.

Texas is very, very heavy.

Uh, lots of oil.

Yeah.

Um,

sloshing around.

Free surface effect.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hurricane deck.

Um, I forget why it's called that.

Okay, you want to see a hurricane?

That's where they give you the hurricanes?

Oh, the wind passes through it.

I think that might actually be the reason.

This is the fifth sultana on the Mississippi River.

I mean, there's only so many names you can give a boat, right?

I I don't like scrapped, wrecked, burned, burned,

and

cursed, burned, burned down and sank, yes.

Cursed.

Cursed boat name.

Yeah.

Burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.

Yes.

The front fell off.

Yeah, so this is the fifth Sultana.

It was 260 feet long, 42 feet in beam.

seven foot draft, but it could be trimmed to operate in only 34 inches of water.

Jesus.

It was built in 1863 by John Litherby's boatyard in Cincinnati, Ohio.

It had two 30-foot diameter side paddle wheels.

So at a time when Ohio was like a sort of center of shipbuilding, which is an insane.

Yeah,

that took a while to go away, even.

It was designed to go as far upriver as Pittsburgh and all the way down to New Orleans, but the smokestacks were too tall and it crashed into the bridge at Wheeling.

So they never went that far upriver again.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.

Yes.

So according to the Cincinnati Daily Commercial on February 4th, 1863, it was one of the largest and best business steamers ever constructed.

It was built largely to carry cotton up from New Orleans and distribute it north, right?

Here's some of its features.

As a grand and luxuriously appointed saloon with a full bar, uninterrupted by columns or other perturbations, lit with chandeliers.

Just imagining like 1860s us doing the cruise ship's bit and behind it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A steam-powered robot bartender.

I play Fallout.

Yeah.

I'm just talking about the like riverboat gambling you could do on this.

31 staterooms with two berths each, individual wash basins with running water and chamber pots.

Oh, good.

I love the shit in a bucket.

Yeah.

Fine furniture and woodwork of the highest quality material provided only by the best firms in Cincinnati.

Uh-huh.

And it had two side paddle wheels, 34 feet in diameter, driven by four high-pressure, high-pressure for the time, tubular boilers.

Totally tubular, dude.

Yes.

We'll talk about that in the next slide.

And crucially, though not initially, it eventually came to pass.

It featured one seven and a half foot alligator, which will become important later.

What?

As

furniture, as crew, as like what?

Oh, the crew kept it as a pet.

Oh, so as crew, then okay, great, perfect.

They saw

most of the time, live seven and a half-foot alligator.

Yes, America, that's so cool.

Sometimes, why would you not have an alligator?

Yeah, I mean, you're not wrong.

I love, I love an alligator, I love a crocodile.

Everyone loves alligators, yeah, yeah, until they encounter one in the wild, yep, and then they get eight.

Yep,

don't stick your hands out of the boat boat on the bayou tour.

Don't do that.

No.

Unless you want to get a cool story and like a cool nickname and one fewer arm.

Yeah, one fewer, at least a finger.

Yeah,

if you want to take your life joint hands on the bayou tour, that's between you and God.

I wish I would avoid that.

Let's talk about the tubular boilers.

Yeah, please.

Mike Oldfield's tubular boilers.

Yeah.

Traditionally, and I'm talking about traditionally in 1865, Mississippi steamboats were built with a very simple but very inefficient boiler, right?

So you have the boiler, you have a firebox somewhere, it's making fire.

The hot gases go through these two huge flues, right?

Like a pair of nostrils.

Exactly.

The flues heat up the water in the boiler.

They turn it to steam.

The steam drives the engines, right?

Because these flues are gigantic.

A lot of that heat is wasted since not a lot of it is actually in contact with the water and with the with the tubing, which then turns transfers the heat to the water.

You need more surface area.

Yeah, exactly.

You need more surface area in order to transfer the heat.

Learning completely the wrong lesson of being like, you need a very wiggly flue.

Oh, no, they tried that.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they would do like return flues where.

um the thing actually curled back on itself um i mean you get you get more surface area

just a little bit yeah

um

so a newish concept became popular in 1848, right?

Other than overthrowing governments in Europe.

I love to do it.

Yeah.

And though this design had been fitted to steam locomotives 19 years previously, they decided to adopt on the river the fire tube boiler shown here.

So many small tubes.

Many small tubes, yeah.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

This is where you get the cool phosos of steam locomotives where the boilers exploded and it looks like spaghetti has poured out of the front.

Yes.

Because that's the like, those are the flues which have just like shot out of the thing.

Yes, exactly.

That's due to a water hammer during the boiler explosion mostly.

Water hammer 40k.

Yes.

Yeah.

So your fire tube boiler has many small flues.

The hot gases pass through these flues and the flues provide quite a lot more surface area.

They heat the water.

much more quickly than the two huge flues.

Thusly, you can boil the water more efficiently and at much higher pressures, resulting in more power while simultaneously having less fuel consumption.

These had been standard on steam locomotives since Stevenson's rocket in 1829, but they'd been rare on steamboats.

Now, there's a reason for this.

Can I guess?

Can I guess?

Yeah.

Is it because it's like really difficult to make these at like marine engine or marine boiler scale?

Not so much.

It has to do with the water quality.

Okay.

It's because of muddy waters.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we're talking

about the boiler just gets real, real gritty real fast.

Gets real growdy really fast.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

The Mississippi River has a lot of silt.

The water from the river was pumped directly into the boiler.

The water would boil, but the silt would stay there.

This caused problems.

Oh, so because you're not fucking around like filtering that water.

Absolutely not.

No, no filtering.

You just dumped it right in there.

Yeah.

So problem number one was these boilers required frequent cleaning to stay efficient.

This cleaning was very laborious because there's not very much space between the tubes.

You have to get in there with a bunch of like pipe cleaners and shit.

Yeah, is that or you send a small child in or something like that?

Exactly.

You can see here on a steam locomotive, these flues are spaced more closely than they would have been on an early steamboat boiler, but there's not a lot of space in there to clean.

Oh, sure.

Like river silt is like a pain in the dick to get out, especially if it's been very warm.

It's been warm.

Hot silt.

Yeah.

Now, in order that it was very difficult to clean, and in order to clean it,

you had to cool the boiler down.

You had to shut, you know, you had to, you had to, whatchamacallit?

You had to douse the fire.

You had to wait for the boiler to cool down.

You had to drain it, drain it, then you could finally clean it, you know, send send in a small child with a pipe cleaner, so on and so forth

this reduced uh the working life of the boiler um when you have a boiler it's best to keep them at a constant temperature as much as possible

thermal cycling yeah to avoid fatigue from thermal expansion and contraction right so you know a steam locomotive a relatively newer one would be generally if it was in heavy use they'd keep it in steam for 10 days or so on, something like that.

And then, you know, they would do a cursory cleaning.

And a lot of times they didn't even, you know, wait for it to cool down because you could do a lot just by messing with the steam because you have much purer water in a steam locomotive than you do in a steam boat.

In the case of the Sultana, they couldn't stay in steam for that long because the boilers would get clogged with silt.

So they're cleaning the boilers every five days or so, and they got to drop the fire, wait for it to cool down, so on and so forth.

Puts more thermal stress.

How long does this process take?

I am not sure.

It's got to be got to be hours.

I was thinking,

that's what I was saying.

I was just curious if it, if it compounded.

It's got to be at least hours.

That fucking sounds like it sucks.

Yeah,

it sucked.

You know, and this puts more thermal stress on the boiler than, you know, on something that's continuously operating.

Yeah, remind me how good metallurgy in the 1860s is.

So at this point, the Bessemer steel process has only recently been invented.

A lot of these boilers are not made out of steel.

They are made out of some high-grade of wrought iron.

The kind of raw sign that's very prone to fracturing, we've talked about before.

It's less prone than cast iron.

Wrought iron is generally...

you know, you're working out all the brittleness by just hitting it with a hammer over and over and over again.

But yes, it is still much more brittle than, say, steel.

The other problem you get here is hot spots, right?

Because silt does not boil at the same temperature as water.

Stands to reason chemistry.

It's got different stuff in it.

Exactly.

So if silt builds up on the flues, right?

Like if you're, I don't know,

if the ship takes on some water.

And like, I don't know, let's say a fish is like right here that got sucked in.

No, I don't know.

And he immediately dies.

But then a whole bunch of silt builds up on top of it, right?

Because it can't be a fish.

Just dig that fish shallow grave.

Right.

Then you wind up with a hot spot there because the water is not able to carry away the heat.

Doesn't this am I crazy, or does this not happen in like nuclear reactors sometimes?

I think, I mean, that's that's uh, whatchamacallit?

That's got to be like, hmm.

It's just, I vaguely remember this coming up before I was.

I also vaguely remember this, but I can't, but I can't tell.

Yeah, no.

I think that's got to be.

Are we talking about the reactor itself or are we talking about the steam jet?

I don't know.

It is

11.44 p.m.

That makes sense.

I think, you know, you probably have something that

blocks something with the control rods.

There's like, what is it, neutron poisoning or whatever it's called?

I don't remember offhand.

I'm completely derailing the thing.

You got to just ignore me.

Anyway, you're doing great.

It's also a pressure vessel.

So if silt builds up and the flues can't transfer the heat to the water, they heat up much hotter than they would normally.

This weakens them, right?

Eventually, they could fail.

That would cause water to leak into the flue.

Oh, that's bad.

Now, you want to keep in mind that the water in the boiler is under significant pressure.

So the liquid water is at a significantly higher temperature than its normal boiling point.

If the water leaks into the flue at a slow rate, it's not such a big deal.

You have this sort of drop in pressure, and the efficiency of the boiler will be reduced, and you're going to have to reduce the heat.

You're going to have to reduce the pressure.

You're going to have to sort of limp into the next sport to get it fixed.

If the leak is large enough, there'll be this rapid drop in pressure, which is accompanied by a lot of the hot water, and the boiler will immediately flash to steam.

This subsequently causes a massive increase in pressure.

That will widen the leak, which would encourage more water to flash to steam, and the boiler blows up catastrophically.

Oh, okay.

Yeah,

not great.

This is usually not caused by a leak in a flu, however.

Um, but hot spots can have other problems if there is, for instance, a very low water level in a boiler and you suddenly add more water in, which we'll get to in a bit.

Okay, so the Sultana's pre-war and wartime career.

Um, so here is Captain J.

Cass Mason looking amazingly terrified.

Yeah, man.

He's looking very alarmed.

He's never seen a camera before.

Understandable.

He was actually the second captain of the Sultana.

The previous owner was a Captain Lodwick.

I didn't see his first name.

He only owned it for about a year.

Again, it was designed to carry cotton as well as passengers, but it was almost immediately forced into wartime duty.

Captain Mason was known for one thing.

which was speed, right?

His boats were among the fastest.

He set many a speed record on the Mississippi.

Now, Sultana was an ideal boat for the job of going fast with its newfangled fire tube boilers, but Captain Mason's style took a toll on them, right?

They needed major repairs after only two years in service.

When we say wartime servers, which side?

The Union.

Okay, good.

Yeah,

most people we're going to talk about are in the Union.

So anyway, they needed major repairs after only two years in service but after those repairs on april 3rd 1864 he made a trip from new orleans to cause

four days and seven hours which is a trip of 500 miles as the crow flies and much more as the river winds well that is bad fucking like drifting this thing around like meanders and shit absolutely incredible um but mason ran into financial troubles with the boat and he was eventually forced to sell his shares in the boat to investors which uh eventually formed the Merchants and People's Steamboat Line, right?

But he remained captain of the boat.

But his financial position continued to worsen as the war wound down.

So there's less traffic, and he desperately needed cash fast.

Sort of sort of a routine thing in like Civil War period American history where all the guys who had the most kind of like personal

like dash were also the worst with money.

Yes.

Yes.

It's like fucking Ulysses S.

Grant, who can't run a general store.

Yep, oh, absolutely not.

No, there's a lot of uh, there's a lot of we'll get into the shenanigans in a minute.

And if for some reason, you know, people are like, Wow, what war are you talking about?

And we're talking about the Civil War, of course,

the American one, the American Civil War, yes.

Uh, the war between the states,

A24 is Marvel's American Civil War, yeah, exactly.

The wall of northern aggression.

Oh, buddy,

He's from south of the Mason-Dixon.

Get his ass.

Yeah, okay.

Well, you know, okay, what was the Civil War?

What was it about slavery?

Slavery and capital.

I learned from Dinosaur Kingdom 2 in Rockbridge County, Virginia.

Oh, boy.

That the Union accidentally genetically engineered.

a race of warrior dinosaurs that turned against them.

Would have been cool if we did.

Yeah, actually, it would have been pretty cool, except they're Confederate dinosaurs.

Let's go.

Never mind.

I consider all Confederates dinosaurs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What was the symbol of?

I'm the meteor.

It was when we got, it was how we got rid of slavery.

We had to go put a bunch of southerners in their place.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know what else to say about that.

It took a long time.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, people did a lot of fighting.

It was nasty.

There was like Gettysburg and Cold Harbor and like Appomattox and

a bunch of other stuff.

It would be,

if it's not eating the lunch of like a certain military history podcast that we have a sort of slight overlap with, the Civil War would be an interesting bonus episode.

It would also be 17 hours long and entirely comprised of me talking.

No, no, if I get Uncle Robert on, he'd be really good.

I'd listen to that.

I'd listen to Noah Bet and Uncle Robert just yell at each other for 17 hours.

Yeah, but so I mean, like, obviously, a huge part of the American national psyche and mythology and stuff and much much revisionist history from a country with a kind of a shelby foot fetish.

But you know, as as

the right side won and then fumbled the bag in terms of like reconstruction.

Which we should

have really never stopped doing reconstruction.

You know, someone shouldn't have shot Lincoln.

Yeah, Secret Service fucked up on that one.

The Secret Service were like busy thinking about counterfeiting at that point.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Still have to write the Secret Service bonus episode.

That'll be next month.

Yeah.

So

now, one of the things in the Civil War was no one really wanted to take prisoners.

It was annoying.

So we'll talk here a bit about the parole system and the Dick's Hill cartel.

Yeah.

Parole for prisoners predates the Civil War by far, typically for like officers.

Right.

Yeah.

The idea is that you give your word, your parole, your word in French, as like an officer and a gentleman that if you get released, you're not going to take part in any sort of like hostile activities for the duration of the conflict.

So like, we caught you, we're going to send you home, but you like

super ultra pinky from us, not fight anymore.

Yeah, and like they genuinely took this 100% seriously as well.

Like this is a kind of like matter of personal honor with some exceptions.

I got to imagine there's also a few people like, I don't really feel like getting killed, you know?

Yeah, basically like

you kind of, you got captured, you're out of the war, now you get an enforced vacation.

It's like being a cop, right?

Like, you kind of, you're fucked up.

You're on paid suspension.

You're on administrative leave, you know?

Yeah.

So, in the Civil War, they extended, they expanded this to enlisted men because no one wanted to take on a huge number of prisoners because keeping prisoners was expensive.

Expensive, yeah.

And also, you have a bigger number of enlisted men kicking around than you had in any previous conflict.

Yeah.

And there was an extent to which, you know,

folks didn't really want to just shoot people, right?

So the two sides came to an agreement known as the Dix Hill Cartel, named for Union General John A.

Dix,

Confederate Traitor General Daniel Harvey Hill.

This

namesake of Fort Dix in New Jersey and namesake of

fuck all because Fort Hill was for A.P.

Hill until they renamed it.

And it sort of worked like this.

You know, if you're captured, you go to a prison camp.

From there, they'd record that you existed and you'd been captured.

Then you were paroled and sent back to your own land.

Yeah, exactly.

So, this guy's this guy's bad at war, idiot.

And they're like, okay, you can't rejoin the fighting in any capacity until you're exchanged for other prisoners.

In the north, they actually held these folks in huge parole camps, which tended to be dirty and nasty and unpleasant.

And in the south, they're like, eh, just go home.

But they expected you to turn up again if you were exchanged, which I don't think I would do that.

No.

I think I'd try and hide out.

I don't want to deal with this.

Like Jerry Dacing.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm not going back to Cold Harbor.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod.

Do it if you want.

Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that.

Back to the show.

Problems arose with the system when Confederates captured black Union Union soldiers.

Wow, are those guys racist or something?

Hmm.

Getting a kind of bad vibe off the Confederate states of America, yeah.

You don't like our boys in gray?

I'm past even like critical support.

I don't even have that much, you know.

The Confederates refused to exchange black prisoners because they assumed all of them were escaped slaves.

Oh my god.

Okay.

They also refused to parole them.

Of course.

So the Dix Hill cartel just broke in 1863, and then prisoners just started accumulating on both sides of the conflict.

General Grant did not try to resume negotiations to bring back the parole system because he realized it was working in his advantage.

The South had this massive manpower shortage.

It needed its prisoners back far more than he needed his.

This is the thing, right?

How can you sit down and calculate that in your head successfully and coldly and like do it as part of a stranglehold on an entire political and military entity, but also not be able to do it to understand how many cans of beans you need to order in a general store in Ohio?

Yeah, the church auto biography of Grant really made me a cynic on him.

Grant, Grant, you know, he's better at talking about Crown Bro stuff.

Yeah, no kidding.

Like, this is the thing.

Like,

You know, you hear about people getting promoted above their competence.

I think Grant spent a lot of his life below his competence.

He needed to be put in charge of armies to be good at stuff.

Now, this meant that your prisoner of war camps quickly became overcrowded and unhygienic.

And especially in the South, they were chronically under-supplied.

Yeah, we had to invent all new types of war crimes for this.

Exactly.

Never had to do this on this scale before.

There were infamously bad prisons on both sides.

You know, there's like Camp Douglas in Chicago and the camp in Elmira, New York.

But in the north, this was mostly punitive under supply, whereas in the south, it's also punitive, but with genuine supply problems.

But

no prisoner of war camp in

the Civil War was so infamous as the one at Andersonville, Georgia.

And they hanged the commandant after the war.

One of the very few people who got hanged.

Seriously.

Certainly not the only one who deserved it, though.

Yeah, and he was what was like a captain, I think.

So like pretty, pretty low down this ocean pole, but had just been left in charge of this bullshit.

And just like, I don't give a fuck if they get dysentery.

And like they hanged him for it, which they were right to do.

But

just getting dysentery.

So

Andersonville prison was very nasty.

Essentially, they put you in an area with a fence surrounding it.

I'd hate to be put in an area.

Short of that fence was the deadline, which is essentially: if you cross this line, we shoot you immediately.

Right.

It's Arkham City.

Yeah.

I've been playing a lot of Arkham City lately.

Very good.

There was a creek that ran through the camp.

This was the water supply.

It was also the latrine.

Oh, boy.

Essentially, they just shoved people in there and they're like, ah, you're on your own now.

They gave you some rations of cornmeal just like woodstock 99 yeah yeah

except it goes on for years

jesus yeah

they gave you some rations of cornmeal they gave you some timber for heating not you personally but like they shoved it at the entrance and you know you had to sort of distribute it yourselves

You know, and it's not enough for the whole population.

Everyone's, you know, emaciated.

Everyone's got scurvy.

No one had clothes.

Social order completely broke down.

Lots of stories about taking the boots off of corpses and stuff.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

They're like gangs of prisoners robbing other prisoners.

Oh, God.

The mortality rate was something like 28%.

By the end, they had crammed 30,000 people inside the walls.

This was not a great place to be.

Oh, no.

No.

I would avoid being sent to Andersonville Prison.

That is my official recommendation should you fight the Civil War.

Stick with the Run the Jewels advice.

Don't get captured.

Don't get captured, yeah.

So in early 1865, just as the war was wrapping up, the parole system sort of started back up.

That meant there was this arduous task of getting people out of the prison and back to the north, or at least to Union-held parole camps.

On March 20th, a large group of prisoners dragged themselves out of the camp and onto a waiting train, which took them to Montgomery, Alabama.

There, they transferred to a steamer, which steamed down the Alabama River to Selma, where they were then loaded into cattle cars onto the train as far as the

Tombigbee River, which they then crossed on a ferry, then took a train as far as Meridian, Mississippi, then another train to Jackson, where someone said, All right, you got to go to the Union-controlled parole camp at Vicksburg.

It's down this road 40 40 miles.

Good luck.

So they walked.

Oh, fuck that.

Yeah.

Now, when they got there, of course, they were in a parole camp as opposed to Andersonville Prison.

And the parole camp was run by the Confederates, but those Confederates were under control of Union troops.

What's weird, sort of, like, nested, nested, like, maturity?

Because, like, well.

I guess you people know how to run this place.

We're just going to point guns at you to make sure that you run it right.

So it's a very funny idea to be in prison and the prison guard has a second prison guard holding him at gunpoint.

It's where it's always been holding.

Make sure he doesn't try any funny business, you know?

Yeah.

This was an unpleasant place to be, but the rations were better.

It was not Andersonville.

You know, you got new clothes.

You got like not a decent living, but you weren't like...

You weren't a skeleton anymore.

But soon enough, Richmond was captured on April 6th.

Lee surrendered to Grant on April 13th.

Once again, anyone who tells me shit about Lee's generalship scoreboard.

Yeah, exactly.

Real prisoner exchanges started again.

It's time to try and move these folks back north.

Unfortunately.

And a thing happens.

You may have heard of this.

This play about to be lit, et cetera, et cetera.

We'll start slightly before that happens.

On Tuesday, April 11th, 1865, Captain Mason, chief mate William Rowberry, pilots George Caton and Henry Ingraham, chief engineer Nathan Wintringer, and assistant engineer Samuel Clemens.

Hold on.

Two things here.

First of all, Nathan Wintringer fully took me out.

Second of all, Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain Samuel Clemens?

No, it was a completely different Samuel Clemens who happened to be on the Mississippi at the same time.

Some of them got to pick different fucking nights.

Yes, you guys are getting out of here.

Well, I was going to have to change.

Yeah.

Why should I change?

He's the one who sucks.

They set out from New Orleans or from St.

Louis towards New Orleans with the intention of securing some of those lucrative parolee consignments, right?

Then they found out they had to wait a day for a boiler inspection.

So they set out Wednesday.

And on April 15th, the Sultana was pulling up to the wharf in Cairo, Illinois.

Illinois.

And

what a beautiful April 15th, 1865.

Exactly.

A day which is chiefly going to be notable for us making a lot of money.

Exactly.

Now, the Cairo is at the confluence.

The confluence solid oil JFK incident.

Yeah.

Presidential assassinations really have a way of fucking with people's business, I think.

Yeah, I'm going to find one for like Garfield next.

And McKinley, you know.

McKinley, yeah.

Now, the Cairo is at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

It was notable at this stage of the war for being the end of reliable telegraph services to the north and to the east.

And that's where the Sultana or the crew of the Sultana got the bad news.

President Lincoln had been shot.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

I mean,

we do the whole like Madman Kennedy episode about this and then get back to work, you know?

Yeah, well,

again, this is the end of reliable telegraph service.

Oh, wait.

There's an angle.

There's an angle.

Captain Mason knows what they have to do at this point.

The Sultana took on a shitload of copies of the Caro Democrat, and it's just they go down the river and distribute the newspaper everywhere and let everyone know the bad news or the good news, depending on what town you're in.

Just like having a very like 50-50 set of customer service responses, depending on what town you're in, you know.

Well, they get down.

It's like great, great news, Lincoln Shot.

Terrible news, Lincoln shot.

Yeah.

They get down to Vicksburg, which is right near Camp Fisk, where all the parolees were.

You know, they send out the newspapers, and Camp Fisk nearly devolves into a mutiny and a riot.

Oh.

Everyone's clamoring for the blood of Confederates.

I mean, there's worse things to clamor for, you know?

This is true.

This is true.

It's a sort of delicate situation.

So right at this time, Captain Frederick Speed was drawing up orders to send as many troops back north to St.

Louis as quickly as possible,

which I assume they put him in charge of because of his name.

Yeah.

Captain Speed, cool name.

Captain Speed.

Captain West Coast Trucker Turnarounds.

Just sometimes the surname and rank really kind of

blend together.

Yeah.

Like Sergeant Max Fightmaster.

Yes.

Who was the Native American woman who was Mankiller?

Oh, God, that's a cool name.

That's a cool name, yeah.

Coolest Native American name is still American Horse for my money.

Not sure why it just really appeals to me.

That's pretty good.

Literally, it's like steals white guy's horse.

Good fucking man.

Yeah.

Transportation was to be furnished by the quartermaster department, run by one Colonel Ruben Hatch.

Colonel Hatch, not as good.

Now, Colonel Hatch had spoken with Captain Mason when the Sultana reached Vicksburg.

And this is where it's going to get annoying because we're going to have military ranks interspersed with

civilian captains of boats.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, yeah.

So just remember: Captain Mason,

steamboat captain.

Everyone else, military captain.

Okay.

And we are all in the army because there's no Air Force.

Space Force.

Yeah.

I mean, the Union Navy had some interesting, like, riverine stuff going on.

But

so, anyway, Hatch had spoken with Captain Mason when the Sultana reached Vicksburg.

He may or may not have known that Mason was in financial trouble.

Mason may or may not have known that Hatch was not above a little honest graft.

He's a quartermaster.

A quartermaster at this point, who's not above a little honest graft, is like missing some parts of his brain.

This is true, yeah.

But at any rate, an agreement was reached.

The Sultana would take on a nice, healthy load of 1,400 or so parolees at $2.75 a head at Vicksburg on the way back up from New Orleans.

And Hatch would get, you know, a nice, healthy kickback, right?

Of course.

Theoretically, the Sultana should have had preferential treatment anyway, since it had a government contract for moving men and materials.

But, you know, you can't be too careful.

Sometimes, you know, you got to get that kickback.

You got to give that kickback.

Brings the pot of wheels a bit.

Yeah, exactly.

The remaining trip from Vicksburg to New Orleans and back was done as quickly as possible.

They arrived at April 19th, delivered the bad news to New Orleans, which by this point tosses a like pallet of newspapers off the sides.

It's just like, Lincoln's dead.

Bye.

Sorry.

Bye.

Got to go back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They unloaded and loaded as quickly as possible.

They took on some cargo and some passengers.

Then began steaming back up the Mississippi.

Just after midnight the morning of April 23rd, they had a problem.

Which I've cheerfully illustrated here.

Yes.

There was a minor leak that had developed in the middle Larboard boiler.

Larboard?

Larboard is the old-fashioned way to say port.

Left.

Yeah, exactly.

This was not serious enough to cause a disaster, but a big enough problem that the boiler could not be run at full pressure.

Yes, the kind of the small leak you talked about earlier, Ryan.

Yeah, exactly.

It's kind of like, yeah, it's a little bit of a problem.

We just reduced the pressure.

There's going to be a bunch of steam shooting at it.

You'll be fine, right?

Since the boilers were all interconnected, all the boilers ran at low pressure.

The Sultana limped into Vicksburg around 6 p.m.

that day.

The search for a mechanic was on.

Oh, boy.

A certain R.G.

Taylor was found at 8.45 p.m.

and convinced him.

And therefore, presumably extremely drunk.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean,

you're a boiler mechanic and like 8.45 p.m.

I'm like, yeah, you're seeing.

Why do you think they called a boilermaker?

Yeah, I'm not on on call.

I'm not on call right now.

I sure hope not.

They hadn't invented the pager yet anyway.

Yeah, it wasn't even bad to be drunk at work yet.

You know, they don't even give doctors pages anymore so much?

Like,

I know.

It's like real.

Why would you, but at the same time, kind of a bummer.

Yeah, I think you lose something, you know.

You spend all those years in like medical school or whatever, and now you don't even get a little beeper.

It's just your bullshit regular phone that you get tweets on, you know?

It sucks.

Taylor looked at the leak and he was in disbelief.

And he was like, why didn't you repair that in New Orleans?

And the chief engineer, Winchringer,

replied, There hadn't been a problem in New Orleans.

Yeah, no, no, they stopped to check because they were busy throwing bundles of newspapers at the bottom.

They threw everything off and then, like, had a catapult, you know, to put the cargo and the passengers on.

Shadow bar on one of these things.

Yeah.

It is a very like mechanic thing to be like, why didn't you fix this before it was a problem?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, keep in mind, when they left the Cairo, they had just done an inspection.

So anyway, Taylor was like, I can't do this job in time.

I don't want anything to deal with this, right?

But the engineer caught up with him, persuaded him to come back and give it a go.

This is like stuffing money into his hands.

Yeah.

Taylor worked all night on the repair.

He cut out an 11 by 20 inch section of the boiler, and the big bulge on the boiler from the failure, he tried to just beat back into shape with the hammer, right?

Hit it with a hammer.

Hit it with a hammer until it looks better.

And Winchriger stopped him and he said, that repair is going to take too long.

Just make a temporary repair, rivet some sheet metal on there.

We'll take care of it properly in St.

Louis.

Yeah, hit it with flex type.

Yeah, exactly.

And Taylor was like,

fine, whatever.

He still worked for 20 continuous hours on the repair.

Oh.

Yeah.

He also noticed while he was working that it looked like the boilers had been run with some pretty low water levels,

which can cause damage to it.

We'll get to that later.

You asked me to find an image for a slide about corruption.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is, this is, this is, you're going to get whatever images we have in stock.

In the meantime, Colonel Hatch was using his position.

There's no such image warehouse.

That's right.

Yeah.

Colonel Hatch is using his position as quartermaster to get as many kickbacks from as many steamboat captains as possible, right?

Captain Kearns, whose first name I couldn't find, because that's the irritating thing about books is like at some point they just start referring to people as their last name.

You're like, I have to go find somewhere in the book what his actual name is.

Anyway.

It's the benefits of having a very distinctive first name.

This is true.

Captain Kearns was in charge of river transportation.

He expected to know exactly when any steamboat arrived in Vicksburg so that prisoners could be sent north in an orderly fashion on any boat available.

Owing to the sheer quantity of men to be transported, using non-contract ships was permissible.

This is the guy with an actual logistics job whose boss is mostly a kind of kickbacks guy.

This is a guy with a migraine like every day.

A steamboat called the Arthur, which was owned by the Atlantic and Mississippi Steamboat Line, which did not have a contract with the military,

arrived first.

Lieutenant William Tillinghast did the wheeling and dealing, securing kickbacks for himself and Colonel Hatch.

Unfortunately,

being in the military used to be so cool.

These days, you have to be in like the special forces or the SEALs, the CIA to do this shit.

But back in the day, you could just be like a regular ass like army officer and you would still have to...

Yeah, and just have to negotiate your boss's cut on the like deal of like military movements, you know?

Yeah, you could probably be like a sergeant and still get a kickback back then.

Yeah.

It's a better time in a lot of ways.

Also a much worse one in a lot of more ways.

Kearns wouldn't budge on this.

He knew there was a contract boat coming soon.

So Tillinghaston Hatch devised a stunt to get men on the next Atlantic and Mississippi boat.

The A ⁇ M's Arthur left Vicksburg, but the next boat, the Olive Branch, was not far behind.

Hatch was to inform Captain Speed of the arrival of any steamboat, but after detaining the steamboat overnight, the olive branch, he simply didn't inform Captain Speed.

Oh, good.

Okay.

Captain Speed went down to the waterfront, he saw the olive branch, and he was irritated.

He went to see Colonel Hatch, who said he didn't know anything about the boat.

He didn't detain the boat and suggested maybe Captain Kearns had taken a bribe from the contract line to prevent non-contract boats from transporting freed prisoners.

It's like dueling corruption networks.

Captain Speed was infuriated, ordered every man who was ready to depart depart onto the olive branch and then had captain kearns arrested

this is how the fuck did these guys win the war

now captain kern said he didn't know anything about detaining the olive branch and while this particular kerfuffle was unfolding

in handcuffs just like for what do you tell me for what

Kearns is the only guy actually trying to do his job.

Yeah.

Yeah.

While this particular kerfuffle was unfolding, the Sultana pulled out.

Oh, boy.

You're going to fuck everything up.

Yeah.

Captain Mason of the Sultana learned about the olive branch and he was pissed off.

He went to Colonel Hatch to make sure he made good on his promises.

The Sultana would take on as many prisoners as it could carry.

The big reason for the delay in sending prisoners north was entirely due to bookkeeping, right?

They had to figure out who everyone was and account for all of them.

Captain Mason went to go see Captain Speed.

Speed said at most 300.

There's too many goddamn captains around.

Everyone's a captain.

Everyone's a captain.

It's like the IDF.

Yeah.

I do feel like the sentiment there's too many goddamn captains around here is a kind of like classic of military history going back to the fucking Iliad.

Captain Speed said that at most 300 to 400 men might be accounted for and ready to board the Sultana.

Just getting them from Vicksburg to Vicksburg from Camp Fisk was an ordeal.

There weren't enough trains.

Captain Mason threatened to make a formal complaint that the man in charge of the camp itself, Captain George Augustus Williams,

he was going to make a complaint about Captain Speed to a higher echelon here.

Yeah, they're finally going to find the one major left in the Union Army.

I think there was a general somewhere in town.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But he was like, there's a massive gap in ranks.

Well, it's also a colonel and everyone else is a captain.

There's a weird thing with the Union Army, and I guess a lot of the militaries at this time were they had like a system of brave ranks where you would get like a kind of you'd be like an acting major or whatever for like the duration of hostilities and then get busted down to captain or whatever.

So everybody's like a like a, you know, a brave captain or a brevet major or whatever the fuck.

So it's a huge mess as well.

Gotta imagine there were, you know, a good amount of field promotions as well.

Yeah.

So the man in charge of the camp itself, Captain George Augustus Williams, had an idea.

Why don't we just take the Confederate books, check off the men from there, then finish our books afterwards?

Oh, no, okay.

What if we just take the can down the road?

Thusly, the men could be transported before the formal rolls had been completed.

They still had a problem, though, which was physically moving the men from Camp Fisk to

Vicksburg itself to put on the boat.

Yeah, all of these guys who have been subsisting on like one fistrel of cornmeal a week for like three years or whatever and not walking to the thing.

Turned out to be an advantage.

What?

Colonel Hatch was like, I got it.

I'll supply the trains.

Colonel Hatch supplied the trains and they were a goddamn mess.

Over 2,000 parolees had to be transported in a somewhat orderly fashion from Camp Fisk.

The first train that showed up had three passenger cars and a flat car.

Oh boy.

This seems like it's going to go poorly.

Over about two hours, they crammed about 800 men in there.

At least give me a seat on the flat car.

I think I'd prefer the flat car.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At least you got some affluent.

Like one of those Montreal open-air cars rise like so.

A second train left a little bit later.

It was not expected to show up, but it showed up.

And the engineer was like, hey, we're running low on fuel.

We got to move now.

Fucked.

Yeah.

They crammed another 450 men on that one in three passenger cars and a baggage car.

Oh, my god.

No one knew this train was running.

Then the first train came back and picked up more people.

They took the remaining prisoners.

Boarding the Sultana started as soon as the first train pulled into Vicksburg.

Now, the Sultana was rated for 376 passengers and crew, was now expected to take on around 1,400 paroled prisoners.

1,400 times 2.75

is $3,850.

They're making off of this, which in

like off the top of my head, in $1865 is worth about like $11 trillion now.

Yeah, dude,

no one had accounted for the unexpected other train.

The final number wound up being around 2,000 paroles.

Jesus.

Captain Kearns has already been concerned about overcrowding the Sultana when another boat, the Pauline Carroll, pulled into port.

This was another non-contract boat, and it was also bigger than the Sultana.

And Kearns was like, we should put the overflow on there, we should put them on that boat, right?

It's like $75,000.

Yeah, like,

okay.

So he went to the waterfront and he tried to convince Captain Speed.

And Captain Speed said the roles had already been made up.

It was too late to change them now.

Everyone's going on the Sultana.

Oh, no.

And but Captain Speed still went to go check with Captain Williams, who said he'd been aboard the Sultana.

There's plenty of room.

It's fine.

He had not been on the Sultana.

No.

No, no.

Lieutenant Tillinghast was also concerned with sending so many men on the Sultana because he had arranged another kickback scheme with the captain of the Pauline Carroll.

Now, this guy is just hands are everywhere.

He went to Captain Speed, and Captain Speed said there was plenty of room.

Then Captain Kearns was like, okay, I'm going to go directly to Captain Williams.

He said, there's no room on the Sultana.

This is overcrowded.

This is a problem.

But Kearns was still under suspicion of taking bribes from the various steamboat captains arriving in Vicksburg.

And Williams, like, no, they all go on the Sultana, and you're going to hear about this later.

Jesus.

The one guy who is maybe not corrupt here.

I'm not taking bribes.

You're taking bribes.

Fuck you.

Yeah, why are you so obsessed with bribes all of a sudden?

Is it because you're taking bribes?

Are you taking bribes?

You think you're taking bribes?

Because Ben will be fine on that boat.

Don't worry.

No one involved here actually went to observe the loading process or how crowded the sultana actually was, except I could think of Captain Kearns.

Now, very late at night, as the column of men from the third train was marching into the Sultana, there was a revolt.

These men who had seen the horrors of Andersonville prison were anxious to get home to better conditions.

could not bear the crowding on the Sultana.

They refused to be crammed in like hogs.

They wanted to get on the Pauline Carroll.

So some some unknown officer told them, the Pauline Carroll is quarantined due to a smallpox outbreak.

These fucking assholes.

So reluctantly, they boarded the Sultana.

And the scene on board was ugly.

Not as ugly as Andersonville, but pretty bad.

Men had no room to sit or lie down.

They were packed on every available surface, including roofs.

They had to install temporary posts.

between the decks to bear the weight of the men, but there were still like sagging floors.

Jesus.

Men were standing on crates.

They were in the livestock stalls.

There was one person who even took up a berth on top of a coffin that was being shipped.

Oh, two for one.

Yeah, exactly.

There were some regular passengers on board.

They were essentially confined to their staterooms because the men were too thick to navigate through.

Been there.

Yeah.

No, I haven't.

It's worse than Friday night.

A little after 9 p.m.

on April 24th, 1865, the Sultana left Vicksburg dangerously overloaded, and it was miserable.

Jesus.

Now, they had provided rations for the men, but the men couldn't get to them.

There was one stove available between the 1900 odd parolees.

They could also get hot water from the boilers, which was used for coffee and boiling the meat in their rations.

Delicious.

Most people couldn't even reach the stove or the boiler, so they resorted to eating only hardtack and drinking directly from the river.

Tasty.

Since there was a whole extra train load of men who had not been accounted for, of course, insufficient rations had been supplied.

A lot of men went without eating at all.

This was, however, a journey of only a few days.

Frankly, it's still better than Andersonville.

Yeah, and you're on your way home.

Yeah.

There was very little to do on the Sultana.

It was a slow journey.

The only real entertainment was, you know, you pass a town or a settlement or a village or something, or you see another boat.

As a result, you know, know, the prolees would crowd to the side of the boat whenever another steamboat passed.

And of course, that made it list significantly.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sultana carried a significant load of sugar below deck, but it was still extremely top-heavy because humans are big bags of water and meat.

That's a bit heavier.

Right.

This was somewhat lessened at night when everyone was asleep, but still occurred whenever the boat turned.

What's more, navigation was more difficult than usual because the Mississippi was experiencing a massive spring flood.

All the stuff we talked about about how it's a new river every time it floods.

It's extremely dangerous and like unmarked and uncharted.

At some points, the river was as much as three miles wide, bank to bank.

Jesus.

Captain Mason was actually terrified of the heavy load, which he had not expected or wanted.

He was like, I'm going to take a regular number of prisoners on it.

His whatever fageled into some quartermaster bullshit.

Exactly.

as a foot to ease his anxiety he turned to drinking yeah i would say

fair enough oh god he's in charge of the boat but he's not he's not driving the boat that's the pilot's job right the pilot uh the pilot is in charge of you know driving the boat on the mississippi the captain is just operating right

um but you know he spent probably more time than prudent at the ship's bar apparently somehow he he never appeared intoxicated.

Okay.

Just like wedged in by like dudes on every side, just like knocking back whiskey.

Yeah.

So I think during the day they managed to clear out the saloon and then at night they brought out cots for the officers.

Still, you got to maintain that like,

you know, privileges of rank, right?

This is true.

Yeah.

But there's a bunch of eyewitness accounts of people saying, man, Captain Mason was drinking a lot.

Just Just never getting drunk.

Yeah, like grimly remaining completely sober externally as you're like on your like fifth bottle of whiskey.

They're like rolling around your feet, and you're just like staring at a fixed point on the wall opposite, just like consumed with absolute terror.

Yeah, that's that's like me on the airplane.

Um, who's like too scared to get drunk?

That's Ross, baby.

Yeah.

The morning of April 26th, they reach Helena, Arkansas, where this photo was taken.

It looks bad.

Yeah, I'm just thinking about all the adrenaline just like punching the alcohol right back out of your blood.

A man on board spotted the camera, and this being a novelty at the time, told everyone, hey, we're getting our picture taken.

And everyone crowded on the side of the boat to get in the shot.

and nearly capsized the thing.

That's why there's only smoke coming out of one funnel.

Kids these days on the the damn daguerreotypes, you know.

Yeah.

Captain Mason had to issue orders to the officers on board.

Hey, get out there and get your men to redistribute themselves.

Balance is not good.

Balance, you dumb idiots.

We're going to trim this thing if it kills us.

Yeah.

It's like

the Gram, the Instagram is less important here, please.

Okay, so we have to talk a bit about steam engine operational theory in 1865.

Thermodynamics is still in its infancy.

Concepts like enthalpy are not well understood.

Enthalpy is sort of the embodied energy in a substance at different temperatures and pressures.

It was definitely not understood by people who had to actually operate boilers.

It was thought at the time a boiler was operating most efficiently when it was dry, right?

Because they thought the energy was contained in the steam and not in the water, when in fact the reverse is true.

We didn't figure that out for a few decades.

You want your steam boiler to be extremely wet, right?

I want it to be wet.

It's got to be wet.

They were only operating it moist.

Yeah.

So if you were in a situation where you want to get to port quickly, fighting a strong current with an overloaded boat, you'd want to run the boilers as dry as possible to get there fast.

This is like saying essentially, it's like received wisdom at the time, totally understood that I'm trying to get here faster, so I need to drive with a handbrake on.

Yeah.

Sure.

This is all complete horseshit that people believed at the time.

You can tell it's working because the car's much noisier now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But we're oppressing the girls for the handbrake turns.

It's like, well, I need more energy density for my two-stroke engine, so I'm going to put less oil in the mix.

Oh, 1940 sob.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In fact, a relatively full boiler has a lot more energy stored and is going to run exactly as, if not more efficiently, than a dry boiler.

Generally, it's better to have more water than less.

So Sultana was being run fairly dry.

Her boilers were configured four across.

Okay, I'm going to draw a diagram here.

Here's the boiler.

Here's the boiler.

Here's the boiler.

Here's the boiler.

Underneath there's a pipe, right?

And the pipe is supplying water.

I don't know if the pipe is supplying water.

I think it just might be connected that way.

Since there's pressure, there's probably some kind of Venturi device that's the injector.

I don't know how they did it in 1865.

They might not have had those yet.

Anyway,

there's a pipe that connects each boiler together, right?

And then on top of that, there's another set of pipes, right?

Okay, like that.

The steam goes out and that goes to the piston engines, right?

So these are configured across the boat, right?

So, you know, if we look at the hull, it's like this.

We're looking straight on towards the bow.

So essentially, whenever the boat lists, because the boilers are all interconnected, the water level in each one lists with it.

Oh, boy.

So you have.

It's a free surface effect again.

Yeah.

You have exposed tubes on one side, and they're all submerged.

on the other side.

Then it lists the other way.

You got exposed tubes on one side, submerged tubes on the other side.

You are are rapidly thermally cycling these boilers.

You also have buildup of silt and, you know, so on and so forth, right?

So, you know, each time all the men ran over to the side of the boat to look at a bird,

this thermal cycle was occurring.

And every time it sloshed back into an empty boiler, some amount of that water flashed directly into steam.

It caused, you know, this pressure buildup just over and over again.

One of these these boilers has essentially a sheet of like

metal riveted over a big leak in it, right?

Yes, one of them, one of them has a patch.

There's a lot of dispute as to whether the patch actually contributed, though.

But we'll get to that in a bit.

It certainly would be very funny if the whole goddamn thing explodes and they just find the piece of effectively like duct tape still completely fine, like uncompromised.

Yeah, so this is certainly enough to severely fatigue the boilers.

There's another set of issues here.

Back in the day, I mean, there were some inspections on steamboats, but not enough that, like, are the steam pressure gauges properly calibrated?

Do the safety valves work as they should at the pressures they're supposed to?

So on and so forth.

I mean, the fact that the fact that the captain was ordering the boat to go so fast up a strong current strongly implies that these boilers are being run over their rated pressure, which I believe was 135 psi.

So the Sultana got to Memphis, Tennessee at 7 p.m., April 26th, and offloaded some men and cargo, including all the sugar that had been acting as ballast.

Oh, no.

Oh, Jesus.

Okay.

Then set off again about one o'clock in the morning.

Now, it's relatively calm at this point.

Everyone's asleep.

The boat is just humming along as usual when

boom.

Oh, yeah.

I found in the course of looking for images of these in illustration, which has dudes being like blown up out of the boat in a little cartoon form.

Yes.

At 2 a.m.

in the morning, April 27th, 1865.

Just say 2 a.m., you motherfucker.

We don't know what order the boilers blew up.

One of them blew up first.

Two other boilers blew up with it.

The third, the fourth boiler was fine.

Yeah.

It's a margin of safety, you know?

Yeah.

The explosion instantly destroys the pilot house, right?

Where the pilot was sitting, and there any way you could control the boat, kills most of the crew instantly because it destroys the entire

Texas deck where the crew compartments were.

Yeah, where Texas was.

Yeah.

What isn't immediately destroyed in the explosion, there's then a cloud of superheated steam that scalds everyone to death in the immediate vicinity.

No thanks.

Yelch.

And then there's a massive

conflagration on this wooden boat.

Oh.

The decks that weren't immediately destroyed started sagging directly into the middle of the Inferno.

So a bunch of people just slid into the fire.

One of the smokestacks fell backward,

which crushed the remnants of the pilot house.

And the other one fell forward, which crushed the hurricane deck and caused it to collapse onto the deck below.

There's like six different horrible ways you could die here instantly or almost instantly.

If you read the book, there's a full three chapters with like a hundred

survivors accounts,

each one more horrific than the last one.

I only picked a couple.

So yeah, the boat's in a pretty bad way at this point, very rapidly.

No one's in charge.

Captain Mason is still like alive,

but it's very difficult to get control of anything, right?

Well, he's still in the bar remaining resolutely sober.

I think he was even cast sober.

I believe he is actually hungover at this point.

Yeah, there's no crew, no propulsion, no nothing, just a burning Hulk full of whatever is left of about 2,100 people.

Yeah, Captain Mason is like trying to figure out what happened.

He's not able to maintain order.

Lots of soldiers, though, lots of the parolees were so tired they slept through the initial explosion, but were quickly woken up by those who had hurt.

Everything was on fire, and the flooded Mississippi spread out for miles on every side.

Yeah, how do you feel about swimming a mile and a half through like

silty water

on no notice?

And also, you've been like half-starved for several years.

Yes, that is the situation people find themselves in.

And then the passengers are also not in a great way because,

you know, that women's clothing at this time does not do well with water.

No.

Or fire.

Yes.

Yeah, you get a dual problem here.

Pick your poison.

Yeah.

So exactly what you do in this situation is a difficult question.

The Mississippi was cold as hell.

Everyone was weak from being in Andersonville.

The boat was on fire.

There were not very many life preservers and certainly no lifeboats.

The current was very strong.

It's 1865, so no one can swim.

Everyone was panicking.

The whole boat was one huge human stampede.

Now, the river is very busy, and rescue was close at hand, but not close enough.

I mean, this is a kind of 9-11 level of like helplessness, right?

Yes.

Yeah, you're fucked.

If you're in this situation, it's not good.

No, you're going down.

Some men managed to hold on to debris from the boat.

Some men cling to the rudder.

Many found themselves kicking off other drowning men trying to steal their piece of flotsam or jetsam.

Many of these men were severely injured or ill before the explosion.

Many others became severely injured in the process of the explosion.

There's a lot of accounts.

Injury, not service-related, write it off.

Yeah, write it off.

Yeah.

There's a lot of accounts in the book, as I said.

Most of them are pretty grim.

Some people managed to survive by clinging to the treetops in the flooded river.

A lot of people started ripping up the boat for pieces of the boat they could float on.

Because, hey, one advantage of a wooden boat is wood floats.

Now, Captain Mason comes out on deck.

He tries to calm the men on the bow.

He said the sultana would soon soon ground itself on a sandbank.

They'd be able to jump into the shallower waters.

That was a lie, and no one believed him.

Pretty impressive to even come up with a lie under the circumstances.

I was about to say.

Nevertheless, he did his best to make it right.

He spent the rest of his life hurling various pieces of the debris, furniture, crates, anything that floated overboard for the passengers and parolees to cling to.

And no one's entirely sure how or when he died.

Now, in the water, there's this sort of usual general panic that accompanies these kinds of maritime disasters, but also a new one.

Where's that alligator?

Oh, fuck.

Check off alligator.

The pet turns on them in their moment of need.

So, a lot of people who could swim to safety, or could at least attempt to, they didn't for fear of attracting the alligator's attention.

I mean, it's a target-rich environment, man, and they mostly like stuff that's already dead.

You just gotta strike.

Yeah,

I think you're fine.

I think this is one of the only times you could outswim an alligator with any degree of confidence.

At least one group of men clinging to a log were terrified when a horse that had fallen off the boat poked its head above water.

All of them let go of the log, which the horse then lent its head on and floated away.

Thanks.

Okay.

Just mistaken identity.

Yeah.

They needn't have worried about the alligator, though.

Private William Luggenbiel of Company F, 135th Ohio Infantry, saw an opportunity to save himself at the expense of one seven and a half foot alligator

who had also survived the explosion.

He found a crate, bayoneted the alligator.

Hold on a fucking minute.

There's a level this guy is operating on that extends far beyond the bayonet as a weapon designed to kill the enemy, right?

This is the thing about the Civil War, maybe like all human conflict, right?

Is that it contains such things as like corn-fed German name Ohio and bayonetting a fucking alligator.

Yeah.

Then he threw the crate in the water and jumped in after it.

How cool are you going to feel in the second after you've bayoneted an alligator?

Pretty good.

If you get out of this, like you're never buying your own drinks again, surely.

He missed.

Oh,

probably thrown off by the whole bayoneting and alligator thing.

Well, he eventually caught up to the crate and survived and floated away down to Memphis, but he had to do it by kicking off several other men who then drowned.

Steamboat Bostona 2 showed up around 3 o'clock in the morning, saw the conflagration, slowed to a crawl, dumped bales of hay into the water, and sent out ropes for those strong enough to take hold.

They also dispatched their small boat to go pick up survivors.

But that was the first rescue, and the later rescues took longer because word didn't reach Memphis for at least an hour when some men clinging to debris finally floated on by.

Yeah, you just use on the dock, and the guy floats past.

It's like, I bayoneted a fucking alligator.

Yeah, I bayoneted an alligator.

Also, you should probably go help those people.

Yeah, please.

They sent out the ironclad USS Essex upriver, trying to rescue as many survivors as possible as they went.

There was also a gunboat called the Tyler that was closer, but it had been disabled somehow, right?

They sent out some small boats to try and rescue men as they floated by, but darkness and fog were hampering operations.

The entire town of Memphis came out to the docks to distribute supplies, make fires, and send out small boats to search for men in the river.

Several steamboats were dispatched to the location of the wreck, but, you know, essentially by the time they got there, anyone was dead or floating downriver at that point.

Um, and the burning hulk of the sultana drifted about six miles and then sank on what was normally dry land.

Jesus, this is a grim one.

I mean, all the boat ones have been.

We've never had like even

a cheerful boat one.

Nothing good happens on boats.

Well, sometimes you reach your destination.

Not on this show, you don't.

No, that's true.

That's true.

Never going to do a

boat.

Here's an episode about a routine boat voyage there.

Nothing bad happened.

Nope.

Not on this show, goddammit.

So this is very bad.

You know, there's not much else to say about it.

What ultimately comes out of this?

Well, the death toll is unknown.

It's always going to be imprecise.

Especially with the bookkeeping on the fucking Vicksburg end, you know?

Yes.

Likely about 1,587 of the more than 2,100 2,100 passengers and parolees died.

No definite cause was ever determined.

It was likely a combination of factors, overloading, fast running, bad repairs, bad maintenance, poor materials, though they were, again, using one of the best materials at the time, which was charcoal hammered number one, which, again, I assume it's a kind of wrought iron.

Very soon after two more boiler explosions,

the fire tube boiler design was retired on the Mississippi.

They went back to the old boilers for a while, and then I assume they went to newer marine boiler designs

because I guess fire tube is just not suited for this application.

But a lot of times, since you got more space, you can use more advanced designs than that.

Captain Frederick Speed was court-martialed, found guilty.

Then the verdict was overturned since he never actually saw how overcrowded the Sultana was.

Okay.

Colonel Hatch left the service before he could be court-martialed.

God, it's like being a cult.

Yeah.

Captain Mason was dead.

There were a lot of conspiracies afterwards about Confederate sabotage.

At least a few people who claimed to have done it, you know, by putting some kind of bomb disguised as a piece of coal in there

or a log disguised as a piece of coal with a bomb in it.

I don't know.

You're fully in like a sort of Confederate spy paranoia because they did just assassinate the president.

This is true.

Yeah.

And I imagine it probably overshadows it quite a lot in terms of the press that the

president was assassinated day before.

Yeah,

this was not well reported on at the time

because, yeah, the president was just assassinated.

November, you put this memorial in Knoxville up.

There's actually like half a dozen of these.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Little kind of, I think is the most architecturally interesting ones.

I like the little like

obelisk on top of it.

All the others are just kind of like regular stones, you know.

The remnants of the sultana were found in 1982 under a soybean field two miles east of the current channel of the Mississippi.

Hydrology is so fucking weird.

Yeah.

Doing the like where do Skyrim's rivers come from video, but about like uh where does the Mississippi come from?

Yeah.

uh fuck you

yeah yeah uh ask lewis and clark oh wait they're dead so no one knows anymore oh well

google source of the mississippi probably yeah probably

well that'd be late

in northern minnesota yes okay well that was the story of the sultana Relentlessly depressing start to finish.

So great.

Why is every boat what we do the grimmest episode we've ever done?

Briefly, then lie.

There was some good graft.

I thought that was fun.

I agree with graft.

Yeah, I do.

I do love that.

I like our corruption-heavy episodes.

Oh, yeah, always.

And I, of course, I always appreciate an alligator being bayoneted to death.

Yeah.

Poor guy.

He didn't do anything wrong.

No, he just

a single desperate womp for that alligator.

You know, he lived in a creep

for like a year, and then he got bayoneted.

Yeah, that's not fair.

There you go.

I can also do the word womp in the TikTok text-to-speech voice.

Domp.

Womp.

Wow.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Woke on it.

Fuck.

Shake you into danger.

Dear Justin, November, yay, Liam, and guest, if applicable.

No.

This is wrong.

This safety third comes from a country which some say does not exist and is a conspiracy.

Australia.

Yeah.

Wow.

These are some fascinating photos.

Yeah, right.

I used to work for General Bull Mouse and his car factory, which made cars with lion badges on them in Elizabeth, South Australia.

My job was as an electrical engineer, which mostly involved programming robots so they could make various parts and pieces that went into cars.

After the treasurer of my country yelled at the automakers in 2013, all three big automakers announced they would be shutting down their plants within three years.

This to me is Dank Pod's garbage time law.

At the end of 2016, and after we had made our last VF Commodore, we were then tasked with the

Jove.

The job.

The job.

Tasked with the Jove.

The task with the job of dismantling all of the plant and machinery so that the site could be turned into a brown field.

Delicious.

I was asked to write a procedure on how to dismantle a stamping press, which is cute

to stamp things like frame parts and panels.

As we see here, all these beautiful, beautiful Holden Ute

panels.

You can make a Ute, and then you can't make utes anymore.

These are utes on a rack.

When you take them off the rack, you're racking off me fucking you.

The way a stamping press works is that the plates of steel go in, the stamping head pushes down with many fuctopascals of pressure, so the steel is curved and shaped.

I want to hear this in the original accent desperately.

I'm not good at Australian accents.

No.

Yeah.

And then can be sent off to be trimmed further and welded into unibodies and so on.

Hydraulic rounds, which push down with so many fuctopascals of pressure, very much want to release that pressure in a swift hurry.

I wrote my procedure before disconnecting the control circuits and the power, and then I was sent off elsewhere to decommission another part of the plant.

Sad job.

Yeah.

On this particular day, when I was close by in a welding shop which housed many robots, I heard what could be best described as being similar to a single shot from an Abrams M1 battle tank.

So I left what I was doing and ran into the adjacent building.

What I saw was one of the hydraulic rams buried in the passenger door of an Isuzu 550 truck

after it had already gone clean through a brand new Commodore with all the doors closed.

There was also a second hole in a concrete wall roughly nine meters from ground level.

Australia the first country to make a practical rail gun and all it took was closing a car factory.

And one poor sacrificial Asuzu.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And a Commodore.

And a Commodore.

Apparently the people dismantling the story died in battle.

It's going to Valhalla.

Yes.

Apparently the people dismantling the stamping press had thought it unnecessary to follow the procedure which I had written and had failed to depressurize the hydraulic rams before knocking out the shims that held them in place.

Jesus Christ on sale.

The moral to the story is that when someone writes a procedure manual, then you would do well to at least read the procedure manual.

If that manual contains the word fuctopascals or other obscene made-up units of measurement, such as a metric fucton, then it is because someone who does not know you would prefer it if you did not turn into chunky marinara.

Thank you from EE7529.

Well, thank you for bringing the first railgun to market.

Yeah, congratulations, Aloner 60.

Yeah, you outpaced DARPA, you know.

P.S., the Chevy SS, was the best car ever sold in America because it was built by people who live in a place where everything is trying to kill you, and not just the animals and plants, but the dirt too.

Remember, Wittenum.

Oh, yeah,

that's the town that was all asbestos mine, right?

Oh, right.

Yeah, that one.

That one, yeah.

There's a similar one, Times Beach in the United States.

Although that was benzene.

Oh,

old friend of the show, benzene.

Oh, yeah.

Least favorite chemical of the show.

We should do both of those episodes sometime soon.

Oh, that's a good idea.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, remember to take the pressure off a hydraulic ram before you decommission it.

A lot of sort of pressure-related accidents this week.

Delta P.

You know, when it gets you, it gets you.

Well, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

No, because by the time this comes out, we will have already done the Kill James Bond live shows.

You've missed your chance to come and see us.

Yeah, you're right.

Unfortunately, it's a great shame.

You just have to, you know, remain vigilant for the next ones.

Well, you have to go back in time and fight the Civil War.

That'll be too early.

Yeah, then that's not going to work.

You gotta recalibrate your time machine, yeah.

You donate to my friends, go fund me.

Um, yeah, donate to other good things, also, yeah, yeah.

Um, and uh, yeah, I mean, if you go back in time to fight the civil war, remember to be on the good side, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's key.

Supposed to be fighting against slavery, not for it.

Yes, yeah, the good guys wear blue, all right, yeah.

Well,

bye, everybody.

Yeah, bye.

Don't get sent to Andersonville.

No, don't do that.