"Greed blinds and fools a man, and makes him an easy target for destruction."

The captives who had been released post - civil war boarded the Sultana riverboat to return to their homes. Around 2:00 a.m. that night, an explosion occurred, followed by two more explosions, and the steamboat sank. This catastrophe claimed the lives of even more people than the Titanic disaster. Although this incident is not well-known, it was tragic enough to startle you.

The civil war has come to an end, and peace has returned. Soldiers who'd been imprisoned as war prisoners were being freed. The US government paid the ship captains $5 per soldier and $10 per officer to return them to their respective zones. Many captains showed interest in the deal, but one of them crossed all the limits of greed. . Captain James Mason, the captain of the Sultana steamboat, developed for the Mississippi cotton trade. It weighed 1719 tonnes and was 260 feet in length. It sailed for over two years from St. Louis to New Orleans.

When the captain heard about the deal, he was delighted.  the value of the $5 was equal to $150 of today., As a result, the captain agreed to the offer. A mechanic informed him that one of the boilers had a problem and required immediate repair, but the captain was unwilling to invest his time and money. The first blunder was the mechanic's temporary patch for the boiler. The second was to overload the vessel. As we all know, it was a commercial ship with a capacity of only 376 people, but due to the captain's selfishness, 2137 people sat in this boat. When government officials questioned him about the same he bribed them for profit.

Sultana was on her way to its destination on April 24, 1865, with 1907 war prisoners, 22 guards, 70 cabin passengers, and 85 crew members. The captives were hopeful that the boat would carry them home. The boat arrived in Memphis port at 7 p.m., when it unloaded 120 tonnes of sugar and 200 passengers.  These 200 were the lucky ones as The dance of death was just about to begin. Sultana has been travelling for two days on the Mississippi River through a terrible storm.

On April 27, 1865, at around 2 a.m., the temporary boiler exploded, killing 100 persons on the spot! After then, the other two boilers blew up at the same time, killing the ship's pilots. Most of them were set on fire and burnt to death. Some of them jumped into the water, but the most of them drowned, with only a few being rescued by the rescue squad. This catastrophe claimed the lives of 1547 people, however the exact number is uncertain. The most perplexing aspect is that the captain's body is still to be discovered.

The Titanic had a total of 1517 passengers and crew members. Soldiers who were looking forward to returning home had to bid farewell to this world for one reason only because of one man's greed.

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