TITLE: Sultana
NAME: Michael Hunter
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: intertek@one.net
WEBPAGE: http://www.interactivetechnologies.net
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: sultana.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    3D Studio Max Version 7.0

TOOLS USED: 
    3D Studio Max, PhotoShop (for texture maps)

RENDER TIME: 
    22 Minutes @ 1600 x 1200

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium 4 1.8 GHz 256 MB RAM



IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Vicksburg was a frustrating mess for the Captain James Cass Mason. He was being
harassed by a know-it-all boilermaker. One of the four boilers had started to
bulge and steam was poring out of it. R.G. Taylor said he'd fix everything that
needed to be fixed or he'd fix nothing. The Captain reassured him that all of
the repairs would be made, just not at Vicksburg. Mason promised to finish the
repairs once in St. Louis. Taylor reluctantly agreed to do minimal repairs.(1)
Still it would take 20 hours to complete, and somehow Mason needed to convince
the Army to load up his boat with released Union prisoners. Competing boats
were already there and ready to go.
 
At $5 a head for enlisted solders and twice that for officers, the Sultana could
pull in a princely sum if Mason could fill the boat. Being forced by financial
hard times to sell off all but 1/16 of his shares in the boat it was vital to
make a killing. Mason struck a deal with army Captain Ruben Hatch that the
Sultana would be paid $4000 less than stated in the contract (the difference
going to Hatch). In return Mason was guaranteed as many men as could fit on the
boat.(2) Meanwhile other boats such as the Lady Gay sailed off without one
prisoner. Thanks to the deal with Captain Hatch they loaded 2100 Union soldiers
on board (six times her legal limit).<3>

The Sultana also took on board that night, 12 Sisters of Charity, the Chicago
Opera Troupe, 100 civilian passengers(4), 60 horses and mules, 100 hogs(5), at
least one cow and a ten foot long alligator (the ship's mascot).

Sergeant Rober Talkington grabbed the only spot not taken - the top of a Union
officer's coffin headed to the north for burial. He joked as he stretched out
with his knapsack for a pillow that "he was going to hold that officer down the
rest of the night."<6>

Pvt. George Downing was enjoying the sights of Memphis and didn't hear the
steamboat whistle (or couldn't get back in time). The boat had left the Memphis
dock and worked its way across the badly flooded Mississippi to pick up a load
of coal on the opposite bank. Officially still part of the Union Army, he was
now "A.W.O.L." (Absent Without Leave). But Downing was lucky to have some money
sent to him from home. He found a man with a skiff and paid him two dollars to
row him back to his steamboat. Without that money he would have no alternative
but to watch his ride home slowly paddle away as some other stranded men did.

Downing rejoined the mob of emaciated and weak soldiers just in front of the
Sultana's wheel housing and said, "If I had not sent home for that money I
would have been left".(7) He settled down and quickly went to sleep.

Some of his fellow travelers fought at truly monumental battles such as
Gettysburg. These soldiers were captured by the Confederates and neglected in
deplorable concentration camps in the South.<8> But in spite of the past, their
ailments and the crowded conditions they were in great spirits because now the
war was over and they were finally on their way home.

Just after midnight, Captain Mason retired for the evening, leaving Chief Mate
Rowberry in charge. The boat eased out into the river channel. There was a
light drizzle. The river ran much faster now flooded with the melting snow from
the North. They proceeded upstream about 9 to 10 miles per hour against the
heavy current. Pvt Chester D. Berry sang "Sweet Hour of Prayer" from a hymn
book given to him by one of the Sisters of Charity.<9> With most of the men
asleep it must have been very peaceful.

William H. Woodridge was awakened in this mother's house at 2 o'clock in the
morning by a loud explosion. "It rolled and re-echoed for minutes in the
woodlands". Running to the front porch he could see a burning boat a mile down
river near the Hen and Chicken islands. It was the Sultana. "The flame was
shooting far up into the sky. It was so light I could have picked up a pin."
(10)

Three of the boat's four had boilers exploded with earth shattering force. The
blast ripped a huge hole through all of the decks (including the pilot house)
and on up into the night sky. Men were blown 50 feet into the air, some landing
in water some landing back on the boat. Red hot metal and coals from the
furnace were blasted through the pine boat sending splinters everywhere while
setting the middle of the ship on fire. The support for the two exceptionally
tall smoke stacks were now gone. The two stacks twisted, breaking the ties that
held them together. Like two great trees, one fell backward crushing the
remains of the pilothouse while the other fell forward collapsing the front
portion of the hurricane deck. Many of those who were not killed by the
explosion were now crushed or pinned down in burning wreckage.

Some people woke to find themselves in the water quite far from the boat.
Several of them said they did not hear the explosion even though it was heard
in Memphis seven miles away. It takes quite a spectacle to make men who can not
swim (or to weak to swim) jump into the dark swirling waters of the flooded
Mississippi but they did by the hundreds. Cpl. Simon D. Chelf was about to jump
from the boat but found the water filled with struggling men. He said, "I
believe I saw 150 or 200 men sink at once" (11) They drowned just feet away
from other men burning. Pvt. Thomas Pangle wrote, "So cold was the water...
that I soon became powerless to swim, and determined to climb up on the deck of
the steamer." (12)

Pvt. John F. Hartman had grown a long beard in prison. A drowning soldier
grabbed it and they both drowned together. (13)

Pvt. John Lowery Walker said, "Never in my life have I witnessed such a struggle
as there took place...I thought the sights on the battle-fields terrible, and
they were, but they were not to be compared with the sights of that night when
the animal nature of man came to the surface in the desperate struggle to save
himself regardless of the life of others." (14)

For 30 minutes after the explosion Pvt. Commodore Smith assisted others in the
water by throwing to them anything that could float. "The wounded begged us to
throw them overboard, choosing to drown instead of being roasted to death."
Smith described it as "the most heart-rendering task that human beings could be
called upon to perform - that of throwing overboard, into the jaws of certain
death by drowning, those comrades who were unable... to help them selves." Some
were so badly burned that the flesh fell from their bones. He never forgot "the
gurgling sounds  and  the dying groans' and seeing the injured men 'writhing in
the water and finally... sink to rise no more.'"(15)

Pvt. William Lugenbeal could not swim. Looking for something - anything - that
floats he remembered seeing a large wooden cage used on the boat to store the
alligator. He broke the lock to the storage room under the main stairs,
bayoneted the unfortunate animal and emptied him onto the deck. He went into
the water with the wooden cage. He climbed inside and paddled with his hands
and feet. He wrote later of the incident: "When a man would get close enough, I
would kick him off, then turn as quick as I could and kick someone else to keep
them from getting hold of me... if they had got hold of me we would both have
drowned".(16)

Captain Mason did all he could for others. "His dream of the 'greatest trip'
ever made on Western waters was suddenly a nightmare... Now, during the last
minutes of his beloved Sultana, as she burned around him, he worked to redeem
his wrongs."(17)

Being the boat's mascot, the ten foot "man-eating" alligator was known to most
of the passengers. Not knowing that the poor dead creature was being roasted in
the embers of their boat, many men floating in the dark waters imagined the
worst whenever they heard splashing behind them. Several men were clinging to a
knot of driftwood when a large head immerged from the waters. It flopped down
on the wood and not one man argued for ownership as they abandoned their
floatation in haste. The fearful head belonged to one of the horses carried by
the boat.(18) Ira B. Horner wrote "Although I felt that I would not drown, at
the same time I did not feel comfortable from the fact that there was an
alligator... keeping me company."(19)

The Bostona II was on its madden voyage from Cincinnati. It was the first boat
to arrive at the scene about an hour after the explosion. The crew and
passengers immediately and with great heroism assisted those in the water. Mr.
Deson, a passenger from Louisiana, risked his own life when he jumped into the
water with the panicked soldiers. He was able to save eight lives. Ropes were
thrown into the water to drag back those who could cling on. The crew lowered a
rowboat and fished out 4-9 people in each trip. Crew and passengers threw
chairs and anything else that would float into the water. But there came a
time, with the boat loaded with nearly dying men, that the captain, John T.
Watson, made the difficult call to take those rescued to medical facilities in
Memphis. Doing so condemned many, still in the water, to certain death. Their
heroic efforts saved 150 lives.(20)

By dawn, the men women and children who had not found their way out of the water
were dead. The uniforms became exceptionally heavy when saturated with water.
Most men preferred to relieve themselves of this burden and were swimming nude
or near nude. Now naked men were in the trees that lined both sides of the
flooded riverbanks and were being attacked by flies. The Sultana, still on
fire, had burned off it's wheels and decks. It had hit a snag by Chicken
Island. There were still 25 live men on the boat who were rescued by John
Fogelman and two of his sons. The Fogelmans saved the last men before the
Sultana sank in a cloud of steam. The 25 men were cared for at the Fogelmans'
home.(21)

The morning seemed to bring new hope to the wet naked men in the trees. They
began to sing. Some conscience of the oddity of their circumstances whistled
like birds perched in trees. Some, stranded on large rocks, brought cries of
laughter from their companions by mimicking frogs.(22)

The last boat of survivors landed in Memphis at 11:30 AM. The Memphis riverfront
was a mass of naked, burned and exhausted men. Assessing them were ladies of
the Sanitary Commission and Sisters of Charity who washed and clothed the men.
They were then transported by carriage to various hospitals.(23) Two hundred
survivors later died from their wounds and exposure. Most of the soldiers are
now buried with head stones that read "Unknown U.S. Soldier" in Memphis'
National Military Cemetery.(24)

The grim cleanup of bodies after the disaster took weeks. They were found more
than 200 miles south of the explosion in Vicksburg - where they started their
trip. The Pauline Carroll sighted "the body of a woman with a child in her arms
floating in the Mississippi" a week after the disaster.(25) Many of the bodies
were being pecked at by birds or eaten by other animals. The engineer of the
U.S.S. Vindicator said, "I wish to say that the most horrible sight I saw
during the whole service... was  when cleaning the wheels after the Sultana
disaster we would find them clogged with dead bodies."(25)

In spite of a $200 reward, Captain Mason's body was never recovered.(26) It is
assumed he died assisting others at the stern of the Sultana.(27)

No one is certain of the cause of the horrific explosion that killed 1700 on
April 27, 1865. Some say that a southern saboteur named Robert Lowden put a
bomb disguised as a lump of coal in the coal bunker of the boat.(28) The
official explanation however, mainly pointed to a mechanical failure with one
of the boilers.(29) Certainly the weakened condition of the men coupled with
the rapidly flowing, frigid water contributed greatly to the magnitude of the
loss.

The large newspapers of the day, such as the New York Times, had little space
for the death of mid-western farmers' boys in the light of the assassination of
Lincoln, the death of Booth, Lee's surrender, and other major stories. If they
had been wealthy passengers, or if it happened in New York, the Sultana
disaster would have been page one material.(30) A bitter survivor, James H.
Kimberlin wrote of those who suffered immeasurably "to be so soon forgotten
does not speak well for our government or the American people."(31)

Congress rejected requests from victims' families to erect a monument. They also
required eyewitness testimony of one officer or two enlisted men to verify any
injury received for the purpose of pensions. This, most survivors were unable
to supply.(32)

More people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic making it the worst maritime
disaster in U.S. History. The disaster killed three times as many as the
world's worst single plane crash.<33> There were more deaths on the Sultana
than those U.S. troops killed in Iraq.(34) They had survived a war that cost
over 620,000 lives to die going home. And then they were forgotten. 


EVOLUTION OF CONCEPT
I was looking for catastrophes on the Internet. It became obvious that there
were thousands of worthy disasters to choose from for this competition. I
picked the Sultana because it was the worst maritime disaster but is not that
widely known. So I hoped that I could tell a good story.

My first goal was to get as many photos of the boat as possible. There were
exactly four photos taken of the boat. Three I've seen. There are a number of
drawings done after the fact, but they contradict each other. Without knowing
what the boat looked like I thought about changing topics but then I ran across
a hopeful sign. This boat was made not ten miles from where I am sitting -
Right here in Cincinnati - the original "river city". Surely the historical
society or the public library would have copies of the blueprints for the boat.
Short of having actual AutoCAD files this was great! And I, a native
Cincinnatian, could maybe bet out anyone doing the same topic because mine
would be historically accurate! It was meant to be. Fate brought me to this
topic. There were six large ship yards but I knew the year it was made, who it
was made for and the exact name of the shipyard. The historical society was of
little help over the phone. I couldn't even find out if they had anything on
the topic. But the Public Library of Hamilton county actually has a riverboat
department and I was delighted to chat with its librarian/historian. She told
me that back in 1865 no one did blueprints or technical drawings of riverboats.
The builders after talking with the customer simply started sawing wood. Ok,
they did make a model of the hull to test how it would work in water but I
needed to know what the rest of the boat looked like.

I took out two books on the topic, "Disaster on the Mississippi" by Gene Eric
Salecker and "The Sultana Tragedy" by Jerry O. Potter. Both are truly excellent
references on the topic. There are numerous eyewitness accounts of what
happened in both books. I started to get to know the men on the boat. I felt so
sorry that they had had such miserable existences. It seemed like such a cruel
twist of fate that they died instead of going home as they had thought. The
tragedy isn't the boat blowing up, its the men (along with some women and
children) dying. When I turned to page 5 of Salecker's book and saw an accurate
drawing of the boat - the Rosetta stone I had been searching for - it seemed
far less significant to me. If I am to reenact what happened that night, the
boat which looks very much like any other side-wheeler, is just a stage for the
actors to perform. I had gone from being seduced by sensationalism to actually
caring about these guys. And I wanted to tell their story.

I tried to imagine going back in time with a camera. I could stop time at any
point and I could take my picture from any vantagepoint. So with all this God
like image making power, what's the best shot? I decided to take my picture
after the initial explosion when people were doing things. It was at that point
were the internal nature of people showed through. Some fought their comrades
for survival others sacrificed their lives to save those in need, some prayed
to God others cursed him. The Sultana is not one story but 2000 different
dramas happening at the same time.

Its one of the weird twists in this story that some were being burned while
others were drowning just feet away. I tried to show the danger of fire and the
danger of water. Both took many lives. 


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

People:
So now, how do you do a picture of 2000 people? Clearly I had to be really picky
about the number of polygons in these people. I was eventually able to get it
down to 356 each. (Still the final image has over 90,000 polygons.) It looked a
bit rough but I really wanted to have as many people in there as I could -
Stuff the picture like the boat was stuffed. Even so, the fifty or so people in
my picture are just a fraction of the number of people that would have been in
this area. I decided to stop adding people when adding more would cover key
figures.

I made about ten different men and a young girl. Also I built bones for them so
I could position them easily. To reduce a drain on resources, I positioned
groupings of people in separate files then removed their bones and imported
just the skin into the scene. It's a very different situation working with
fifty people rather than five. Rather than spending the effort on getting the
right curve to their filtrum (the ditch between your nose and upper lip) just
right, you are forced to think of clusters of people and their body language.
Most of my people could have no face at all and you would not know the
difference but if they are not in a natural position it will really show.

Its very interesting to work with many figures. Even in a crowd, people group
into smaller subgroups - each doing their own thing. In a picture this provides
more than one story within a larger story.

Fire:
I tired a number of methods of creating fire before my final solution. Along the
way I noticed that there are at least two types of fire. One type is simply
flames extending from burning objects (such as in my picture). The other is
related to explosive liquids and gases, which project the material into the air
creating a burning cloud.

I was extremely fortunate to find photos of a fire that was burning the front
porch of a house. The structure of the porch was nearly identical to the main
deck of the Sultana. These photos helped me construct the shape of the fire.

The material for the fire has its self-Illumination set to 100% (meaning that it
will not have any shadows on its surface). The color and detail of the fire
come from the diffuse color map, which I drew in PhotoShop. The transparency of
the fire uses the same diffuse color map. Also I made it a 2-sided (making the
back facing polygons display the material also) to add more depth to the fire.

I first tried to use radiosity controls to make the fire project light but the
color of the light was white - I really can't explain why, it might be a bug in
Max 7. I reverted to omni lights with area shadows. This makes a single point
light create soft shadows as would be formed by a large luminous surface. This
low-tech workaround also rendered much faster and gave me some creative control
over the light.

Smoke:
The trick to smoke is the outside edges should be much more transparent than the
center of the smoke. I used a procedural map called Falloff for the
transparency to obtain this affect. Falloff provides two colors - one for
surfaces facing the camera and one for surfaces see edge-on. The edge-on I set
to black (100% transparent) the other I set to light gray (so there's some
transparency). To change the color of the smoke I could simply change the
diffuse color. This technique can be used to create volumetric clouds as well.

Water:
The big thing with the water is the shape and bump maps. Noise modifiers and
procedural maps helped but the splashes had to be box modeled much like any
other organic object. The water looked to dark - a result of reflecting the
dark environment behind the camera. I used an environment map of one of the
renderings to resolve this problem.


NOTES:
1 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 51
2 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 45-50, p. 178
3 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.60 - 61. Thirteen years
earlier Congress passed more stringent regulations in hopes to reduce the
number of riverboat mishaps but "military necessity" became a loophole that
rendered the regulations useless.
4 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 4
5 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.151
6 Salecker, p. 58 and 78. Talkington survived with slight scalds.
7 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.77
8 Andersonville was the largest of these storing 32,000 prisoners. More than a
third of those (13,000) died from neglect and disease. The camp's commandant
Major Henry Wirz holds the distinction of being the only soldier in the Civil
war to be convicted of war crimes. Cahaba, another prison camp represented on
the boat, was not much better. Though the prison was much smaller than
Andersonville, it's 3,000 prisoners were only afforded six square feet of
living space each. To make matter's worse, the prison flooded in February and
the men were forced to stand in waist high, nearly freezing water for four
days. (from: http://www.rootsweb.com/~genepool/yeiseman.htm)
9 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.78. Pvt. Berry suffered a
fractured skull but survived
10 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.120
11 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.91
12 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.103
13 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.104
14 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.99
15 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.123
16 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.97
17 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 107
18 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.137
19 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.135
20 Gene Eric Salecker, "Disaster on the Mississippi", p.136
21 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.113-115
22 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.113-115
23 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.118
24 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.126
25 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.124-125
26 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.131
27 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p.123
28 http://www.civilwarstlouis.com/boatburners/
29 The "Return Tubular" or "Elder" Boilers on the boat were state of the art for
1865. They provided a greater surface area inside the boiler for heat to
transfer to the water. This added efficiency yielded a smaller, lighter boiler
yet one with much more power. The downside was that it tended to clog with
muddy river water. If a clog prevented water from reaching a section of the
boiler the metal in that area would overheat and weaken. If water then rushed
back into that area it would immediately turn to steam and create great
pressure capable of rupturing the weaken metal.
30 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 186
31 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 191
32 Jerry O. Potter, "The Sultana Tragedy", p. 190
33 On Aug. 12, 1985 a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountain in
Japan, killing 520 of the 524 aboard. Highest death toll in a single-plane
crash in aviation history. It was caused by a faulty repair of a rear bulkhead
which led to the loss of the plane's tail. Taken from
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001449.html, In the US the worst air disaster
was American Airlines Flight 191 on May 25, 1979 where 273 deaths including two
on the ground (engine on port side fell off).
http://www.ezl.com/~fireball/Disaster06.htm
34 From the time of the invasion until March 03, 2005, 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1509108,00.html


