Imagine a maritime disaster more tragic and with more lives lost than on the Titanic! Now read the story of our nation's worst, most forgotten maritime disaster.
Climb aboard and experience her last days in,
"River Reunion. . .
Seven Days Aboard the Sultana."
A historical fiction novel based on the April 27, 1865
explosion and burning of the steamboat Sultana
by Alice Morrison
Witness the last days of the Sultana through the eyes of 13-year-old Ray Shaw. Travel up the Mississippi River to Vicksburg where the Sultana, a steamboat licensed to carry only 376 passengers, takes on more than 1700 paroled Union soldiers recently released from the Southern prison camps of Andersonvill and Cahaba.
Sneek around the overcrowded decks with Ray and his dog, General Lee. Be sure to stay out of Captain Mason and First Mate Rowberry's sight because stow aways are thrown overboard or worse they get fed to Rowberry's nine-foot alligator.
Get to know passenger DeWitt Clinton Spikes, Winfield Scott Colvin of the 6th Kentucky Cav., Cletus a legless livestock foreman who becomes Ray's ally, and many more colorful characters. Who will survive?
Hide in the shadows and listen to the officers make deals and compromises that put many lives in peril as revealed in "River Reunion . . .Seven Days Aboard the Sultana."
". . .an effective point of view, capturing a young man's wrenching coming of age in the midst of tragedy"
--Marshall Cook author and professor UW-Madison
"The report of the Sultana was largely ingnored by the contemporary Press. It has also been passed over by many a historian, who didn't quite know what to do with it. So the book has a distinct advantage in telling a tale not well-known. . ." --Phil Angelo EditorKankakee Daily Journal
"Alice Morrison’s hope and my own is that this neglected story will have such a profound effect upon young readers that they will tell it to their children so that at long last the forgotten soldiers who perished will live again and forever in the American consciousness."
--Prof. David Madden Baton Rouge, LA, author, scholar, and chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission for Louisiana.