The Titanic, which sank in the North Atlantic on the night of April 14–15, 1912, killed approximately 1,517 people. It is, by a wide margin, the most famous shipwreck in history. Several of the worst peacetime maritime disasters on record killed two to three times as many people, and are, for reasons I will try to explain, almost unknown outside the specialist literature.
This is a short catalog of five such disasters, in rough chronological order. I have tried to include what the surviving records say, what the modern casualty estimates look like, and why each of them has, in one way or another, slipped out of public memory.
1. The SS Sultana (April 27, 1865)
The Sultana was a Mississippi-class steamboat, licensed to carry 376 passengers. On the night of April 26, 1865, she departed Vicksburg with approximately 2,137 people aboard, most of them newly-released Union prisoners of war, many of them severely malnourished survivors of the Andersonville and Cahaba prison camps. The overloading was the work of a single Army quartermaster who was being paid per head for the prisoners' transport and had arranged a side deal with the boat's captain.
The Sultana's boilers had been hastily patched in Vicksburg to address a known leak. At around two in the morning on April 27, seven miles north of Memphis, three of the four boilers exploded simultaneously. The explosion tore the ship apart. Most of the survivors of the initial blast were thrown into the cold Mississippi and drowned, many of them too weak from months of starvation to swim.
The modern casualty estimate is approximately 1,800 dead. The Sultana killed more people than the Titanic would kill forty-seven years later. It happened five days after President Lincoln's funeral procession reached Springfield, three days after the last significant Confederate force surrendered, and twelve days after the assassination of the President himself. There was no room in the national news cycle. The story ran, for two days, on the inside pages, and then stopped running.
2. The SS Kiangya (December 3, 1948)
The Kiangya was a Chinese passenger steamer, built in Shanghai in 1939 and pressed into service at the end of 1948 evacuating civilians south from the advancing front of the Chinese Civil War. On the afternoon of December 3, 1948, carrying something between 2,150 and 3,920 passengers (the manifest was never reliable; there are no exact figures) she struck what was probably a submerged Japanese sea mine, left over from the Second World War, approximately fifty miles north of Shanghai in the mouth of the Huangpu River.
The explosion tore open the stern. The ship sank in roughly thirty minutes. Lifeboats were insufficient and panic was total. Modern estimates place the death toll between 2,750 and 3,920, which would make it, by most accounts, the second deadliest peacetime maritime disaster on record.
The Kiangya's sinking was covered in the Chinese and international press at the time, but the Chinese Civil War's larger news flow, followed by the 1949 establishment of the People's Republic and the subsequent decades of limited Chinese–Western press contact, meant the disaster never entered the Anglophone historical consciousness in any sustained way. You will find it, now, on lists of worst maritime disasters. You will not find it in any major popular history book.
3. The MV Wilhelm Gustloff (January 30, 1945)
The Wilhelm Gustloff was a German Kraft durch Freude cruise ship, converted during the war to a hospital ship and then to a refugee transport. On January 30, 1945, in the last six months of the Second World War, she left the port of Gotenhafen (modern Gdynia, Poland) carrying approximately 10,600 people, the vast majority of them German civilians fleeing the advancing Soviet army. Her capacity, per the original design, was 1,465 passengers.
At approximately 21:16 that evening, in the freezing Baltic, she was struck by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. She sank in approximately seventy minutes. Water temperature was around four degrees Celsius. Estimates of the death toll range from 9,343 to 9,400. It is, by most counts, the deadliest sinking of a single ship in history — roughly six times the casualty count of the Titanic.
The reasons for its historical obscurity are complex and partly ideological. As a German civilian transport sunk by a Soviet submarine in the closing months of a war Germany had started, the Gustloff occupied an awkward place in Cold War-era Western historiography. East Germany did not commemorate it. Soviet naval history celebrated Marinesko. West Germany's tentative memorialization was complicated by a very reasonable unwillingness to appear to claim victim-status during the Nuremberg era. The ship received serious historical treatment only after 1990, most notably in Günter Grass's 2002 novel Im Krebsgang, which treated the disappearance of the disaster from memory as its explicit subject.
4. The MV Doña Paz (December 20, 1987)
The Doña Paz was a Philippine passenger ferry, servicing the run between Tacloban and Manila. On the evening of December 20, 1987, two days before Christmas, she collided with the oil tanker Vector in the Tablas Strait. The Vector's cargo of gasoline ignited immediately. The sea around both ships caught fire.
The Doña Paz's official manifest listed 1,424 passengers. The actual number, after subsequent investigation, was something close to 4,386 — the ferry was routinely and massively overloaded. She sank in approximately two hours. Survivors reported water that was, in several directions, on fire. Only twenty-six passengers from the Doña Paz survived. Two of the Vector's thirteen crew survived. Total casualties are estimated at approximately 4,386, which would make it the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history.
The Doña Paz is slightly better known in the Philippines than elsewhere, where it is sometimes referred to as "Asia's Titanic." Globally, it has never entered popular consciousness. The reasons are the usual ones: it was covered by the international press for a few days, and then it was not.
5. The MV Le Joola (September 26, 2002)
The Joola was a Senegalese government-owned ferry, servicing the route between Ziguinchor in the Casamance region of southern Senegal and the capital Dakar. On September 26, 2002, she capsized in a storm approximately twenty-two nautical miles off the Gambian coast. The ship was, again, massively overloaded: her capacity was 580 passengers. Her actual passenger count that night was somewhere between 1,863 and 1,953, approximately three times her design limit.
She sank in approximately five minutes. Sixty-four people survived. The death toll of approximately 1,863 makes it, in terms of confirmed casualties, the second-deadliest maritime disaster in African history (after the 1991 Salem Express) and one of the worst peacetime shipping losses of the twenty-first century.
The Joola, which happened only a year after September 11, 2001 and a year before the invasion of Iraq, received a brief flurry of international coverage and then vanished from it. A subsequent French parliamentary investigation and a series of books by French-Senegalese authors have preserved the record. The outside world has, for practical purposes, forgotten.
What forgetting looks like
I do not think there is a grand theory of why these disasters faded and the Titanic did not. There are specific factors in each case: the competing news of the Lincoln assassination, the fog of war, the opacity of regimes, the distance of the audience. Some of these shipwrecks killed poor people, or colonized people, or the wrong kind of civilian at the wrong political moment. Some of them happened in languages the English-language press did not follow closely. The Titanic benefited from the relative peace of 1912, from the prominent inclusion of Anglo-American industrialists and first-class passengers, and from a subsequent century of intentional preservation in film, novel, and exhibition.
What these five share, viewed together, is something like a counter-history of the sea. They were all preventable. They were all, in some way, disasters of overloading, under-regulation, or wartime chaos. They are not inexplicable tragedies; they are consequences, very clearly, of decisions that were made. Every one of them involved more people than the Titanic, and several of them involved more than all of Anglo-American maritime mythology combined. They are still, individually and as a group, not on the wall of any museum I know of.
I think it is worth remembering that they were real. Each of those passenger lists was a list of specific names. The Gustloff's was children, mostly, and elderly women. The Sultana's was starved veterans. The Joola's was market traders coming home for the holidays. They did not get a film made about them. I do not know what the right word is, but it ought to be remembered, at least, that they were there.