Post by California gal on Jul 8, 2014 17:29:38 GMT -5
I just watched this week's PBS show, "History Detectives." If you ever watched this show you might know that previously they would investigate 2 or 3 artifacts during the half hour show. The format has been changed to investigate a single incident, and the first show of this season was about the Sultana, the steamboat that exploded on April 27, 1865 with several thousand people on board, including many released prisoners of war from Andersonville and elsewhere, on their way home. The actual death toll is unknown because they don't know exactly how many people were on that overloaded boat, which had a legal passenger limit of about 360, and had almost 10 times that number on the night of the explosion.
If you have a device with the PBS app, you can probably watch it, or else check PBS.com. (I had to search for "History Detectives" because it didn't seem to be featured.) It is very very interesting, especially the results they came up with.
But the reason I'm posting this here is because one theory for the disaster was Confederate sabotage. The investigators on the show loceated a man whose ancestor was a Confederate saboteur, and he had an artifact, a lump of fake coal that was actually a torpedo, like those used by southern saboteurs during the war to blow up steamboats. The lump would be sneaked on board with the load of coal that the ship was taking on, and when it was shoveled into the furnace--blooey! Some thought that even though the war was several weeks over, a fanatic had slipped a coal torpedo like this into the Sultana's fuel supply.
It of course ties into Deadly Bed because that was what Artie created to put into Flory's furnace! I guess Artie didn't invent it after all.
(Next week they are going to investigate Jimmy Hoffa's death.)
If you have a device with the PBS app, you can probably watch it, or else check PBS.com. (I had to search for "History Detectives" because it didn't seem to be featured.) It is very very interesting, especially the results they came up with.
But the reason I'm posting this here is because one theory for the disaster was Confederate sabotage. The investigators on the show loceated a man whose ancestor was a Confederate saboteur, and he had an artifact, a lump of fake coal that was actually a torpedo, like those used by southern saboteurs during the war to blow up steamboats. The lump would be sneaked on board with the load of coal that the ship was taking on, and when it was shoveled into the furnace--blooey! Some thought that even though the war was several weeks over, a fanatic had slipped a coal torpedo like this into the Sultana's fuel supply.
It of course ties into Deadly Bed because that was what Artie created to put into Flory's furnace! I guess Artie didn't invent it after all.
(Next week they are going to investigate Jimmy Hoffa's death.)