The Story

The deadliest shipwreck in American history
happened the week we were all looking the other way.

April 1865. A nineteen-year-old who walked out of Andersonville alive talks his way onto a steamboat for the trip up the dark river home — not knowing a quartermaster's bribe has packed two thousand freed men onto a boat built for four hundred, and that the boiler under his feet has been closed with a scab of tin that will not hold. What the war could not do, the river nearly does. The country, busy burying its president, turns the page. This book does not.

The Author

Thomas P. Skinner

Tom Skinner writes the things a country would rather forget — hard, quiet, and lit by the small lights people carry into the dark. In Safe Water he takes the true bones of the Sultana disaster of April 1865 — the worst maritime disaster in American history — and refuses to turn the page.

The First Pages

Read the opening.

Prologue — The Photograph

They held the reunion in a church hall in Toledo, and not many came.

He had thought there would be more of them. Twenty years, and a war before that, and the men who lived through both had gone to farms and to graves and to the far side of the country. The ones who came were old before their time, the way he was. They sat in folding chairs. A woman had lettered a banner by hand and hung it crooked over the stage. There was coffee. There was a cake going dry under a cloth.

A young man came from the newspaper with a pencil and a kind face. He asked what boat.

"The Sultana," the old man said.

The young man wrote it down wrong. Spelled it like the raisin.

"More men died on the river that morning than the country has ever had a number for," the old man said. "And you never heard of it."

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The deadliest shipwreck in American historyhappened the week we were all looking the other way.

Thomas P. Skinner

Read the opening.

Be the first to know when it lands.

The river kept the dead.This book keeps their names.

The deadliest shipwreck in American history
happened the week we were all looking the other way.

The river kept the dead.
This book keeps their names.