Ship Sabtoge history dates back to 1888
As found in the book “Planet Rothschild (Volume 1): The Forbidden History of the New World Order (1763-1939).” by M King:
"APRIL 27, 1865
THE SINKING OF THE SULTANA / 1700 DEAD / GREATEST MARITIME DISASTER IN U.S HISTORY
The Sultana is a Mississippi River steamboat that is tied up at Cairo, Illinois when word reaches the city that Lincoln had been shot in Ford's Theater. Immediately, Captain Mason grabs an armload of newspapers and heads south to spread the news, knowing that telegraphic communication with the South had been almost totally cut off because of the war.
While docking in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to pick up a couple of thousand recently-released Union Prisoners-of-War, Sultana also has some repairs done to a leaky boiler. This gives Benjamin’s Confederate secret agents access to the ship.
After leaving port in Mississippi, three of the boat's four boilers suddenly explode. Sultana burns to the waterline, sinking near Memphis, Tennessee. An estimated 1,700 of her 2,400 passengers die (35) (more than the death toll of the famous Titanic). The disaster will be overshadowed in the press by the just day-old killings of John Wilkes Booth and recent killing of President Lincoln.
In 1888, a St. Louis resident named William Streetor reveals that his former business partner, Robert Louden, made a death bed confession of having sabotaged Sultana by a weapon known as a coal torpedo - a hollowed out prop that looked like a lump of coal but is actually packed with explosives. Enemy agents would sneak the weapons into a ship’s coal supply. When shoveled into the ship’s firebox – the boiler goes BOOM! Several Union ships were destroyed in this manner with substantial loss of life.
Louden, a former Confederate agent and saboteur who operated in and around St. Louis, had the opportunity and motive and may have had access to the means. Thomas Edgeworth Courtenay, the inventor of the coal torpedo, was a former resident of St. Louis and was involved in similar acts of sabotage against Union shipping interests. Supporting Louden's claim are eyewitness reports that a piece of artillery shell was observed in the wreckage.
Remember this fiendish little weapon – the coal torpedo – because Sultana will not be the last ship to mysteriously blow up.”