Both Diana And Myself Love Cruises,

and with that in mind I found this,

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, a romanticized depiction of the 1870 race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez, but I did not have any idea that a lazy cruse in days long gone could be so dangerous, I had thought of a leisurely cruise down the Mississippi would be so relaxing as the boat sedately made its way on the river, but these steam boats had another side to them, steamboat racing! and it was dangerous, still it has to be said that the first steamboat race in 1811 didn't see any explosions or deaths, but the boats did crash into each other, between 1816 and 1848, boiler explosions alone killed more than 1,800 passengers and crew and injured another 1,000, according to government records, “Western steamboats usually blow up one or two a week in the season,” Charles Dickens observed, after an 1842 tour of the U.S. although not racing one of the most horrific accidents occurred in 1838, when the Moselle, a fast and nearly new Ohio River steamboat, exploded off Cincinnati. “All the boilers, four in number, burst simultaneously,” reported one contemporary author. “The deck was blown into the air, and the human beings who crowded it were doomed to instant destruction. Fragments of the boiler and of human bodies were thrown both to the Kentucky and Ohio shores, although the distance to the former was a quarter of a mile.” At least 120 people died, but the exact death toll remains unknown, then in 1852, a steamboat boiler exploded during a race and 80 people died, and then it got worse, apparently “Western steamboats showed an appalling accident record,” wrote historian Daniel J. Boorstin in 1965. “A voyage on the Mississippi, it was often said, was far more dangerous than a passage across the ocean.” I never knew how dangerous steam boat travel was, I must have watched Gone With the Wind a few a few times too many! for the full story have a look here.