Patti Callahan Henry
Mar 10, 20214 min
Pictured on a balcony above Savannah, Georgia’s historic riverfront is Patti Callahan, author of the soon to be released “Surviving Savannah,” a historical fiction novel based on the true story of the Steamship Pulaski wreck. BUD JOHNSON PHOTOGRAPHY
BY DAVID LAUDERDALE SPECIAL TO THE ISLAND PACKET AND BEAUFORT GAZETTE
MARCH 07, 2021 06:30 AM
Suddenly, a late-night boiler explosion blew the whole thing apart. In 45 hellish minutes, it sank 100 feet into the sea. More than half of the 200 or so people aboard were killed.
Some survivors clung to debris for five days and five nights 30 miles off Wilmington, North Carolina.
In that June of 1838, Savannah wept. Businesses closed in a citywide day of mourning, and church bells pealed over her quiet squares.
This week, a solid gold pocket watch from that wreckage will be displayed for the first time in Savannah.
The watch still says it’s 11:05 p.m. on a tragic day now all but forgotten by time.
Patti Callahan first heard the story from one of Bluffton’s best storytellers, Boo Harrell.
Boo comes by his storytelling naturally. His mother is award-winning Bluffton columnist Annelore Harrell.
He runs boats for a living, exploring the magical world of the May River with the people of Palmetto Bluff, where Callahan lives part time.
Callahan is an elite writer, with many of her 15 novels on the New York Times best-seller list.
After three years of research and writing, she has turned the Pulaski story into a historical fiction novel that launches Tuesday at the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum in Savannah.
“Surviving Savannah” will debut virtually, online at 6 p.m., in conjunction with E. Shaver Books. Relics found in the Pulaski wreckage in 2018 will be shown for the first time.
Shortly after hearing Boo tell the tale, Callahan noticed a marker at Palmetto Bluff about the Pulaski. It tells of Samuel Parkman, who perished that night along with four of his children. He loved the May River, where his wife’s family had the Octagon Plantation, now part of Palmetto Bluff.
She would become forever marked by the story, and what it tells us about humankind.
Gazaway Bugg Lamar represented all of Savannah’s gentility as he boarded the Pulaski with his wife and six children.
His wife, five of those children, and a niece would not live to tell it.
Callahan uses that family under a different name as her “door” into the story.
We now get to hear it like children at bedtime, and she tells it with this wonder: What happens to us when we survive tragedy?
The first thing to explode in her face was this notion that some survive because they were meant for a higher purpose.
In real life, the Lamar son who survived was called “The Noble Boy” for his heroism in the madness after the ship sank.
But 20 years later, he was called “The Red Devil” for his role in illegally importing slaves aboard a ship called the Wanderer. A long look into his sad character is revealed by another Beaufort County writer, Jim Jordan of Callawassie Island, in his nonfiction book, “The Slave-Trader’s Letter Book.”
“That because Charlie survived, it was meant to be, and what he did with his life tossed that whole idea into question for me — that fate and destiny and meant-to-be — because he lost some siblings. Would they have done beautiful things with their life while he did harmful things? What does ‘meant-to-be’ even mean? I can’t answer that. I’ll leave that to people like my dad. The preachers, the theologians, the philosophers.
Callahan tells the story through three women of different times and different stations.
The last time we talked to Callahan, her book on the wife of C.S. Lewis, “Becoming Mrs. Lewis,” had just come out, and in a talk in Bluffton, she took on the cliché that behind every successful man stands a woman. She proved in her award-winning best-seller that the woman stands beside, not behind, the successful man.
And here she finds a story told by men running a failed ship, but it didn’t have to stay that way.
It’s the same thing our county and nation are wrestling with today, trying to address, or even acknowledge, the Black point of view that was obliterated from history.
She found their voices and the voices of their peers, in writing, at the Georgia Historical Society, the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, the Telfair museums and the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace.
David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.