Shipbuilding was for centuries a major industry in Scarborough. The harbour in South Bay had maintained fishing boats since the town’s earliest days, but in the seventeenth century shipbuilding commenced and grew rapidly. The large supply of oak from the North Riding and cheaper labour than shipyards on the Thames made Scarborough shipbuilding a great success. Encouraged by Newcastle and Sunderland’s demand for colliers to transport their coal to London, Scarborough was for a time a leading collier-building and owning port in England.
The most successful shipbuilders in Scarborough were the Tindalls, whose production made up between two fifths and two thirds of Scarborough’s total between the early 18th century and their closure in 1863. Most of their ships were brigs or barques, with a smaller number of snows. Smaller ships were mostly built for residents of Scarborough or the Yorkshire coast. Larger ships were often added to the Tindalls’ own fleet. Some of the larger ships were destined to be Baltic traders, designed to be cheap to operate and carry a large amount of less valuable cargo.
Shipbuilding took place along the foreshore, between the King Richard III House (once home to the Tindalls) and the Castle Hill, protected by the harbour. At its peak, as many as eleven shipyards lined the foreshore, mingled with workshops working with rope, sails, iron and timber. Unfortunately for Scarborough, the size of the harbour could not keep up with the increasing size of ships in the nineteenth century, and the industry failed to adapt to iron shipbuilding.
Two Scarborough-built vessels, the Scarborough and the Friendship, along with nine other ships, took convicts for the first time from England to Botany Bay (now Sydney). This was known as the First Fleet and it founded a European colony.
Two ships built in Scarborough are recorded transporting African slaves. The Success Packet, built in Scarborough in 1765, picked up enslaved people in Senegal and took them to Maryland in 1770 and 1772, and another ship called the Friendship, built in Scarborough in 1781 by Tindall’s yard, carried 25 slaves to Jamaica.
