In 1900 a sailing ship named the Success visited Scarborough allowing visitors to tour the ship to see the horrors of the convict trade.
The Success was built in Natmoo, Tenasserim, Burma, in 1840 as a merchant trading ship for Cockerell & Co. of Calcutta, initially trading around the Indian sub-continent. After a few years it was sold to London owners and made three voyages with emigrants to Australia during the late 1840s. When Success docked in Melbourne, in 1852 the crew deserted to join the Victorian Gold Rush to the gold mines. Due to a rise in crime in that part of Australia the prisons were full to overflowing, so the Victoria government were purchasing large ships and converting them to prison hulks (floating prisons), which happened to the Success. Later again, in 1854, the Success was once again converted, this time to a store’s vessel, and anchored on the Yarra River, not far from Melbourne, for the next thirty-six years.
In 1890, Success was purchased by a group of entrepreneurs and refitted as a museum ship, making some outrageous claims; although never a convict ship, Success was advertised as one, claiming to have been involved in the settlement of Western Australia (there had been another ship named Success built in 1790 which had been involved), it was also incorrectly claimed that it was the oldest ship afloat. However, the first season as a museum in Sydney was a financial disaster and the owners scuttled it in Kerosene Bay, near Sydney.
Only a year later the scuttled Success was sold to a second group of entrepreneurs and re-floated and given a complete refit, after which it set sail again as a convict ship/museum visiting Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, and back to Sydney, then onto England in 1894. It was whilst in England it visited Scarborough in 1900 mooring up against the Vincent Pier, where visitors were invited to see the so called implements of torture used on the convicts.
After touring Britain, in 1912 Success crossed the Atlantic continuing to be displayed as a convict ship museum along the east coast of the USA then through the Great Lakes, by April 1915 the ship was in San Francisco for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition. When the museum business started to stall, Success returned to being a trading ship in 1916, around the US and Great Lakes, however, this venture was cut short when she was holed by ice and sunk at Carrollton, Kentucky. Success was yet again re-floated and returned to being a travelling museum. In 1930 she attended the Chicago World Fair. As Success aged, repairs were becoming more expensive so in 1940’s it was towed to Sandusky, Lake Erie, Ohio, to be dismantled and sold as scrap. Whilst moored at Sandusky, Success was sunk by a bad storm, after which a salvage operator acquired it in 1945 and had it towed to Port Clinton where it grounded outside the harbour. It remained grounded until 4 July 1946 when a fire broke out aboard and it burned to the waterline; remains of the ship are still in 5 metres of water just east of Port Clinton harbour.
