By James Heinz
As previous stories on this blog have shown, strange things have ended up at the bottom of the Great Lakes, such as a World War I German U-boat, a Soviet spacecraft, and military drones made by Marilyn Monroe. But this story is about a ship built 185 years ago and 8,400 miles away.
Photo at top of page: SUCCESS convict ship September 8, 1924, at Jones Island, Milwaukee
SUCCESS was built in 1840 in Natmoo, Burma, or Myanmar as the country is known now. She was a three masted barkentine that displaced 621 tons, was 117 feet long, 26 feet wide, and her hold was 22 feet deep. She was built of teakwood to resist rot. WMHS founder Herman Runge said that her hull was 30 inches thick at the bilge and she was ballasted with 500 tons of stone.
Herman would know. He went aboard her in the Milwaukee River.
SUCCESS convict ship, 1924 at Jones Island Milwaukee
From launch until 1847 she was engaged in coastal trading along the shores of India. In 1847 the British government chartered her to carry immigrants, not convicts, from England to Australia. She made three trips between 1847 and 1852.
Her last voyage ended at the start of the Victorian Gold Rush in Australia. A sharp increase in population led to a sharp increase in crime, and SUCCESS was bought by the government of the State of Victoria to act as a floating prison ship. This was the first time convicts trod her decks.
In 1857 Superintendent of Prisons John Giles Price came to visit her. Price was the kind of man who literally believed that the floggings would continue until morale improved. Morale did not in fact improve, and some of SUCCESS’s convicts beat and stoned him to death to demonstrate just how little their morale had improved. SUCCESS was later converted to floating warehouse.
In 1890 SUCCESS was bought by the first of several entrepreneurs, who promptly invented an origin story for her that one expert described as “largely fictional.” They claimed that she was built in 1790 and was the oldest ship in the world, and had carried convicts from England to Australia. Justice was served when the egregiously erroneous entrepreneurs went bankrupt and scuttled her.
In 1891 SUCCESS was bought again, raised, toured Australia and sailed to England. Her new owners frequently fabricated falsehoods about her as well. In 1913, she was sailed to America and toured the East Coast.
In 1915 she arrived in San Francisco for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where she starred in a 9 minute silent film called “Mabel and Fatty Viewing The World’s Fair”, starring the two biggest movie stars of the day, Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand. In it the actual mayor of San Francisco gives them a tour of SUCCESS, showing them hideous articles of torture that were largely fictional or artifacts of the Spanish Inquisition. The film can be seen on the internet.
SUCCESS convict ship’s Iron Maiden Brochure
SUCCESS then toured America’s inland waterways, being reported sinking at two different places on three different dates on the Ohio River.
SUCCESS convict ship in front of Gimbels in Milwaukee, 1924
On September 8, 1924, the ship arrived in Milwaukee via the St. Lawrence River according to Runge. He boarded her on October 8, 1924, when she was docked alongside the Gimbels department store in downtown Milwaukee. SUCCESS stayed over the winter, which must have had her yearning for the nice warm waters of Australia. I know I do right now. Herman says she went to Chicago for the next two years and returned in 1933 for the Chicago World’s Fair.
The November/December 1986 issue of TELESCOPE magazine in the WMHS files says that she was docked at Oswego, NY, in August 1928. And once again, convicts walked her decks. Twenty two inmates from the prison at Auburn, NY, were given a tour. “No audience ever listened with more rapt attention than these men…One prisoner said, ‘Auburn is a playhouse compared to this.’”
SUCCESS convict ship, June 1927 at Sheboygan, Wis.
Despite frequent repairs, SUCCESS was falling apart. In 1945 she was sold for scrap and suffered her third or fourth sinking off Sandusky, Ohio. In 1946 she was raised for her fourth or fifth time and towed to Port Clinton, Ohio, where she ran aground trying to enter the harbor.
And on July 4, 1946, her long life came to an end. She caught fire and burned to the waterline. Her demise the repeatedly rumored result of vile and vicious vandals who wanted to create their own Fourth of July bonfire as hundreds watched from the shore. She still lies there in 16 feet of water. Her remains could be seen from shore for many years. The TELESCOPE article says that she is a popular dive site and that artifacts recovered from her ended up in England’s National Maritime Museum.
——————————–
James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
Photo Credit: Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
