THE CONVICT SHIP "SUCCESS"

THE CONVICT SHIP "SUCCESS".

    The Success was built in Mawlamyine, Burma in 1840 (not 1790 as the advertising made out!), she was a merchant vessel weighing in at 621 tons. After trading around the Indian subcontinent for a couple of years she was sold off to new owners in London, she was refitted to take human cargo and was first employed taking free emigrants to Australia, three voyages were made by the Success, the last one was in 1849, many of the emigrants on this last trip were survivors of the Great Famine.       After being employed out of Sydney for a while the Success was sent to Melbourne, on 31st May 1852 the crew mutinied and disappeared into the Victoria gold fields as this was the height of the gold rush.

    The Success was then sold to the Victoria government, it's new role was a prison hulk along with three other ships, these hulks were mainly filled with some of the most desperate men in the convict system, many were from the now closed penal colony of Norfolk Island and known for their mutinous and violent ways, but it was hardly surprising that they reacted in a brutal way when they were treated in a very inhumane manner, far worse than other colonies such as Macquarie Harbour, Botany Bay and Port Arthur.
    One of the worst Commandants' was John Price, he was a very brutal disciplinarian who would not spare a man from a flogging or a hanging, his first duty as Commandant was to oversee the execution of 12 inmates found guilty of leading a revolt three months previously, he was nicknamed "The Demon". 

    Naturally the convicts hated him and soon they would get their revenge, unrest in the hulks had been simmering for a while so a Royal Navy warship was placed amongst the hulks armed with "double-shotted" guns so any revolt would be stopped by sending the ship and it's manacled men to the bottom of the sea.
    The convicts on board the hulks had to work, this mainly consisted of being rowed to the shore to work in the quarry at Williamstown, on 26th March 1857 as part of his duties as Inspector General of Penal Establishments in Victoria John Price also found himself in the quarry at Williamstown, with a small body of guards he swaggered into the middle of hundreds of convicts, many of them remembered this tyrant and still bore the scars where their flesh had been stripped off their backs by the floggings that Price ordered for the slightest misdemeanor.
    As the convicts started to gather around menacingly the guards started to back away, Price stood his ground, rocks started to fly and the guards ran away, Price too started to run but a rock hit him in the back and down he went.
    The convicts gathered around him and in a flurry of striking fists, hammers and bars Price was battered to death, a nasty end for a cruel man, 15 men were tried for murder and 7 were hanged, the others went back to the hulks, I suppose they thought the Success was aptly named that day.
    Soon the Success's days as a hulk came to an end and she was converted in to a stores ship and anchored in Port Phillip Bay at the mouth of the Yarra River and there she stayed for 36 years.

    She would have probably rotted away there and have been lost but for a group of entrepreneurs who bought her and fitted her out as a convict ship museum complete with wax dummies of convicts, a whole host of torture devices and also the body armour of Ned Kelly who had been hanged in Melbourne Gaol in 1880. 

    In 1890 the Success was exhibited in Hobart and she was a huge success with thousands coming to see the horrors therein and to hear terrible tales told by ex-convict and bushranger Harry Power, with this promising start under their belts they next took the Success to Sydney, however, the "stain" of the convict era was more acutely felt here and the ship soon was making a loss so one night in 1891 the Success was scuttled in Kerosene Bay and she was left a sunken relic.

    However this was not to be the end of the story, one year later the Success was sold, refloated, refitted and again used as a convict museum, this time with torture devices that were never used in the Georgian or Victorian convict systems such as the Iron Maiden!
    This time the Success toured the world, after a tour of Australia she was off to England and eventually to America.

 She was even featured in a film starring Fatty Arbuckle in 1915 before returning to a commercial vessel in 1917, during one of her voyages she struck ice and was holed, refloated again in 1918 the Success was once more a convict museum ship but by the 1940's the Success's great age was taking it's toll, she became unprofitable and was sent to Lake Eerie to be dismantled, on 4th July 1946 the Success was destroyed by a fire allegedly started by vandals, so ended the career of an extraordinary ship.

Bram Stoker interview 1897.

   BRAM STOKER INTERVIEW 1897.

This interview was conducted by Jane "Lorna" Stoddard for the British Weekly Magazine on 1st July 1897, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula was published on 26th May 1897.

    The strange thing is that, although in some respects this is a gruesome book, it leaves on the mind an entirely wholesome impression.
    The events which happen are so far removed from ordinary experience that they do not haunt the imagination unpleasantly. It is certain that no other writer of our day could have produced so marvellous a book.

    On Monday morning I had the pleasure of a short conversation with Mr. Bram Stoker, who, as most people know, is Sir Henry Irving’s manager at the Lyceum Theatre. 
    He told me, in reply to a question, that the plot of the story had been a long time in his mind, and that he spent about three years in writing it. He had always been interested in the vampire legend.
    “It is undoubtedly,” he remarked, “a very fascinating theme, since it touches both on mystery and fact. In the Middle Ages the terror of the vampire depopulated whole villages.”

“Is there any historical basis for the legend?”

    “It rested, I imagine, on some such case as this. A person may have fallen into a death-like trance and been buried before the time. 
    Afterwards the body may have been dug up and found alive, and from this a horror seized upon the people, and in their ignorance they imagined that a vampire was about. 
    The more hysterical, through excess of fear, might themselves fall into trances in the same way; and so the story grew that one vampire might enslave many others and make them like himself.     Even in the single villages it was believed that there might be many such creatures. When once the panic seized the population, their only thought was to escape.”

“In what parts of Europe has this belief been most prevalent?”

    “In certain parts of Styria it has survived longest and with most intensity, but the legend is common to many countries, to China, Iceland, Germany, Saxony, Turkey, the Chersonese, Russia, Poland, Italy, France, and England, besides all the Tartar communities.”

“In order to understand the legend, I suppose it would be necessary to consult many authorities?”

    Mr. Stoker told me that the knowledge of vampire superstitions shown in “Dracula” was gathered from a great deal of miscellaneous reading.

    “No one book that I know of will give you all the facts. I learned a good deal from E. Gerard’s ‘Essays on Roumanian Superstitions, which first appeared in The Nineteenth Century, and were afterwards published in a couple of volumes. I also learned something from Mr. Baring-Gould’s ‘Were-Wolves.’ Mr. Gould has promised a book on vampires, but I do not know whether he has made any progress with it.”

    Readers of “Dracula” will remember that the most famous character in it is Dr. Van Helsing, the Dutch physician, who, by extraordinary skill, self-devotion, and labour, finally outwits and destroys the vampire. 
    Mr. Stoker told me that van Helsing is founded on a real character. In a recent leader on “Dracula,” published in a provincial newspaper, it is suggested that high moral lessons might be gathered from the book.
    I asked Mr. Stoker whether he had written with a purpose, but on this point he would give no definite answer, “I suppose that every book of the kind must contain some lesson,” he remarked; “but I prefer that readers should find it out for themselves.”

    In reply to further questions, Mr. Stoker said that he was born in Dublin, and that his work had laid for thirteen years in the Civil Service. 
    He is an M.A. of Trinity College, Dublin. His brother-in-law is Mr. Frankfort Moore, one of the most popular young writers of the day. He began his literary work early. 
    The first thing he published was a book on “The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions.” Next came a series of children’s stories, “Under the Sunset,” published by Sampson Low. Then followed the book by which he has hitherto been best known, “The Snake’s Pass.” Messrs. Constable have published in their “Acme” library a fascinating little volume called “The Watter’s Mou,” and this with “The Shoulder of Shasta,” completes Mr. Stoker’s list of novels.
    He has been in London for some nineteen years, and believes that London is the best possible place for a literary man. “A writer will find a chance here if he is good for anything; and recognition is only a matter of time.” 
    Mr. Stoker speaks of the generosity shown by literary men to one another in a tone which shows that he, at least, is not disposed to quarrel with the critics.

    Mr. Stoker does not find it necessary to publish through a literary agent. It always seems to him, he says, that an author with an ordinary business capacity can do better for himself than through any agent. 
    “Some men now-a-days are making ten thousand a year by their novels, and it seems hardly fair that they should pay ten or five percent of this great sum to a middleman. 
   By a dozen letters or so in the course of the year they could settle all their literary business on their own account.” Though Mr. Stoker did not say so, I am inclined to think that the literary agent is to him a nineteenth century vampire.

    No interview during this week would be complete without a reference to the Jubilee, so I asked Mr. Stoker, as a Londoner of nearly twenty years standing, what he thought of the celebrations.     “Everyone,” he said, “has been proud that the great day went off so successfully.
    We have had a magnificent survey of the Empire, and last week’s procession brought home, as nothing else could have done, the sense of the immense variety of the Queen’s dominions.”