Prison Ship Success, Iron Jacket

A prison ship, often more precisely described as a prison hulk, is a current or former seagoing vessel that has been modified to become a place of substantive detention for convicts, prisoners of war or civilian internees. Success was an Australian prison ship, built in 1840 at Natmoo, Burma, for Cockerell and Co. of Calcutta. After initially trading around the Indian subcontinent, she was sold to London owners and made three voyages with emigrants to Australia during the 1840s. Due to an increase in crime, prisons were overflowing and the Government of Victoria purchased large sailing ships to be employed as prison hulks. These included Success, Deborah, Sacramento and President. In 1857 prisoners from Success murdered the Superintendent of Prisons John Price. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, she was converted into a floating museum displaying relics of the convict era and purporting to represent the horrors of penal transportation in Great Britain and the United States of America. After extensive world tours she was destroyed in 1946 by fire while berthed in Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio. Photographed by Bain News Service, circa 1910-15

Restrictions Only for Ireland and United Kingdom

Bain Convict Correctional Cruel Cruelty Detention Facility Horrors Hulk Inhumane Inhumanity Method Penal Persecute Persecuted Persecuting Persecution Punish Punishing Seagoing Suffering Torturer Torturing

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