The Poky Little Puppy

If you were to guess which children’s books hold the top slots for all-time sales, which would you pick? Perhaps The Tales of Peter Rabbit, or Green Eggs and Ham? While both of those have been big hits through the years, they are not the best-selling children’s book of all time – that honor goes to The Poky Little Puppy!

Published in 1942, The Poky Little Puppy was one of twelve books released by Simon and Schuster in their series Little Golden Books. The books initially sold for 25 cents, at a time when children’s books normally sold for $2-3. The premise was to provide “a colorful children’s book that was durable and affordable for most American families.” The books were also sold in department stores – a new concept in selling that further enabled access to the books to all. Even today, the books can be purchased for $2.99! In 2001, Random House acquired the Golden Books line for 85 million dollars. There are now more than 600 books in the series.

The Poky Little Puppy was written by Janette Sebring Lowrey, a Texas native (1892-1984). She wrote dozens of books for children and young readers from the 1930s through the 1970s. The book was illustrated by a Swedish artist, Gustaf Tenggren. Tenggren worked for Simon and Schuster for twenty years, producing 25 books, many of which also sold millions of copies. Many of these books carried the prefix "Tenggren's" before the title as a kind of quality mark; a warranty that the tale was interpreted by an authority in the area of illustration. Despite the success of these books, neither Sebring nor Tenggren is well-known to the general public for their work.

The quilt shown here was made for my sister Pam’s birthday last year. It’s my first try at using prairie points for the edging – my verdict is that they are tedious, but add a nice border to the quilt!

The Convict Hulk Success

An eBay item I bid on but did not win was a pamphlet advertising the tour of the Success, which was billed as “the last of England’s infamous felon fleet.” As is often the case, a little digging reveals an interesting story!

Captain James Cook was the first Englishman to suggest colonization of the newly discovered land of Australia, in 1770. In May of 1787, this idea came to fruition, although in a way that Cook may not have intended: two warships, six transport ships, and three supply ships set sail for Australia for the purpose of establishing a penal colony. The six transport ships carried 568 male convicts and 191 female convicts, along with their military escort of 191 Marines and 19 Officers. The fleet arrived in Botany Bay in January of the following year, eventually moving on to Port Jackson and establishing the colony there.

Thus began a period of some 60 years of transporting convicts to Australia, until 1850. During that period, more than 162,000 convicts were relocated to the continent. As can be imagined, this required a flotilla of ships, numbering over 800, however, the ship Success was not one of them!


The Success was built in 1840 in Burma for the East Indian trading firm of Cockerell and Co., for the purpose of trade between the Orient and England. She had a length of 135 feet, a beam of 30 feet, and weighed 622 tons net. After some voyages for that purpose, her owners turned her to the task of carrying families emigrating to Australia, which she began doing in 1843. After her third such voyage in 1852, she was abandoned by her crew, who succumbed to “gold fever” and left sailing to try their hands in the gold fields of Victoria.

The ship was then sold to the Victorian government, which wanted to use the Success as a “prison hulk,” or a floating prison. This was the ship’s fate from 1860 until 1869; first as a women’s prison, and later as sleeping quarters for a boys’ reformatory, until the Australian government discontinued the use of vessels for detention, due to the inhumanity of the practice. After a stint as a warehouse for storing powder and ammunition, the Success was sold to a UK company, after which her whereabouts are uncertain for a period of time.

In 1891, the ship was made into a floating “convict ship” museum, with a wax museum and exhibits depicting the terrible conditions of the convict transports, along with exhibits of torture devices, presumably for the purpose of increasing attendance. A man named Harry Power was the tour guide on these port-to-port stops; this is notable because Mr. Power was a resident on the Success as a convicted felon at one point! His career as tour guide was ill-fated, however, as he drowned on a fishing trip later that year.

The Success did not fare any better, as she was not successful as a maritime museum, and was scuttled at her moorings in 1892. She was sold to a new owner and refloated the following year, again working as the museum ship, touring the Australia ports. In 1895, she went abroad, touring Great Britain ports to great crowds until 1910, when she was sold to American Captain D. H. Smith.

On April 10, 1912, she sailed from Liverpool toward the U.S.—the same day that the Titanic left her port on her final voyage. Tens of millions of visitors toured the Success from 1912 until the early 1940s, including her last tour on the Great Lakes beginning in 1923 (she was featured at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933).

Unfortunately, many of the exhibits and pamphlets and postcards used to promote the museum were based on exaggerations and sometimes outright falsehoods. One particularly durable inaccuracy was the claim that the Success was a convict transport ship, when, in fact, she never served in that capacity. Another was the exploitation of the “Kelly Gang,” who were notorious Australian outlaws, but had no connection to the ship other than the fact that one of the gang’s father emigrated on the ship. In other editions of the pamphlets, the gang’s ringleader was supposedly the one who arrived on the Success, and manufactured arguments and trials were also published. The amount and persuasiveness of the inaccuracies were so great that in 1934, the Commonwealth of Australia instructed its own Attorney General to investigate the claims and set the record straight. A great website about the ship that contains the Australian A.G. report is http://www.ohioshipwrecks.org/ShipwreckDetail.php?AR=1&Wreck=15.


During the period of 1925-1943, while the Success toured the Great Lakes ports, a schoolteacher named Harry Van Stack was a frequent lecturer on the ship’s history and on the role of convict ships. By 1933, the Success had found a permanent home in Cleveland. When Mr. Van Stack relocated to Sandusky, he worked to have the ship towed there, as she had experienced a period of neglect and was showing her age. In 1945, her final owner, Walter Kolbe, had her towed to Port Clinton, where she was to be restored and permanently docked near the Erie Islands. However, this journey was the last for the Success. She ran aground near Port Clinton while under tow, and after the autumn storms in Lake Erie and the winter ice, she was not in good shape. On July 4, 1946, vandals burned the ship to the waterline while berthed at the Lake Erie Pier.


Mr. Van Stack’s final legacy regarding the Success was a generous and lasting one. He donated his entire collection of documents to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio. The collection includes early English penal documents, correspondence, news clippings, advertisements, brochures, postcards, and posters relating to the Success. The bulk of the material dates from 1925 to 1943, although some documents date to 1779. Additional documents are located in the National Library of Australia.