Sealed with a Cork of Ice: The Legend of the Frozen Ghost Ship Jenny

A ship caught in a bottle/ becalmed in time/ and still sealed with a cork of ice.

-from the poem The Ship of Ice by Rosemary Dobson 

The last entry in the logbook of the whale ship Jenny reads, “May 4, 1823.  No food for 71 days.  I am the only one left alive.”

In September of 1840, over seventeen years after that chilling logbook entry was written, another whale ship, this one ironically named Hope, was sailing through the Drake Passage, the narrow body of water that separates Chile’s Cape Horn, South America’s southernmost point, from the Shetland Islands of Antarctica when it unexpectedly happened across the wreck of the Jenny frozen in ice and lost to history.

When the Jenny was discovered frozen in the Drake Passage, stuck forever in the immovable ice on the edge of Antarctica, the Captain who wrote that message in a trembling script was found still sitting upright in his chair with pen in hand.  Frozen in time along with the body of the Captain was the body of a woman at his side, assumed to be his wife’s, and that of a German shepherd.  The bodies of the crew of the Jenny, still clothed in the coats they wore in death and appearing exactly as they had nearly two decades before, were also found frozen in place where they had died nearly twenty years ago.

The story of the frozen ghost ship Jenny was first reported on in print in an 1862 edition of the German magazine Globus.  During the nineteenth century Globus had been a popular German science and travel magazine, a sort of German National Geographic of its day, both widely read and well respected by many.  The author of the article that reported on the discovery of the frozen ghost ship Jenny remained anonymous, and was not given a byline for his work, though he claimed to have been a member of the crew of the British whaler Hope in September of 1840.

Mid-nineteenth century copy of Globus

According to the article in Globus as the Hope sailed through the Drake Passage the crew caught sight of a battered old ship, which they supposed to be a wreck and empty, lodged in an enormous ice wall near King George Island.  However, as the Hope drifted closer to the ice wall it began to appear as if the battered ship they had stumbled upon was in fact fully manned.  It seemed as if crew members were standing at attention on deck and ready to hail the approaching Hope.

But as the Hope pulled astride the battered ship that had one side stuck in the ice, to the horror of all on board, the crew of the Hope quickly realized that what they were seeing weren’t men standing at attention on deck, but clothed corpses permanently frozen in place by the frigid sub-zero arctic temperatures of the Drake Passage.

Captain Brighton of the Hope along with an adventurous boarding party went onto the deck of the frozen ghost ship in the ice and that’s where they discovered the logbook and Captain of the Jenny still at his desk with pen hand where he had sat frozen in time for over seventeen years.

The captain of the Hope, Captain Brighton, upon returning to  England is reported to have told all who would listen that he, “peered into the face of the Captain of the Jenny just as if he were alive.”

Artist's Depiction of the Frozen Whale Ship Jenny

According to its logbook the whale ship Jenny had left its home port on the Isle of Wight in early 1822 and sailed south of the equator on its whaling mission later that same year.  It appears that sometime during 1823 while attempting to sail back around Cape Horn to return home the Jenny had become trapped in ice floes off the Shetland Islands where it remained stuck for seventeen years until being rediscovered by the crew of the Hope in September of 1840.

It is believed that the crewmen of the Hope, horrified by the frozen ghost ship that they had stumbled upon, buried all bodies discovered still frozen intact aboard the Jenny unceremoniously at sea including that of the Captain, his wife and their dog, by throwing them overboard before lighting the decrepit hulk of the ghost ship on fire and burning it to cinders.

Some stories involving the Jenny say that, not wishing to disturb what they had found stuck in the ice and somehow bring a curse down upon them all, that Captain Brighton and the Hope left everything and everyone they found aboard the Jenny intact and simply sailed away, leaving the ship frozen in ice where they had originally unwittingly stumbled upon it.

Period Whale Ship Believed to be the Hope

Prior to appearing in print in 1862 in an issue of the German magazine Globus stories of sea lore involving the Jenny as told by sailors aboard whale ships around the world indicated that the Jenny was still stuck in place where it had first been sighted by the crew of the Hope, but that the hulk of the ship had once again become entombed in the ice floes near the Shetland Islands and was no longer visible to any passing ships that happened to be adventurous enough to journey that far south in the Arctic Ocean.

Oddly enough, the logbook of the frozen ghost ship Jenny has never been found and may have been incinerated in the fire that was lit by the crew of the whale ship Hope, or perhaps, Captain Brighton simply left it where he had discovered it in 1840.  Since there is no physical evidence of the Jenny which still remains, many believe the story as reported on in Globus in 1862 was entirely fictional.

Some believe that, to this day, the Jenny with all hands aboard still roams the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean as a ghost ship, or that it remains, somewhere still frozen in the ice and lost to time immemorial, waiting to be rediscovered to the horror of another seafaring crew like the crew of the whale ship Hope in 1840. 

Whether fact or fiction the legend behind the frozen ghost ship Jenny lives on. Australian poet Rosemary Dobson, whose poem is quoted at the beginning of this article, won the Sydney Morning Herald’s award for best new book of poems by an Australian poet in 1948 for her work entitled The Ship of Ice and Other Poems which gave a harrowing literary account of the discovery of the Jenny by the whale ship Hope.  

And in 1960 the United Kingdom’s Antarctic Place-Names Committee named an enormous rock that overlooks King George Island, the largest of the South Shetland Islands lying approximately 100 miles off the coast of Antarctica, Jenny’s Buttress in honor of the legendary ship.