Creative History

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 b...

  The USS Stein , a Knox Class destroyer of the United States Navy, was on a special operations mission in the Pacific Ocean sometime in the summer of 1978. Named after Marine Corps Corporal Tony Stein of Dayton, Ohio who posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in combat during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, the USS Stein was first launched in December of 1970 and immediately assumed a prominent place among ships in the United States Pacific Fleet. The Stein was unique among vessels at the time because it was equipped with the most state of the art sonar equipment in the world and it was deployed by the Navy to listen for the tell-tale sonar signatures of Soviet nuclear submarines at the height of the Cold War. Somewhere on its mission between Mexico and El Salvador the USS Stein had a terrifying encounter.  Unexpectedly, the ship was felt to rock from side to side and almost instantaneously the ship’s highly advanced sonar equipme...