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 b...