Schooner Jenny

The "Jenny" was a British schooner that reportedly became frozen in an ice-barrier of the Drake Passage in 1823, only to be rediscovered years later by a whaling ship, the bodies onboard being preserved by the Antarctic cold. The original report has been deemed "unsubstantiated"cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2UPdt-wpySAC
chapter="A Place of Ideals in Conflict": Images of Antarctica in Australian Literature
author=Elizabeth Leane
title=The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and Their Writers
editor=C. A. Cranston, Robert Zeller
year=2007
publisher=Rodopi
isbn=9042022183] , but the story has become a fixture of Antarctic sea-lore, and inspired a noted Australian poem.

According to the account, the ghost ship was discovered by Captain Brighton of the whaler "Hope" on September 22nd, 1840, after having been locked in the ice for 17 years. The party that boarded the ship found the last log entry by the captain, which read:

:"May 4 1823. No food for 71 days. I am the only one left alive."

The last port of call had been Lima, Peru. The cold had preserved the ship. The captain was found sitting in a chair with the pen still in his hand. The "Jenny" had seven people aboard, including one woman, and a dog.

The crew of the "Hope" buried the bodies at sea, and Brighton passed the account on to the Admiralty in London.

The "Jenny" is commemorated by the Jenny Buttress, a feature on King George Island near Melville Peak, named by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee in 1960. [cite web
url=http://aadc-maps.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/display_name.cfm?gaz_id=127087
title=Jenny Buttress
work=Antarctic Gazetteer
publisher=Australian Antarctic Data Centre
accessdate=2008-03-31]

Australian poet Rosemary Dobson wrote about the story in her poem "The Ship of Ice" published in her "The Ship of Ice with other poems" in 1948, which won the Sydney Morning Herald award for poetry that year. [cite web
url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms4955
title=Papers of Rosemary Dobson
publisher=National Library of Australia
accessdate=2007-07-13] Dobson's poem places the discovery of the "Jenny" in 1860, adding 20 years to the period of entrapment. The poem speaks of her as a "ship caught in a bottle / [....] / Becalmed in Time and sealed with a cork of ice". According to Dobson, her source was the anonymous report "The Drift of the Jenny, 1823-1840".

Popular Culture

*This ship and it's context is seemingly one of the inspirations for the setting events in Tardi's graphic novel, Le démon des glaces ("The Demon of Ice"), 1974. Set in 1889, a passenger carrying loafer named "L'Anjou" passing the Barents Sea has an (as it turns out) fatal encounter with a strange, ghostly ship which is somehow stranded on the top of a huge iceberg. The ship is called "The Iceland Loafer", and when the crew of L´Anjou enters it by ascending the iceberg, the full crew of the loafer is found as mentioned above, including the captain in his cabin, mysteriously pointing in his frozen state to a certain point on his naval map (where they actually are). Immediately here after, their mother ship, L´Anjou is blown up in front of their eyes, and they're now stranded on the ghost ship... another inspiration could be the vessel Octavius or (less possible) the strange case of Mary Celeste.

References

Further reading

* cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=qMvD_f3R4BEC&pg=PA273&ots=vM6mNacnrI&dq=schooner+jenny+antarctica&sig=ZanjtyT2MY5B2x_obso_clDgBdw#PPA273,M1
title=Seafaring Lore and

author=Peter D. Jeans
year=2004
publisher=McGraw-Hill Professional
* cite book
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=sAstAAAAMAAJ&q=schooner+jenny+antarctica&dq=schooner+jenny+antarctica
title=Antarctica: An Encyclopedia
publisher=McFarland
year=1990
author=John Stewart]
* Dobson, Rosemary,(1948) "The ship of ice : with other poems" Angus & Robertson, Sydney.