Mysterious Ship Disapperances By Tom Currie Sep 05, 2013 ZEBRINA The Zebrina was an anachronistic design, a three-masted sailing barge operating in the late years of World War I alongside oil-burning warships and early submarines. Advances in the development of ship rigging allowed the 189-ton Zebrina to operate with only five sailors. She ran a fairly simple course between England and France, so when the ship was found aground south of Cherbourg in good condition but completely lacking a crew, naval authorities were at a loss. The easy explanation was a U-boat attack. Common German practice was to allow merchant crews to board lifeboats or the U-boat itself before sinking the target with cannon fire, and it was assumed that a Royal Navy patrol had discovered and sunk the sub before it had the chance to destroy the Zebrina. This ignored several facts, chief among them that the captain’s log was still aboard and U-boat captains always claimed such documents as proof of their claim. At the height of the war, Allied commanders had little time to investigate the mystery, and the barge was subsequently broken up. Post-war research never definitively put a U-boat along the Zebrina’s course THE SCHOONER JENNY The Antarctic Circle has never been a safe or simple place to sail, and among the hundreds of tales of death and tragedy the story of the schooner Jenny is among the most disturbing. On September 22, 1860, the crew of the whaler Hope sighted a battered ship emerging from a gap between two icebergs, seven men seemingly standing at attention on the main deck. As the two ships drew nearer, the whaler’s crew saw that the men on deck were actually frozen solid, apparent victims of some freak storm that caught them in the open. Boarding the schooner, the Hope’s Captain Brighton made his way to the master’s cabin, where he found the Jenny’s captain apparently in the middle of writing a log entry. When the man failed to respond to conversation, Brighton discovered that he too was frozen stiff. The log’s final entry (“No food for 71 days. I am the only one left.”) was dated May 4, 1823, almost forty years prior.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:13:44 +0000
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