Jenny Up for Sale

After a brief exhibition at the Portsmouth Athenaeum, Jenny Lind went back into her specially built shipping crate for a trip to Connecticut. At Mystic Seaport she communed with dozens of fellow figureheads. She has been exhibited from Norway to New York. She has been featured with a full symphony orchestra. Jenny has her own DVD documentary. She has her own web site. She has a second book, this one in Swedish. She met the king of Sweden and appeared in National Geographic.

But was this Jenny Lind really part of the Clipper Nightingale? The jury is still out. The Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, VA has a Jenny Lind figurehead of its own. Another similar figurehead with long flowing hair was reportedly carved in Salem, MA for the clipper ship "Jenny Lind". You can buy a three-foot tall polyurethane molded foam version of that statue on eBay and paint it to suit your taste.

At a Portsmouth, NH reception, after uncrating the heavy statue, Svardskog in 2001 gazed at the now familiar image as it turned slowly on an automated pedestal. "She haunts me," he said. "She is like a ghost."

Jenny, like a ghost, did not respond.

Now after 16 years together, it may be time for Jenny and her promoter to part. Unlike the original singer, this Jenny brings in no income. Shipping her around the globe has cost Svardskog untold thousands of dollars. Has tracing her history and making headlines turned the Jenny figurehead into gold? Svardskog has asked Southeby’s auction house to put JennyLind on the block this fall. Will she sing for his supper or sink like the clipper ship Nightingale?

Copies of the book "Jenny Lind and the Clipper Nightingale Figurehead" by Karl-Eric Svardskog, are still available from the publisher at Peter Randall Publisher. http://www.PERPublisher.com