Pink
The final bullet on the list of things which had to be done to retrofit the boat Jessica would be using for her journey is: “Everything painted in glorious shades of pink.” That retrofitted vessel would start off with the name Pink Lady before becoming Ella’s Pink Lady in honor of a sponsor. The hull of the boat is painted pink and that is not where it ends. Pink crops up throughout the narrative in ways related to other things beside the boat in ways that ultimately situate it as a symbol of gender and age. It is not just traditionally symbolic of innocent femininity, however. It is also a symbol of the subversion of traditional male dominance of sailing. That vivid pink boat is a shock to the system in its symbolic status as a message to the world saying, look what this young girl in a pink boat did that Ferdinand Magellan actually did not do.
The Albatross
Traditionally, the albatross is a bird used as a symbol of an especially heavy burden weighing on a person to the point of feeling like a curse. Once again, Jessica subverts the conventional notion of these extraordinary creatures capable of flying enormous distances without exhausting their energy or capabilities. This should only make sense, of course, since the albatross becomes a symbol of Jessica herself. The albatrosses she witnesses flying represents herself on her voyage. Like the birds, she is lonely and isolated from the rest of the world, but she also enjoys stretching her wings and pushing the limits of endurance.
Chocolate
The very idea of an extended supply of chocolate on a trip around the world seems the stuff of fantasy, and fantasy is exactly what chocolate represents. The juxtaposition between the survival mode of sailing around the world in a boat alone and the decadence of chocolate is jarring. With such limited storage space on a boat leaving little left over once you have the necessities and the emergency materials, chocolates seem like something that should be on the very bottom of the list of supplies. Chocolate candy, chocolate pancakes, and hot chocolate are, of course, very traditional “comfort items” at home, and that is exactly what they are symbols of on the boat: the comfort of home.
Trashy Novels
Sailing around the world is boring. Generally, Jessica is a fan of adventures books, but she finds herself turning to what she terms “trashy novels” as her preferred reading material. As she explains, when your whole day is spent thinking about one thing, the last thing you want to read about is that thing. So, rather than reading books about sailing, she throws herself into the “trashy” worlds depicted in these novels that are as far away from the isolation of the ocean as possible. Within this specific use, this reading material comes to act as a symbol of the necessity of imaginative escapism as means of withstanding the tortures of monotony. It is easy to imagine Jessica’s state of mind being corrupted by reading stories that too closely replicated her experience. The mind is susceptible to projection of fears created by the experiences of others.
Ella’s Pink Lady
Ella’s Pink Lady is literally the vessel on which Jessica takes a voyage around the world. As a symbol, it is the transport which conveys her from childhood to adulthood. She is an adolescent during the voyage and that is the period of life which covers this gradual process. The solo trip shrinks that longer timeline down to the period between leaving Sydney harbor as an innocent girl and returning to Sydney as an experienced woman.
