The Flying Dutchman

Of all the ghost stories told by sailors, none has travelled further than that of the Flying Dutchman: a Dutch East Indiaman, homeward bound, that tried to round the Cape of Good Hope in a howling gale and never made it. In the best-known telling the captain, refusing to turn back, swears he will round the Cape if he has to keep sailing until Doomsday – and is taken at his word. Ever since, the story goes, the ship has been glimpsed in the waters off southern Africa, under full sail in a dead calm or driving straight into the wind, sometimes glowing with a strange light. To see her was said to foretell disaster.

The legend grew out of a real and frightening stretch of sea. The Dutch East India Company’s route to Java ran round the Cape, where the cold Benguela and warm Agulhas currents meet and sudden storms wrecked many ships; the Portuguese had first called it the Cape of Storms. Popular accounts date the doomed voyage to 1641 and name the captain Hendrik van der Decken, but no captain of that name has been found in the records. Some writers have pointed instead to Bernard Fokke, a 17th-century Dutch skipper so fast on the run to the East Indies that rumour said he had a pact with the Devil.

In print the story is surprisingly young. The earliest known reference is in John MacDonald’s Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, published in 1790, which describes sailors on a stormy passage off the Cape claiming to have seen the Flying Dutchman. A version attributed to the transported pickpocket George Barrington (A Voyage to Botany Bay, 1795) is thought to be a publisher’s forgery. Walter Scott’s notes to Rokeby (1812) made the ship a pirate vessel cursed for its crimes, and in May 1821 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published the first full short story, naming the captain Hendrick van der Decken and adding the eerie detail of the crew trying to hand letters to passing ships, addressed to people long dead.

From there the Dutchman sailed into literature and music. Edward Fitzball staged an English melodrama in 1826; Heinrich Heine’s satirical version of 1833 gave the captain a chance of release through a woman’s faithful love; and Richard Wagner turned that idea into his opera Der fliegende Holländer, first performed in Dresden in 1843. Painters such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, novelists such as Frederick Marryat, and in recent decades the Pirates of the Caribbean films have all kept the ship afloat.

Sightings have been claimed into the 20th century. The most famous witness was a future king. In July 1881 Prince George – later George V – and his elder brother Prince Albert Victor were midshipmen on a Royal Navy squadron cruise, travelling in the flagship while their own ship, HMS Bacchante, was repaired. Their journal for 11 July, between Melbourne and Sydney, records that at 4 a.m. “the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows”: a brig some 200 yards off, lit by a strange red glow, which vanished when a midshipman ran forward to look. Thirteen people saw it, and later that morning the seaman who had first reported it was killed in a fall from the rigging. A much-repeated later story, usually dated 1939, tells of bathers near Glencairn and Simon’s Town watching a sailing ship cross False Bay and disappear; its details vary from book to book.

A sailing ship, often described as an old-fashioned square-rigger, seen under full canvas in calm weather or racing into a gale; a red or pale glow around it; the ship approaching on a collision course and then vanishing; in older tales, a boat lowered from the phantom with crewmen begging passing sailors to carry letters home.

Most traditionally off the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Point and False Bay, especially in stormy weather and at night or dawn. Later stories moved the ship around the world – off Australia, in the North Sea and on the Great Lakes – wherever sailors needed a phantom.

Wagner’s opera remains in the repertoire of opera houses worldwide. The legend inspired Frederick Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship (1839), Albert Pinkham Ryder’s painting in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the ship of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean. At Cape Point the funicular railway to the old lighthouse is named the Flying Dutchman, and the ghost ship is part of the Cape Peninsula’s tourist lore.