The Flying Dutchman - The Most Famous Ghost ShipFlying Dutchman is the famous ghost ship cursed to roam the seas endlessly and strikes terror into the hearts of sailors who have seen it.
Sailors can entertain the enthusiasts of legends and folklore with many eerie tales of the deep. There is the myth of the Kraken, the enormous sea monster said to lurk within the depths, feeding off passing ships with its massive tentacles. There is the myth of the giant sea of weed, the Sargasso Sea, where hundreds of ships are said to have become trapped in the motionless waters, the crew dying a slow death from thirst and starvation. However, of all the stories of mysteries of the oceans, nothing causes such terror as the sighting of a phantom ship, and none is more well-known than the Flying Dutchman.
The ship was immortalized by Wagner in his opera, the Flying Dutchman. The vessel was originally a seventeenth-century brig, capable and seaworthy, and owned by an unscrupulous and greedy captain.
Captain van der Decken was reputed to have set sail in the accursed ship from its home port of Amsterdam bound for the East Indies. Here he hoped to pick up a valuable cargo to sell in Europe and make his fortune. Legend has it that the ship was battered so badly by gales off the Cape of Good Hope that the ship's sails were torn off, she began taking in water and the rudder was badly damaged. The gales blew day after day, says the legend; then the unfortunate mariner is said to have been visited by the Devil himself.
Satan posed van der Decken with a challenge. Was he prepared to earn his patronage by challenging God and setting sail into the eye of the storm? The Dutchman did so, and he was never seen again... however, his ship has been. It had been doomed to roam the seas for eternity because of the captain's punishment for having taken up the Devil's challenge.
Sceptics say this alone is sufficient to prove that the entire affair is hogwash, the work of over-active minds feeding on a legend, which they've changed into reality. However, a look at the number of sightings of the Flying Dutchman through the years does pose the question, is it true?
The second part of the curse on the phantom vessel - that those who see it will come to grief has frequently come frighteningly true. There were many sightings of a glowing phantom ship on oceans as far apart as the Pacific and the Arctic throughout the nineteenth century. Penny journals of the day regaled their readers with lurid stories of sailors who went mad after looking at the ghostly, glowing apparition. But the sightings in July 1881 by the man who was to become King George V of England gave credence to the believers.
On 11 July of that year, sixteen-year-old Prince George recorded this historical entry in his logbook aboard HMS lnconstant as she sailed off the coast of Australia. He wrote:
At 4.00 am the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. She emitted a strange, phosphorescent light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the mast, spars and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief, as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle, but on arriving there no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm.
Thirteen others aboard witnessed the eerie sight and like the curse of the pharaohs, destined to strike down those who disturbed the tombs of the long-dead rulers of ancient Egypt, so the curse of the cursed ship looked as if it would come true. Later that day the sailor who had first noticed the phantom ship fell to his demise; the fleet admiral died shortly afterwards, and many of the sailors on board became unwell.
In all, there are over three dozen reported sightings of the phantom ship, many of them in the Cape of Good Hope region, where she is supposed to have defied God and sailed on into the storms. One of the most abnormal sightings came not from sea, but land, in 1942 at Moule Point, Cape Town. A family relaxing on the terrace of their house watched as an old sailing ship in full sail moved into view heading for Table Bay. All four testify that they saw it for a full fifteen minutes before it slunk into the shelter of Robben Island, and vanished, leaving an incandescent glow.
A similar sighting had taken place three years previously, when almost 100 bathers at Glen Cairn Beach in False Bay testified seeing the brig, in full sail once more, floating gently across the water, even though there was no wind at all that day. As they gazed at it, it vanished.
There was one additional sighting since then, over 300 kilometres up the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa in 1957, when a party reported seeing an old-fashioned ship drifting eerily across the horizon. It vanished before they'd time to realize what they had seen. Fact or fiction? Many would argue that the word of the future king of England was good enough. Others say that the 'illusions' were created by the play of light on water. The mystery goes on.
Holland is not the only nation to spawn a 'Flying Dutchman' legend. Britain has one in the form of a schooner known as the Lady Lovibond, wrecked on the 'ships' graveyard' of the Goodwin Sands, which has claimed the lives of 254 vessels through the years. Legend has it that the mate on the ship, inflamed with jealousy - because he was in love with the woman who had recently married the captain intentionally steered the ship to its doom on the infamous sandbanks in the English Channel, killing everybody, including himself. That happened on 13 February 1748; and on 13 February 1798, a schooner just like the Lady Lovibond was shipwrecked at the same spot. The vision of a shipwreck was seen precisely fifty years later; however, since then... nothing.
This is another mystery that the waves will shroud eternally.
