The fate of a merchant ship owned by the Dutch East India Company, which went missing off the Cape of Good Hope in 1641, was the source of increasingly more lurid tales. By May 1821, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine was telling how its captain, Van der Decken, after searching vainly for the Cape and caught in a storm, swore that he would round it, even if it took until doomsday. The ship was condemned to sail the seven seas for eternity either as punishment meted out by an angel for his blasphemy or because he had made a pact with the devil to survive the storm.
The Flying Dutchman, a ship that seemed to come out of the horizon sailing on air, became a harbinger of doom. According to some, its ghostly crew would crowd on to the deck, waving letters to be delivered to their, by now long lost, relatives, which, if accepted, would bring misfortune. Some seafarers believed that if they saw it, they too would never reach land again.
The first record of a sighting of The Flying Dutchman appeared in John MacDonald’s Travels in various parts of Europe, Asia and Africa (1790), but perhaps the most famous occurred at 4am on July 11, 1881 somewhere in the Bass Strait between Melbourne and Sydney. On board HMS Inconstant were Prince George of Wales, the future George V and his brother, Prince Albert Victor of Wales.
In their joint diary they recorded that The Flying Dutchman crossed their bows. “A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow” The quarterdeck midshipman was sent to the forecastle “but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon”.
In all, thirteen members of the crew reported seeing it. Inevitably, tragedy struck. “At 10.45 am”, they reported, “the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms”.
Members of the British navy off the Cape of Good Hope on January 26, 1923 saw a phantom derelict ship, luminous with two masts and a thin mist where the sails would have been. Second Officer Bennett later reported the incident to Sir Ernest Bennett, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, who included an account in his book Apparitions and Haunted Houses: A Survey of the Evidence (1934).
Landlubbers were also gripped by the myth. Heinrich Hesse romanticised the story in From the Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski (1831) by allowing the captain to go ashore once every seven years to try to gain his freedom by winning the hand of an unsullied maiden, a version Richard Wagner used for his opera, Die Fliegende Holländer (1840), van Derdeeken and Senta being the protagonists.
Despite its association with seafaring disaster, curiously, the first steamship to enter the Stikine River in British Columbia in 1862 was called The Flying Dutchman. It was also the name of an express steam locomotive which from 1849 until 1892 ran between London and Bristol and of an English thoroughbred racehorse which won all but one of its fifteen races between 1848 and 1851.
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