Flying Dutchman

For other uses, see Flying Dutchman (disambiguation).

The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The myth is likely to have originated from 17th-century nautical folklore. The oldest extant version dates to the late 18th century. Sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries reported the ship to be glowing with ghostly light. If hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman will try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is a portent of doom.

Origins

The first reference in print to the ship appears in Chapter VI of A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795) (also known as A Voyage to New South Wales), attributed to George Barrington (1755–1804):

I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions and doom, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a Dutch man-of-war was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition.

The next literary reference, which introduces the motif of punishment for a crime, was in John Leyden (1775–1811): Scenes of Infancy (Edinburgh, 1803):

It is a common superstition of mariners, that, in the high southern latitudes on the coast of Africa, hurricanes are frequently ushered in by the appearance of a spectre-ship, denominated the Flying Dutchman ... The crew of this vessel are supposed to have been guilty of some dreadful crime, in the infancy of navigation; and to have been stricken with pestilence ... and are ordained still to traverse the ocean on which they perished, till the period of their penance expire.

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) in his poem Written on passing Dead-man's Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Late in the evening, September, 1804 places the vessel in the north Atlantic: "Fast gliding along, a gloomy bark / Her sails are full, though the wind is still, / And there blows not a breath her sails to fill." A footnote adds: "The above lines were suggested by a superstition very common among sailors, who call this ghost-ship, I think, 'the flying Dutch-man'."

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), a friend of John Leyden's, was the first to refer to the vessel as a pirate ship, writing in the notes to Rokeby; a poem (first published December 1812) that the ship was "originally a vessel loaded with great wealth, on board of which some horrid act of murder and piracy had been committed" and that the apparition of the ship "is considered by the mariners as the worst of all possible omens."

According to some sources, the 17th century Dutch captain Bernard Fokke is the model for the captain of the ghost ship. Fokke was renowned for the speed of his trips from the Netherlands to Java and was suspected of being in league with the Devil. The first version of the legend as a story was printed, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for May 1821, which puts the scene as the Cape of Good Hope. This story introduces the name Captain Hendrick Vanderdecken for the captain and the motifs (elaborated by later writers) of letters addressed to people long dead being offered to other ships for delivery, but if accepted will bring misfortune; and the captain having sworn to round the Cape of Good Hope though it should take until the day of judgment.

She was an Amsterdam vessel and sailed from port seventy years ago. Her master's name was Van der Decken. He was a staunch seaman, and would have his own way in spite of the devil. For all that, never a sailor under him had reason to complain; though how it is on board with them nobody knows. The story is this: that in doubling the Cape they were a long day trying to weather the Table Bay. However, the wind headed them, and went against them more and more, and Van der Decken walked the deck, swearing at the wind. Just after sunset a vessel spoke him, asking him if he did not mean to go into the bay that night. Van der Decken replied: "May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the day of judgment. And to be sure, he never did go into that bay, for it is believed that he continues to beat about in these seas still, and will do so long enough. This vessel is never seen but with foul weather along with her".

Reported sightings

There have been many reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries. One was by Prince George of Wales, the future King George V. During his late adolescence, in 1880, with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales, he was on a three-year voyage with their tutor John Neill Dalton, temporarily shipped into HMS Inconstant after the damaged rudder in their original ship, the 4,000-tonne corvette Bacchante was repaired. In the pre-dawn hours of 11 July 1881, off the coast of Australia in the Bass Strait between Melbourne and Sydney, the princes' log (indeterminate as to which prince, due to later editing before publication) records:

July 11th. At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our 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, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once 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, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her ... At 10.45 a.m. 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.

Explanations as an optical illusion

Main articles: Mirage, Fata Morgana (mirage), and Looming and similar refraction phenomena

Probably the most credible explanation is a superior mirage or Fata Morgana seen at sea.

Book illustration showing superior mirages of two boats

The news soon spread through the vessel that a phantom-ship with a ghostly crew was sailing in the air over a phantom-ocean, and that it was a bad omen, and meant that not one of them should ever see land again. The captain was told the wonderful tale, and coming on deck, he explained to the sailors that this strange appearance was caused by the reflection of some ship that was sailing on the water below this image, but at such a distance they could not see it. There were certain conditions of the atmosphere, he said, when the sun's rays could form a perfect picture in the air of objects on the earth, like the images one sees in glass or water, but they were not generally upright, as in the case of this ship, but reversed—turned bottom upwards. This appearance in the air is called a mirage. He told a sailor to go up to the foretop and look beyond the phantom-ship. The man obeyed, and reported that he could see on the water, below the ship in the air, one precisely like it. Just then another ship was seen in the air, only this one was a steamship, and was bottom-upwards, as the captain had said these mirages generally appeared. Soon after, the steamship itself came in sight. The sailors were now convinced, and never afterwards believed in phantom-ships.

Another optical effect, known as looming, occurs when rays of light are bent across different refractive indices. This could make a ship just off the horizon appear hoisted in the air.

Adaptations

There is a 20-foot one-design high-performance two-person monohull racing dinghy named the Flying Dutchman (FD). It made its Olympic debut at the 1960 Olympics Games and is still one of the fastest racing dinghies in the world.

In artworks and design

The Flying Dutchman has been captured in paintings by Albert Ryder, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and by Howard Pyle, an artist famous for illustrations of pirates.

Dutch artist Joyce Overheul also adapted the name of The Flying Dutchman onto her crochet pattern designs (The Flying Dutchman Crochet Design), resembling the similarity of her designs 'roaming' the world just like the ghost ship once did.

Flying Dutchman Tobacco was a popular blend for pipes and smoking. Many of their tins are still readily collected by those who appreciate packaging art and design.

In television series and manga

• The Flying Dutchman is a recurring character on the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series Spongebob Squarepants, although he is drawn resembling a famous pirate, Edward Teach, best known as Blackbeard. He is often in episodes that deal with repentance of wrongdoings and moral judgement.
• Carl Barks wrote and drew a 1959 comic book story where Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie meet the Flying Dutchman.
• In Eiichiro Oda's manga One Piece Vander Decken is the Flying Dutchman's captain.
• In Soul Eater, the Flying Dutchman is the soul of the ghost ship.
• In the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon episode "Return Of The Flying Dutchman" the legend of the Flying Dutchman is used by Spider-Man's enemy Mysterio to frighten villagers and plunder their wealth.
• In a 1976 episode of Land of the Lost, the Marshalls discover the captain of a mysterious ship that appears in "the mist". Later in the episode it is discovered that the ship is the Flying Dutchman.
• In the Simpsons animated series, Captain Horatio McCallister or just simply The Sea Captain is a sea captain and owner of The Frying Dutchman Restaurant.
• An episode of Night Gallery, hosted by Rod Serling, features a shipwrecked survivor who claims he is a Flying Dutchman. He appears to the crews of several famously doomed ships before they sank such as the Titanic and the Lusitania.
• An episode called "The Arrival" (written by Rod Serling) of the TV series The Twilight Zone depicts an airplane that arrives at a busy airport. The airplane is discovered to have no crew, passengers, or luggage. At the tail end of the prior episode ("Two") Rod Serling advertises "The Arrival" as a retelling of the Flying Dutchman tale. It also gets a mention in the closing narration of the episode Death Ship.
• In an episode of Supernatural a ghost ship heralds the death of the victims of a first mate's ghost. The ship is compared to the Flying Dutchman by one of the characters.
• The pilot of White Collar (2009) sees the protagonist figure out the FBI cannot track a suspect and have given him the nickname "The Dutchman", and a link to the ship is made.
• In the second season Xena: Warrior Princess episode "Lost Mariner", the Flying Dutchman motif is merged into Greek mythology, presenting the wanderer as a hero who offended the sea-god Poseidon.

In film

The story was dramatised in the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, starring James Mason (who plays the Dutch Captain Hendrick van der Zee) and Ava Gardner (who plays Pandora). In this version, the Flying Dutchman is a man, not a ship. The two-hour long film, scripted by its director Albert Lewin, sets the main action on the Mediterranean coast of Spain during the summer of 1930. Centuries earlier the Dutchman had killed his wife, wrongly believing her to be unfaithful. Providence condemned him to roam the seas until he found the true meaning of love. In the only plot device taken from earlier versions of the story, once every seven years the Dutchman is allowed ashore for six months to search for a woman who will love him enough to die for him, releasing him from his curse, and he finds her in Pandora.

In Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films, the ship made its first appearance in Dead Man's Chest (2006) under the command of the fictional captain, Davy Jones. The story and attributes of the ship were inspired by the actual Flying Dutchman of nautical lore.

In literature

The 1797–98 poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, contains a similar account of a ghost ship, which may have been influenced by the tale of the Flying Dutchman. One of the first "Flying Dutchman" short stories was titled "Vanderdecken's Message Home; or, the Tenacity of Natural Affection" and was published in Blackwood's during 1821.

This story was adapted in the English melodrama The Flying Dutchman; or the Phantom Ship: a Nautical Drama, in three acts (1826) by Edward Fitzball (1792–1873), music by George Rodwell, and the novel The Phantom Ship (1839) by Frederick Marryat. This in turn was later adapted as Het Vliegend Schip (The Flying Ship) by the Dutch clergyman, A. H. C. Römer. In Marryat's version, Terneuzen, in the Netherlands, is described as the home of the captain, who is called Van der Decken (of the decks).

The Edgar Allan Poe short story MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) recounts a story of a shipwreck survivor who finds himself on an ancient ship with an aged and listless crew. The descriptions of the ship mirror the Flying Dutchman legend.

Another adaptation was The Flying Dutchman on Tappan Sea by Washington Irving (1855), in which the captain is named Ramhout van Dam. Irving had already used the story (based on Moore's poem) in his Bracebridge Hall (1822). Hedvig Ekdal describes visions of the Flying Dutchman from the books she reads in the attic in Henrik Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" (1884).

John Boyle O'Reilly's The Flying Dutchman was first published in The Wild Goose, a handwritten newspaper produced by Fenian convicts being transported to Western Australia in 1867.

British author Brian Jacques wrote a trilogy of fantasy/young adult novels concerning two reluctant members of the Dutchman's crew, a young boy and his dog, who were swept off the ship by a wave on the night the ship was cursed; however, the same angel who pronounced the curse on the ship and crew appeared to them and blessed them, charging them to help those in need . The first novel was titled Castaways of the Flying Dutchman and was first published by Puffin Books in 2001. The second was titled The Angel's Command and was released by Puffin in 2003. The third and final book of the trilogy (due to Jacques' death in 2011) was titled Voyage of Slaves and was released by Puffin in 2006.

In the novel The Flying Dutchman (2013) by the Russian novelist Anatoly Kudryavitsky, the ghost ship rebuilds itself from an old barge abandoned on the bank of a big Russian river, and offers itself as a refuge to a persecuted musicologist.

The comic fantasy Flying Dutch by Tom Holt is a version of the Flying Dutchman story. In this version, the Dutchman is not a ghost ship but crewed by immortals who can only visit land once every seven years when the unbearable smell that is a side-effect of the elixir of life wears off.

The Roger Zelazny short story "And Only I Am Escaped To Tell thee" tells of a sailor who escapes from the Flying Dutchman and is rescued by sailors who welcome him to the Mary Celeste.

Ward Moore in his 1951 story "Flying Dutchman" used the myth as a metaphor for an automated bomber plane which continues to fly over an Earth where humanity long since totally destroyed itself and all life in a nuclear war.

Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, "Dutchman", uses the metaphor of ship-lost-at-sea to express the way White liberal America has alienated African Americans in their own country.

In opera and theatre

Richard Wagner's opera, The Flying Dutchman (1843) is adapted from an episode in Heinrich Heine's satirical novel The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski (Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski) (1833), in which a character attends a theatrical performance of The Flying Dutchman in Amsterdam. Heine had first briefly used the legend in his Reisebilder: Die Nordsee (Pictures of Travel: the North Sea) (1826), which simply repeats from Blackwood's Magazine the features of the vessel being seen in a storm and sending letters addressed to persons long since dead. In his 1833 elaboration, it was once thought that it may have been based on Fitzball's play, which was playing at the Adelphi Theatre in London, but the run had ended on 7 April 1827 and Heine did not arrive in London until the 14th. Heine was the first author to introduce the chance of salvation through a woman's devotion and the opportunity to set foot on land every seven years to seek a faithful wife. This imaginary play, unlike Fitzball's play, which has the Cape of Good Hope location, in Heine's account is transferred to the North Sea off Scotland. Wagner's opera was similarly planned to take place off the coast of Scotland, although during the final rehearsals he transferred the action to another part of the North Sea, off Norway.

The opera's overture would later become the signature theme for Captain Video and His Video Rangers, one of television's earliest children's potboiler series.

Pierre-Louis Dietsch composed an opera Le vaisseau fantôme, ou Le maudit des mers ("The Phantom Ship, or The Accursed of the Sea"), which was first performed on 9 November 1842 at the Paris Opera. The libretto by Paul Foucher and H. Révoil was based on Walter Scott's The Pirate as well as Captain Marryat's The Phantom Ship and other sources, alough Wagner thought it was based on the scenario of his own opera, which he had just sold to the Opera. The similarity of Dietsch's opera to Wagner's is slight, although Wagner's assertion is often repeated. Berlioz thought Le vaisseau fantôme too solemn, but other reviewers were more favourable.

Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) wrote the play "Dutchman" in 1964. The play's abstract nature makes it difficult to draw a direct correlation between it and the myth, but its emphasis on fate and doom recasts themes of the legend in terms of race relations in the contemporary United States.

In music

• In 1949 RCA Victor, inventors of the single 45 RPM format, released as one of their first 45s a recording of the legend in song in bandleader Hugo Winterhalter's "The Flying Dutchman", sung as a sea shanty.
• Jethro Tull refer to the Flying Dutchman on their 1979 album Stormwatch.
• Tori Amos refers to the Flying Dutchman in her 1992 single B side "Flying Dutchman", the A side being "China". It was re-released in 2012 on her album Gold Dust and performed on The Gold Dust Orchestral Tour.
• Jimmy Buffett refers to the Flying Dutchman in his 1995 song "Remittance Man" on the album Barometer Soup.
• Rufus Wainwright refers to the Flying Dutchman in his song "Flying Dutchman" on the album Poses.
• Carach Angren wrote a concept album about the Flying Dutchman entitled Death Came Through a Phantom Ship.
• God Dethroned, a Dutch death metal band, featured the song "Soul Capture 1562" about the Flying Dutchman on their album Bloody Blasphemy.
• In the 1969 classic self-titled album by The Band, the Flying Dutchman was referenced in the song "Rockin' Chair".
• Iron Maiden a Heavy Metal band produced a song titled, "Rime of The Ancient Mariner" which is loosely based on the poem of the same name, and is in reference to the, "Flying Dutchman" tale.

In video games

The Flying Dutchman is a cheat unit in the original Age of Empires computer game. It is a ship that can travel on both land and sea.

In the 1993 multiplatform game Alone in the Dark 2, fictional detective Edward Carnby investigates a missing girl who he discovers has been kidnapped by the undead One-Eyed Jack who, in the game, is captain of the undead crew of The Flying Dutchman.

In amusement park

The Efteling amusement park in the Netherlands has a roller coaster called The Flying Dutchman which features a character named Willem van der Decken.

Worlds of Fun amusement park in Kansas City, Missouri has a swinging boat ride called The Flying Dutchman.

In aviation

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines references the endless traveling aspect of the famous story by having Flying Dutchman painted on its numerous aircraft below the cockpit and to the right of the nose.

In education

The nickname of Lebanon Valley College is the Flying Dutchmen, and its mascot the Flying Dutchman. The nickname references the college's location in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

See also

• Peter Rugg
• Wandering Jew
• Wild Hunt
• List of ghosts
• Faust
• Stingy Jack

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Barrington, George (2004) [1795], Voyage to Botany Bay, Sydney University Press, ISBN 1-920897-20-8
• Meyer-Arendt, Jurgen (1995) [1972], Introduction to Modern and Classical Optics, Prentice-Hall, Inc., ISBN 0-13-124356-X

External links

• Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, May 1821
• On the history and sightings of the Flying Dutchman
• Mainly about Wagner's possible sources
• Melodramatic Possessions: The Flying Dutchman, South Africa and the Imperial Stage ca. 1830
• The Phantom Ship by Marryat at Project Gutenberg
• USA premiere of 1841 critical edition of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman at Boston Lyric Opera, April & May 2013
• The legend of the Flying Dutchman
• "The Flying Dutchman, Harbinger of Watery Doom" article on Atlas Obscura