Flying Dutchman
The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port and doomed to sail the sea forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company and of Dutch maritime power. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a 17th-century cargo vessel known as a fluyt.
Origins
The first known print reference to the ship appears in Travels in various part of Europe, Asia and Africa during a series of thirty years and upward by John MacDonald:The next literary reference appears in Chapter VI of A Voyage to Botany Bay , attributed to George Barrington :
The next literary reference introduces the motif of punishment for a crime, in Scenes of Infancy by John Leyden :
Thomas Moore places the vessel in the north Atlantic in his poem Written on passing Dead-man's Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Late in the evening, September 1804: "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, a friend of John Leyden's, was the first to refer to the vessel as a pirate ship, writing in the notes to Rokeby 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". Scott notes that Leyden shared a similar legend, but that Leyden had named their crime not as piracy, but as being the first ship to bring enslaved people from Africa.
According to some sources, 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 names the Dutchman’s captain as Hendrick van der Decken and introduces the motifs 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.
Reported sightings
There have been many reported or alleged sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries. A well-known sighting was by Prince George of Wales, the future King George V. He was on a three-year voyage during his late adolescence in 1880 with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales and their tutor John Neill Dalton. They temporarily shipped into after the damaged rudder was repaired in their original ship, the 4,000-tonne corvette. The prince's log records the following for the pre-dawn hours of 11 July 1881, off the coast of Australia:Nicholas Monsarrat, the novelist who wrote The Cruel Sea, described the phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean in his unfinished final book "Master Mariner", which was partly inspired by this tale and the story of the Wandering Jew.
Explanations as an optical illusion
Probably the most credible explanation is a superior mirage or Fata Morgana seen at sea:Image:Superior mirage of the boats painting.jpg|thumb|250px|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
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.
John Boyle O'Reilly wrote a poem titled The Flying Dutchman. It was first published in The Wild Goose, a handwritten newspaper produced by Fenian convicts being transported to Western Australia.
Dutch poet J. Slauerhoff published a number of related poems, particularly in his 1928 volume Eldorado.
Ward Moore's 1951 story Flying Dutchman used the myth as a metaphor for an automated bomber which continues to fly over an Earth where humanity long since totally destroyed itself and all life in a nuclear war.
British author Brian Jacques wrote a trilogy of fantasy/young adult novels concerning two reluctant members of the Dutchmans crew, a young boy and his dog, whom an angel charges to help those in need. The first novel was titled Castaways of the Flying Dutchman ; the second was titled The Angel's Command, and the third was titled Voyage of Slaves.
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.
In opera and theatre
The story was adapted into the English melodrama The Flying Dutchman; or the Phantom Ship: al Drama, in three acts by Edward Fitzball, with music by George Rodwell. The 48-page text, published c. 1829, acknowledges the Blackwood’s Magazine as the source.Richard Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman is adapted from an episode in Heinrich Heine's satirical novel The Memoirs of Mister von Schnabelewopski , in which a character attends a theatrical performance of The Flying Dutchman in Amsterdam. Heine had first used the legend in his Reisebilder: Die Nordsee , 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, Heine introduced 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. It was once thought that Heine may have based the episode 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; it was not published until its revival in 1829. Unlike Fitzball's play, which is set off the Cape of Good Hope, Heine's account is set in 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.
Pierre-Louis Dietsch composed an opera Le vaisseau fantôme, ou Le maudit des mers, 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 Frederick Marryat's novel The Phantom Ship and other sources, although 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.
Dutchman, a short play by Amiri Baraka, uses the legend as a symbol of entrapment.
In art and design
The Flying Dutchman has been captured in paintings by Albert Ryder, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and by Howard Pyle, whose painting of the Flying Dutchman is on exhibit at the Delaware Art Museum.In television
In "The Buccaneers" 1956, episode 22 of Season 1 features a ghost ship known as The Dutchman. Ultimately, it is found that a crew of pirates had taken the ship after the previous captain was hanged and used it in lucrative business, drawing other ships in, stealing their cargo, then scuttling them, all while haunting the crews. This is ultimately thwarted by Dan Tempest and crew, when they attempt to take the ship to harbor.In "Judgment Night", a 1959 episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, the U-boat captain who sank an Allied passenger ship in World War II finds himself doomed to forever relive the experience as a "Flying Dutchman" passenger of the torpedoed ship. Two other Twilight Zone episodes, "The Arrival" and "Death Ship" also refer to the legend. The Flying Dutchman was also featured in "Cave of the Dead", a 1967 episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
In the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon "Return of the Flying Dutchman", the ship appears as an illusion created by Mysterio.
In the 1976 Land of the Lost episode "Flying Dutchman", the ship appears captained by Ruben Van de Meer, who attempts to take Holly with him to give him company on his endless voyage.
A ghostly pirate known as the Flying Dutchman appears as a recurring character in the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants.
In the anime/manga series One Piece, the Flying Dutchman is an undersea pirate ship captained by Vander Decken and his descendants over the course of generations and has maintained a reputation as a ghost ship accordingly through its damaged appearance.