Sailors rounding the Cape of Good Hope told each other one story more than any other: somewhere in the storms off southern Africa sailed a ghost ship that could never make port, crewed by the dead, and to sight her was to be doomed. The Flying Dutchman is the best-known maritime legend to come out of the age of sail, and unlike most sea stories it can be traced through print with unusual precision.
The earliest printed versions
The legend was almost certainly circulating among sailors before it reached print, but the oldest known written account appears in John MacDonald’s Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia and Africa (1790), which describes a Dutch man-of-war lost off the Cape in bad weather and later blamed for phantom sightings. A fuller version followed in George Barrington’s A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795), which describes a crew who believed they saw the lost ship reappear during a storm: “the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman.” Neither of these early accounts names a captain or explains why the ship was cursed.
A captain and a crime
That came later. John Leyden’s poem Scenes of Infancy (1803) introduced the idea that the doomed crew was guilty of some unnamed crime, and a fuller narrative published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1821 finally supplied a name: Captain Hendrick van der Decken, cursed to beat endlessly against the wind off the Cape of Good Hope rather than turn back, as he had once sworn he would do even if it took him until Judgment Day. This is the version that stuck, and it is the one Richard Wagner adapted for his 1843 opera Der fliegende Holländer, which added a further element that had nothing to do with the original sailors’ tale: a woman whose devotion could break the curse.
A future king’s sighting
The legend’s most famous claimed eyewitness account involves Prince George of Wales, the future King George V. On 11 July 1881, while serving as a naval cadet aboard HMS Bacchante off the Australian coast, the thirteen-year-old prince recorded in his journal — published five years later, in 1886 — that “at 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows,” a phantom ship glowing with a strange red light that thirteen people aboard reported seeing before it vanished. The story is sometimes retold with the prince aboard a different vessel, HMS Inconstant, which was in company with the Bacchante as part of the same training squadron; his own published journal, the source closest to the event, names the Bacchante.
Why it attached itself to piracy
The Flying Dutchman was never a pirate ship in the original tellings — it was a merchantman of the Dutch East India Company, doomed by its captain’s blasphemy, not by outlawry. But it entered the same cultural reservoir as pirate lore because both traded on the same fear: a ship from which there was no return, sailing under a captain who had defied the ordinary rules of the sea. That overlap is largely why the legend resurfaced in the twenty-first century as Davy Jones’s vessel in Pirates of the Caribbean, borrowing a three-hundred-year-old ghost story and handing it to a fictional pirate crew.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Flying Dutchman”; Historic Mysteries, “Flying Dutchman: Phantom Ship, Legend and Sightings”; anomalyinfo.com, “1881, July 11: King George V sees a Phantom Ship.”
Leave a Reply