Flying Dutchman
The Flying Dutchman, according to folklore, is a ghost ship that can never go home, and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes seen to be glowing with ghostly light. It is said that if she is hailed by another ship, her crew will often try to send messages to land or to people long since dead. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship is reckoned by seafarers to be a portent of doom.
Origins
Versions of the story are numerous in nautical folklore and are related to earlier medieval legends such as that of Captain Falkenburg who was cursed to ply the North Sea until Judgment Day, playing at dice with the Devil for his own soul.
The first reference in print to the ship itself appears to be in Chapter VI of George Barrington's Voyage to Botany Bay (1795):
I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, 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.[1]
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 uncanny speed of his trips from Holland to Java and was suspected of being in league with the devil to achieve this speed.
However, the first version to appear in print seems to be that which featured in Blackwood's Magazine for May 1821. This puts the scene of the action as the Cape of Good Hope:
She was an Amsterdam vessel and sailed from port seventy years ago. Her master’s name was Captain Hendrik 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: 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 to 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.[2]
There have been many reported sightings of the Flying Dutchman on the high seas in the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the most famous was by Prince George of Wales (later King George V of the United Kingdom). During his late adolescence, in 1880, along with his elder brother Prince Albert Victor of Wales (sons of the future King Edward VII), he was on a three-year-long voyage with their tutor Dalton aboard the 4000-tonne corvette HMS Bacchante. Off the coast of Australia, between Melbourne and Sydney, Dalton records:
"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."[3]
More recently, scientists have offered a new explanation of the Flying Dutchman. A common effect known as looming occurs in optics when the rays of light are bent across different refractive indices. This could make a ship just off the horizon appear as if it were hoisted in the air.[4]
Adaptations
This story was adapted in the English melodrama The Flying Dutchman (1826) by Edward Fitzball 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.
Another, not so well-known version, of this story is that the Captain and crew were struck down with bubonic plague. When the Captain tried to dock the ship they were turned away wherever they went - nobody would risk allowing a plague-ridden ship to dock. Their water and provisions soon ran out and, eventually, all on board The Flying Dutchman died. Their souls are doomed to sail the seven seas for all eternity.
Richard Wagner's famous opera on the subject: The Flying Dutchman (1843) has a somewhat convoluted genesis. It appears to be 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 one of the characters attends a theatrical performance of The Flying Dutchman. This imaginary play appears to be a pastiche by Heine of Fitzball's play, which Heine may have seen whilst in London. However, unlike Fitzball's play, which has the traditional Cape of Good Hope location, in Heine's account of the imaginary play the action is transferred to the North Sea: off the coast of Scotland. This seems to be the reason that Wagner's play is also set in the North Sea, although this time off the Norwegian coast.
Another adaptation was The Flying Dutchman on Tappan Sea by Washington Irving (1855).
The captain of the Dutchman
The Captain is called Van der Decken (meaning of the decks) in Marryat's version and Ramhout van Dam in Irving's version. Sources disagree on whether "Flying Dutchman" was the name of the ship, or a nickname for her captain.[citation needed]
According to most versions, the captain swore that he would not retreat in the face of a storm, but would continue his attempt to round the Cape of Good Hope even if it took until Judgment Day. According to other versions, some horrible crime took place on board, or the crew was infected with the plague and not allowed to sail into any port for this reason. Since then, the ship and its crew were doomed to sail forever, never putting in to shore. According to some versions, this happened in 1641, others give the date 1680 or 1729.[citation needed]
In Marryat's version Terneuzen in the Netherlands is described as the home of Captain Van der Decken.
In Fitzball's play, the Captain is allowed to go to shore once every hundred years, in order to seek a woman to share his fate. In Wagner's opera, it is once every seven years, and in the film series Pirates of the Caribbean, it is once every ten years.
Modern adaptations
The 1951 MGM film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman starred Ava Gardner and James Mason.
Several episodes of the television anthology series The Twilight Zone, most notably "Death Ship", "The Arrival", and Judgment Night were adaptations of the Flying Dutchman legend.
A January 14, 1965 episode of the radio drama Theater Five featured a similar tale set around a space station.
Vandervecken, the second half of Larry Niven's science fiction novel Protector (1973), tells of Brennan, a man who became immortal and gained superintelligence but lost his normal human appearance and drives. Wisely hiding from society at the edge of the solar system, he took on the role of protecting the human race. He periodically kidnapped people for information, then wiped their memory before returning them to their lives, using the identity Vandervecken to provide them a fat bank account in payment for their silence. One victim got a clue from a backpacker song, "I'm the only tar who's e'er jumped ship from Vandervecken's crew," and made the connection to the missing immortal, Brennan. Self-mockingly, Brennan also named his spaceship the Flying Dutchman.
A 1976 episode of Land of the Lost, from its third season, is titled "The Flying Dutchman" and features the ship and its captain.
The 1991 book Flying Dutch by British author Tom Holt is a comedic/fantasy take on the story.
The kid's TV show SpongeBob SquarePants depicts the Flying Dutchman not as a ship, but as a pirate ghost. In the show, The Flying Dutchman terrorizes the citizens of Bikini Bottom, Spongebob's hometown. Though sometimes, the Flying Dutchman interacts with Spongebob in a less-than-menacing way, such as teaching him how to properly tie knots.
Another adaptation is Brian Jacques's 2001 children's fantasy novel, Castaways of the Flying Dutchman. It has two sequels, called The Angel's Command and Voyage of Slaves.
In 2006, the tale of the Flying Dutchman was adapted into the Pirates of the Caribbean film series, in which the ship is portrayed as having a crew of doomed humans slowly being transformed into sea life. According to this interpretation, the captain of the Dutchman is Davy Jones, who fell in love with the sea goddess Calypso. Calypso charged him with conveying the dead at sea to the afterlife, allowing for one day on land (sunrise to sunset) once every ten years. After the first ten years of this task, his heart was broken when Calypso did not appear and so not to suffer, he removed it, placing it into a chest. After this, he abandoned his charge and turned into the Pirate of Pirates. After finding a sinking vessel, or sinking it himself, he would offer the dead or dying one hundred years on his ship, or death. Angered by Jones' treachery and ruthlessness, Calypso cursed the Dutchman and her crew.
In art and music
- The Flying Dutchman has been captured in a painting by Albert Ryder in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, and a painting by Howard Pyle, an artist famous for illustrations of pirates.
- In the 1930s the Flying Dutchman was featured in a famous advert of the Dutch national airline KLM (which is the oldest airline still operating in the world).
- The Japanese singer Hyde recorded a song called "The Cape of Storms", based on the tale. The song was featured as the main theme in the movie Kagen no Tsuki.
- Jethro Tull released a song called The Flying Dutchman, about the ship, on their 1979 album Stormwatch.
- Dutchman by Black Arts playwright Amiri Baraka.
- 'Flying Dutchman' was a B-side released by Tori Amos.
- Seemann by German music group Rammstein tells a story based on The Flying Dutchman.
References
- ^ Barrington, George (2004 [1795]). Voyage to Botany Bay. Sydney: Sydney University Press. p. 30. ISBN 1920897208.
{{cite book}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Music with Ease (2008). "Source of the Legend of The Flying Dutchman". Music with Ease. Retrieved 2008-02-23.
- ^ Rose, Kenneth (1988) King George V
- ^ Meyer-Arendt, Jurgen (1995 [1972]). Introduction to Modern and Classical Optics. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. p. 431. ISBN 0-13-124356-X.
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