The Flying Dutchman

A sailors' story of a ghost ship seen in storms near the Cape of Good Hope, in print by 1790. It later fed Marryat's 1839 novel, Heine's writing and Wagner's 1843 opera.

John MacDonald, in a travel memoir published in 1790, recalls a storm so bad that the crew claimed a sighting of the Flying Dutchman. He gives their usual account: a Dutch ship reached the Cape in heavy weather, could not find a pilot to bring her into harbour, and was lost. Since then, the sailors said, she shows herself whenever the weather turns very bad.

Atlas Obscura says the tale began to spread late in the 18th century, as Dutch sea power collapsed and the Netherlands' East India Company was wound up, and links the two. In some versions, it says, the Dutchman became a ghost near the Cape of Good Hope, a dangerous corner of the sea route between the Netherlands and the East Indies.

The Cruise of Her Majesty's Ship Bacchante, compiled by John N. Dalton in 1886 from the private journals of Prince Albert Victor and Prince George, records a sighting on that voyage. The journals as compiled describe a red glow like a phantom ship lit up, in which a brig's masts, spars and sails showed clearly about 200 yards off the port bow.

Writers took the story up. Frederick Marryat's 1839 novel The Phantom Ship gives the captain a confession: weeks of failing to round the Cape, cursing and blasphemy, and refusing his exhausted crew's pleas to turn back to Table Bay. Wikipedia says Richard Wagner based his 1843 opera The Flying Dutchman on a scene in Heinrich Heine's 1833 satirical novel about Mister von Schnabelewopski. Heine's first use of the legend came in 1826, when he borrowed an image that Blackwood's Magazine had used: a ship seen in a storm that sends letters to people long dead.