The age of great geographical discoveries ended about 200 years ago. By that time, virtually all the seas and oceans had been divided among the leading maritime powers. British, Spanish, French and Dutch ships were increasingly linking home ports with the most remote corners of the Earth. Sailors on long voyages told in taverns about the things they had seen and the adventures they had had. The most popular story in all port taverns was about the mysterious and frightening ship known as the Flying Dutchman. Drinkers listened with bated breath to the stories of experienced sailors who saw with their own eyes the gloomy sails of the “Dutchman” and managed to survive. The most talented storytellers were treated to a drink, and those of them who knew all the details of the legend, never left the tavern sober ...
In 1641, Captain Philip Van der Dekken, who had a reputation among sailors profanity and blasphemy, returned from the East Indies to Europe. Among the ship's passengers was a young couple. The sailor fell in love with a beautiful woman, killed her husband, and immediately offered his bloody hand and cruel heart to the grief-stricken woman. The woman pushed the murderer away and threw herself overboard ...
This tragedy played out near the Cape of Good Hope. A few hours later, a violent storm broke out, but Van der Decken did not deviate from the planned course. Part of the crew led by the skipper began to demand an urgent mooring to the African coast and wait out the storm in some secluded bay. The enraged captain shot all those who dared to argue with him and swore that none of the crew would go ashore until they passed the cape, even if they had to sail until the second coming. At that moment the heavens opened, and a voice from there said: “So be it!” Since then, the cursed ship, nicknamed the “Flying Dutchman”, has been sailing the seas, but it is not destined to reach the shore. Sailors said that the tattered sails are handled by a team of dead men, and orders are given by Van der Dekken, who has half-turned into a skeleton. According to nautical beliefs, an encounter with the Flying Dutchman did not bode well. It was believed that most of those who saw even the sails of the ominous ghost ship soon found themselves at the bottom of the sea.
Today it seems that the myth of the “Flying Dutchman” is a hundred percent fiction. However, “ghost ships” are not a rare phenomenon, and in the age of sailing ships they were even more common. In tropical ports, European sailors were exposed to diseases unknown to them. Already at sea, an epidemic began on board. All sailors died, but the ship could continue its voyage for many months at the will of the waves and wind. Meeting with such a floating morgue inevitably gave rise to a lot of rumors and tall tales. Often for ghost ships were taken mirages, when the shiny surfaces of the sea and low clouds reflected silhouettes of ships sailing hundreds of miles away from the witnesses ... In general, not all that mysticism that looks like it.
The legendary villain Van der Decken has a very real prototype. In the 1660s-1670s among sailors rattled the name of Captain Bernard Focke. He was captain of the Dutch East India Company and became famous for his speed records. On the way from Amsterdam to Java, ordinary ships spent five months, and Focke managed in three and a half. Since company mail was transmitted with his ship, the amazing speed is documented. Detractors spread gossip that Focquet sold his soul to the devil for the ability to control the winds. The Dutchman only joked about it, but the grim reputation clung to him and decades later turned the fast-moving Bernard Focquet into the sinister Philip van der Decken.
For over a hundred years, the legend of the Flying Dutchman existed only in the form of oral stories in the companies of sailors. The name of the ghost ship was first printed in 1790, when the English traveler John MacDonald published his memoirs of his 30-year wanderings around the world. In them, he mentioned how the sailors of the ship he was sailing on saw the Flying Dutchman on the horizon. MacDonald explained that it was a ship that had long ago been lost in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope and had been appearing in tropical seas during inclement weather ever since.
Romantic writers soon popularized the gloomy legend. The English poet Thomas Moore in 1804 in one of his poems mentioned “a ship sailing with full sails, though there was a full calm”. In his commentary on this line, he wrote that this image was inspired by the maritime legend of the Flying Dutchman. Walter Scott, in the poem “Rokeby” described the omen that sailors consider the worst - “the pirate ship ‘The Flying Dutchman’”. In 1813, when the poem was written, the ghost ship could be called a pirate ship - the legend had not yet taken canonical form by then. This happened in 1821, when Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine devoted a large article to “The Flying Dutchman”. It was in it that the murder of a young couple by a villainous captain, and the curse from heaven, and eternal wandering on the seas, and the evil that promises a meeting with the ship of the dead. It was there that Van der Decken's surname was first mentioned. All further interpretations of the legend were in one way or another based on this article.
In 1839, on his way to England, a ship carrying the young but already famous composer Richard Wagner was caught in a violent storm. The bad weather made the musician think of Heinrich Heine's short story about the legend of the “Flying Dutchman”. Arriving in London, Wagner sketched out a draft libretto for an opera about the ominous ship, which he sold to a Parisian theater. Based on this sketch, the composer Pierre Louis Dietsch composed the opera The Ghost Ship. Despite the royalties received, the maritime legend did not let Wagner go, and in 1843 he wrote his own opera “The Flying Dutchman”, which is the most famous work of art about the cursed ship. The German composer's creation ends with a happy ending: the captain is forgiven after the daughter of a Norwegian sailor agrees to become his faithful wife. True, both lovers are drowned, but against the background of Wagner's other operas, such a finale can well be considered happy.
Sails were replaced by steam engines on seagoing ships, but the number of encounters with the Flying Dutchman did not diminish. Even such a noble witness as the future King George V of Great Britain left a description of a meeting with him. In 1881, he and his brother Prince Albert Victor traveled to his future possessions. On July 11, his highness recorded in his diary, “At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman passed 200 yards directly in front of us. The ghostly ship glowed with scarlet lights illuminating the masts, tackle, and sails... Thirteen men saw it, but when we tried to come nearer, no one saw any sign of the big ship passing. At the same time the night was clear and the sea was calm... At 10:45 one of the sailors who saw the ship fell from the top of the mast and crashed ...” On the fate of the heir to the throne, the meeting with the ghost ship had no effect.
In our days, the legend of the “Flying Dutchman” became famous due to the famous series of films “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
