The Flying Dutchman: The Ship That Cannot Come Home

Off the port bow, where there should be only grey water and haze, a full-rigged sailing ship hangs a little above the horizon, sails set, moving against a wind that is not touching yours. You reach for the glass. When you look again the sea is empty, and the older hands on deck have gone quiet, because they know what a ship that is not there is supposed to mean.

The Flying Dutchman is the most durable ghost ship in the Western imagination: a vessel condemned never to make port, crewed by the damned or the dead, doomed to beat against the same storm for eternity. To sight her was to sight an omen, a harbinger of disaster for the ship that saw her. The captain is often named Vanderdecken, a Dutchman who in the usual telling swore a blasphemous oath that he would round the Cape of Good Hope in a gale though it took him until Judgment Day, and was taken at his word.

Where the legend came from

The story is younger in print than its atmosphere suggests. It surfaces in English texts near the end of the eighteenth century, including a 1795 account by George Barrington, and it was hardened into popular culture by two nineteenth-century works: Frederick Marryat's 1839 novel The Phantom Ship, which fleshed out Vanderdecken and his oath, and Richard Wagner's 1843 opera Der fliegende Holländer, which gave the doomed captain a chance at redemption through faithful love. By then the legend had settled into the shape sailors passed along in the dangerous waters off southern Africa, where the weather did most of the work of making men believe in curses.

Even royalty logged it. In 1881, aboard HMS Bacchante, a teenage midshipman who would later become King George V of Britain recorded in the ship's log that thirteen men had sighted the Flying Dutchman off the Australian coast, a strange red-glowing ship that vanished. It is one of the more famous first-hand entries precisely because of who wrote it.

The trick of the light

The likeliest ordinary explanation is a superior mirage, and specifically the Fata Morgana. When a layer of warm air sits over colder air near the sea, light bends as it passes through the temperature boundary, and distant objects, a real ship hull down beyond the horizon, a coastline, an iceberg, appear lifted, stretched, doubled, and made to shimmer and float above the waterline. A ship can seem to hover in the sky, change shape, or wink out as the air shifts. To a crew primed by fear and folklore, that is a phantom under full sail.

Where the tidy story frays

The optics are sound, and most sightings surely dissolve into bent light and tired eyes. What the explanation handles less gracefully is the specific, dated entry: named ships, named witnesses, logbook ink, a future king among them. A mirage accounts for a shape on the horizon. It has more trouble with the number of steady, sober sailors who wrote down what they saw and stood by it. That gap is where the Dutchman still sails.

Readers have filed their own sightings of ships and lights that should not have been there, and each is voted True, Fake or Not sure. Take a bearing and enter your own verdict.