All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Aug. 12, 2014 - Skeptoid
15:53
Skeptoid #427: The Legend of the Flying Dutchman

The real source of the ancient nautical legends of the Flying Dutchman ghost ship. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Ghostly Flying Dutchman 00:06:04
Any book on nautical legends worth its salt will include a chapter on the Flying Dutchman, the spectral old sailing ship with its sails torn to shreds, condemned to an eternity of stormy seas, with its skeletal crew never to see a home port again.
Today we're going to look at the origin of this story and find out what set it apart and made it become such a fundamental legend.
The Flying Dutchman is coming up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The legend of the Flying Dutchman.
Some say it is a spectral schooner seen under full sail, sometimes in the distance, sometimes at night or through the fog, sometimes gliding above the water.
Its sails may be torn to ribbons or it may be making great headway even in the lack of wind.
Some say the Dutchman refers to the captain of the ship, a man cursed to sail the seas forever and never make land.
Some say the captain and his ship are doomed to forever try to round a stormy cape, never quite succeeding and always being beaten back by the howling wind and waves.
But whatever the specifics of the legend, the flying Dutchman has become a mainstay of maritime lore.
With such a famous story, it would seem worthwhile to see whether it grew from some seed of fact.
References to the flying Dutchman have been around for more than two centuries, and sailing ships were plowing the saltwater for centuries before that.
So it seems a practical certainty that we should be able to nail down exactly what triggered the stories.
A good place to start is its most famous iteration in pop culture.
In Wagner's 1840 opera, Der Fliegende Hollande, it is not the ship that is named the Flying Dutchman, but refers to the captain of the ghostly vessel.
The Dutchman, who is unnamed in the opera, commands a ship with only a spectral crew.
He makes port in a storm in Norway and grapples to the ship of Captain Dolland.
The Dutchman reveals to the captain that years ago he made a curse during a storm, swearing to Satan that he would round the Cape of Good Hope even if he had to keep trying until doomsday.
Satan took him at his word and cursed him to never be able to make port until he found a woman who would love him until she died.
Fortunately, the captain has a new bile daughter, Zenta, who, upon hearing of the Dutchman's terrible plight, falls in love with him.
But another suitor, the muscular and handsome huntsman Eric, reminds Zenta that she had once promised herself to him.
When the Dutchman hears of this, he assumes he is lost forever and casts off with his ghostly crew.
But Zenta's love was true, and when she sees the Dutchman sail away, she throws herself into the ocean and drowns.
The terms of the curse thus fulfilled, the Dutchman and his ship are seen ascending to heaven, thus becoming the Flying Dutchman, where he will finally be able to rest.
Interestingly, the Cape of Good Hope is not the Cape infamous for its stormy seas.
That's Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America.
The Cape of Good Hope is the tip of the peninsula jutting south from Cape Town, South Africa, and is some 150 kilometers west-northwest from the true southern tip of Africa, Cape Agulius.
The ship is known for its many ghostly appearances, showing up out of the dark with a fog and then disappearing, often terrifying the sailors who witness it.
An interesting point shared by so many of the books and articles written about the Flying Dutchman is that they all list the same half-dozen or so famous sightings of the ship.
But these reports are all terrible because in not a single instance is there any reason for the witness to have identified the ship as that of the infamous Dutchman.
They saw or believed they saw unidentified wooden ships under sail.
Let's have a look at a few.
In 1881, the future King George V of England was a midshipman aboard HMS Bacante when he reported unambiguously a ship that he identified as the Flying Dutchman had crossed their bow.
13 men on the Bacante and two other ships saw it, and it remains in the Admiralty's official publications in the crews of HMS Bacante.
In 1942, Nazi Admiral Carl Dunitz, at that time the senior commander of the U-Boat forces, is reported to have said that certain of his U-Boat crews claimed that they had seen the Flying Dutchman during their tours of duty east of Suez.
In 1939, dozens of people at Glen Cairn Beach in Cape Town reported seeing the Flying Dutchman charging toward shore under full sail, only to disappear just before disaster.
Lighthouse keepers at the Cape Point Lighthouse are said to have frequently sighted the Flying Dutchman during storms.
In 1835, a British ship came near having a collision with the Flying Dutchman, approaching at night under full sail in a storm, but it vanished at the last instant.
Origins of the Legend 00:08:16
And so on and so on.
Tall ships remain common all around the world and have been ever since they first took to the water.
Even most modern navies maintain a multi-masted square-rigged ship for training purposes, such as Norway's Christian Radish, the American U.S. Coast Guard cutter Eagle, and Japan's Nippon Maru II.
Oman is even launching a brand new three-masted square-rigged ship in 2014.
Combine these with the hundreds of other square-rigged ships afloat and at sea worldwide, and it's very possible to go out today and see what you might think to be the Flying Dutchman.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy.
It's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
So to narrow it down, let's work backwards from Wagner's 1840 piece to see what source materials were available for him to work from.
Many researchers have combed the literature, and two identifications are common.
Two Dutch sea captains, Bernard Fokke and Hendrik van der Decken, are often given as the Flying Dutchman.
So let's go back to the original source, the very first time the phrase Flying Dutchman was used in print, in reference to the ship or its captain.
In 1790, Irish petty thief George Barrington was sent to Australia for his crimes.
After gaining his freedom a few years later, he published the 1795 book, A Voyage to New South Wales, in which he told the tale of two Dutch ships, one of which sank in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope with the loss of all hands.
The other ship returned safely to England, but upon its next trip following the same route, a storm arose again and they saw their former companion vessel alongside for a fleeting moment.
Barrington gave no names of either ship or dates, but said that sailors thenceforth always referred to the ghost ship as the Flying Dutchman.
So far as anyone knows, this is the first time the name was used in print.
Bernard Foka was an actual figure from history.
He was a Dutch sea captain employed by the Dutch East India Company, famous for his fast transits between the Dutch Republic and Java, a route which went under the Cape of Good Hope.
Fokker is believed to have used iron yard arms instead of wood, allowing him to remain under full sail when ships with weaker wooden yards would have had to reef.
He was born in 1600, but his fastest time logged for the trip was in 1678, indicating a really long career.
He is said to have been lost at sea, but insufficient biographical information remains and we don't know exactly when or where.
Books about nautical legends frequently say he's the man who sank during a stormy rounding of the Cape of Good Hope.
But there appear to be no records confirming this, certainly no records of any oaths he may have sworn before sinking, and no record of him ever having been referred to as the Flying Dutchman during his lifetime.
In any case, he died a full century before Barrington first used the phrase in print.
So it seems almost certain that Fokka's identification as the Flying Dutchman is a connection made only by later storytellers.
But it's not a bad connection.
If you're looking for a devilish sea captain known for tearing along under full sail when other ships were squared away, Foka made perfect fodder for your fiction.
A contemporary of Fokka's was Hendrik van der Decken, another Dutch East Indian Company captain who is today known only for having been lost at sea in 1641.
Some sources say 1680, but records of the Dutch East India Company's Cape Colony in southern Africa, which was founded in 1652, make no mention of him.
So 1641 is the more likely correct date.
It's not known where he sank, only that it was between the Dutch Republic and Asia.
Lots of captains were lost at sea in those days, but Vanderdecken is remembered because the British novelist Frederick Marriott, himself a sea captain, wrote a novel in 1839 called The Phantom Ship and named his fictional captain Philip Vanderdecken.
The tale involves encounters with the Phantom Flying Dutchman ship, and according to aged seafarers aboard, it was also captained by a Vanderdecken, making it unlucky to sail with Philip.
But this was a pure fiction adventure novel, written nearly half a century after other authors had introduced the term flying Dutchman, so can't be considered any sort of an historical authority.
So to wrap everything up, let's take a look at the timeline of what we know for sure.
1641.
Sea Captain Hendrik van der Decken was lost at sea under circumstances lost to history.
1678, Bernard Foka made the fastest transit for the Dutch East India Company, possibly earning a nickname.
1795, author George Barrington first wrote of a ghost ship referred to by sailors as the Flying Dutchman.
1839, author Frederick Marriott wrote a novel that drew heavily on the theme of the ghost ship and the cursed captain named Vanderdecken.
1840, Wagner composed Der Fliegender Hollande, guaranteeing that the idea of the Flying Dutchman would be forever a popular theme.
Now there were plenty of other books besides Marriott's and other authors in the game, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, and many others, and uncounted eyewitness accounts around the time of Marriott's book and ever since.
But the biggest and most suspicious gap in that timeline is the 100-plus years between Captain Bernard Fokke and Barrington's first record of the term Flying Dutchman.
At the time he wrote it, 1795, the Dutch East India Company was just closing, having been in decline for the past half century.
But during the company's 200 years of sailors plying the same trade routes between Asia and the Dutch Republic, an uncounted number of tales and traditions must have arisen.
Without a doubt, we'll never know whether the story of the flying Dutchman referred to Fokker, Vanderdecken, or to a ship, or to some other sea captain lost to the annals of time.
Ships sailed and sank, captains lived and died, and old sea dogs told ominous stories and sang their shanties to the fresh new recruits.
Tales from the Sea 00:01:30
And so they might to you too, should you ever find yourself at sea on a dark and stormy night.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X.
Export Selection