Flying Dutchman Totally Explained

Everything about Flying Dutchman totally explained

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's 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):
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:
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:
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.
According to most versions, the captain swore that he wouldn't 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.
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's once every seven years, and in the film series Pirates of the Carribean, it's once every ten years.

Modern adaptations

The Flying Dutchman is the official mascot of Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and Guilderland High School, Guilderland, New York.
   All KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) aircraft carry the name "The Flying Dutchman" on their fuselage.
   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.
   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.
   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 the TV series Andromeda (Season 1 Episode 12 - The Mathematics of Tears) the episode references and adapts The Flying Dutchman.
   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 didn't 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'd offer the dead or dying one hundred years on his ship, or death. Because of his treachery and ruthlessness, Calypso cursed the Dutchman and her crew.
   The Flying Dutchman is also a recurring character in Spongebob Squarepants.

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.
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.
Glory Bells Band also released a song called The Flying Dutchman on their album Dressed in Black.
The Flying Dutchman appears as a recurring ghostly character in the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants.
Dutchman by Black Arts Playwright LeRoi Jones
'Flying Dutchman' was a B-side released by Tori Amos.
In the song Remittance Man on Jimmy Buffet's album Barometer Soup, there's a reference to the Flying Dutchman.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Flying Dutchman'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://flying_dutchman.totallyexplained.com">Flying Dutchman Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.