The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port, but doomed to sail the sea forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and of Dutch maritime power. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a seventeenth-century cargo vessel known as a fluyt.
The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
View of Table Bay (overlooked by Kaapstad, Dutch Cape Colony) with ships of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1683. In the 17th century, the size of the Dutch merchant fleet probably exceeded the combined fleets of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the German states.
An 18th-century painting of a VOC ship with Table Mountain in the background, used by navigators as the landmark to sail around southern tip of Africa
In the Age of Sail, the Brouwer Route, devised by the Dutch navigator Hendrik Brouwer in 1611, greatly reduced the voyage between Cape of Good Hope (Dutch Cape Colony) to Java (Dutch East Indies) from almost 12 months to about 6 months, compared to the previous Arab and Portuguese monsoon route.
A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a vessel with no living crew aboard; it may be a fictional ghostly vessel, such as the Flying Dutchman, or a physical derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, like the Mary Celeste. The term is sometimes used for ships that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped, as well as drifting boats that have been found after breaking loose of their ropes and being carried away by the wind or the waves.
The mysteriously derelict schooner Carroll A. Deering, as seen from the Cape Lookout lightship on 28 January 1921 (US Coast Guard)
The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder
The discovery of the Marlborough, as depicted by Le Petit Journal in 1913
An engraving of Mary Celeste as she was found abandoned.