A future King of England logged a sighting of the Flying Dutchman
Before dawn on 11 July 1881, off Australia, a royal midshipman's log recorded a glowing phantom brig crossing the bows, seen by thirteen people before it vanished on a calm, clear sea. The ship was said to be the Flying Dutchman, a legend that took shape in sailors' tales around the Cape of Good Hope.
The ghost ship is usually tied to the seventeenth-century heyday of the Dutch East India Company, but the oldest surviving version of the story is much later. John MacDonald's travel memoir of 1790 reports sailors in a storm claiming to see a Dutch ship that had been lost at the Cape after failing to find a pilot, and that reappeared in foul weather ever since. A 1795 account attributed to George Barrington traced the rumour to a wrecked Dutch warship whose sister vessel later glimpsed what proved to be a dark cloud.
Writers kept adding layers. The Scottish poet John Leyden, in 1803, introduced guilt: the crew had committed some terrible crime and were condemned to sail until their penance ended. His friend Walter Scott, in notes published in December 1812, turned the vessel into a treasure ship stained by murder and piracy, while recording that Leyden thought the crime was carrying the first enslaved Africans. A story in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in May 1821 named the captain Van der Decken, who swore he would round the Cape even if it took until judgment day, and added the eerie letters to long-dead people that no ship should accept.
Some sources suggest a real model: Bernard Fokke, a seventeenth-century Dutch captain whose voyages to Java were so fast that people suspected a pact with the Devil. Later reports often described the phantom glowing with an unnatural light, and its appearance was read as an omen of disaster.
The royal sighting came during a three-year voyage by Prince George, the future George V, and his brother Albert Victor; later editing makes it unclear which prince wrote the entry. The likeliest scientific explanation is a superior mirage, or Fata Morgana, in which layers of air bend light so that a distant real ship appears floating above the horizon.
Source: Flying Dutchman
