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The Flying Dutchman legend
This is the legend of the Flying Dutchman, a ship that was doomed to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa forever.
The legend of The Flying Dutchman is said to have started in 1641 when a Dutch ship sank off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope:
Captain van der Decken was pleased. The trip to the Far East had been highly successful and at last, they were on their way home to Holland. As the ship approached the tip of Africa, the captain thought that he should make a suggestion to the Dutch East India Company (his employers) to start a settlement at the Cape on the tip of Africa, thereby providing a welcome respite to ships at sea.
He was so deep in thought that he failed to notice the dark clouds looming and only when he heard the lookout scream out in terror, did he realise that they had sailed straight into a fierce storm. The captain and his crew battled for hours to get out of the storm and at one stage it looked like they would make it. Then they heard a sickening crunch - the ship had hit treacherous rocks and began to sink. As the ship plunged downwards, Captain VandeDecken knew that death was approaching. He was not ready to die and screamed out a curse: "I WILL round this Cape even if I have to keep sailing until doomsday!"
So, even today whenever a storm brews off the Cape of Good Hope, if you look into the eye of the storm, you will be able to see the ship and its captain - The Flying Dutchman. Don't look too carefully, for the old folk claim that whoever sights the ship will die a terrible death.
Many people have claimed to have seen The Flying Dutchman, including the crew of a German submarine boat during World War II and holidaymakers.
On 11 July 1881, the Royal Navy ship, the Bacchante was rounding the tip of Africa, when they were confronted with the sight of The Flying Dutchman. The midshipman, a prince who later became King George V, recorded that the lookout man and the officer of the watch had seen the Flying Dutchman and he used these words to describe the ship:
"A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the mast, spars and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief."
It's pity that the lookout saw the Flying Dutchman, for soon after on the same trip, he accidentally fell from a mast and died. Fortunately for the English royal family, the young midshipman survived the curse.
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The Flying Dutchman
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For other uses, see The Flying Dutchman (disambiguation).
According to folklore, the Flying Dutchman is a ghost ship that can never go home, but must sail 'the seven seas' forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes glowing with ghostly light. If she is hailed by another ship, her crew will often try to send messages to land, to people long since dead.
Contents [hide]
1 Origins
2 Details changed
3 Cultural allusions
4 See also
5 External links
[edit]
Origins
Versions of the story are legion. According to some, the story is originally Dutch, while others claim it is based on the English play The Flying Dutchman (1826) by Edward Fitzball and the novel The Phantom Ship (1837) by Frederick Marryat, later adapted into the Dutch story Het Vliegend Schip (The Flying Ship) by the Dutch clergyman A.H.C. Römer. Other versions include the opera by Richard Wagner (1841) and The Flying Dutchman on Tappan Sea by Washington Irving (1855).
According to some sources, the 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. According to some sources, the captain is called Falkenburg in the Dutch versions of the story. He is called Vanderdecken (meaning on deck) 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 would not 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.
Many have noted the resemblance of the Flying Dutchman legend to the Christian folk tale of the Wandering Jew.
[edit]
Details changed
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 is once every seven years.
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Cultural allusions
Two books by Brian Jacques: Castaways of the Flying Dutchman and its sequel The Angel's Command. In this adaptation, The captain blames the lord God for the Dutchman's failures, and an angel descends to pass judgement upon them.
A song by Jethro Tull
A song by The Band (Rockin' Chair)
A painting by Albert Ryder in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.
A song by German group Von Thronstahl
A restaurant in the TV show The Simpsons is named "The Frying Dutchman".
A graphic novel by Carl Barks
A coffee shop in Amsterdam's red light district
The Homeward Bounders, a book by Diana Wynne Jones
Flying Dutch, a parody based on the Wagner opera by Tom Holt
A play called Dutchman by Amiri Baraka
A song by Tori Amos
A now-defunct ride once featured at Six Flags Over Georgia.
Dutch footballer Dennis Bergkamp suffers from severe aviophobia, and is endearingly named "The Non-Flying Dutchman".
Hall-of-Fame shortstop Honus Wagner was known in the press as "The Flying Dutchman."
In the video game Alone in the Dark 2, the Flying Dutchman is the ship of One Eye Jack and his fellow ghost pirates.
The legend is portrayed in the movie Pandora and the Flying Dutchman featuring Ava Gardner and James Mason.
Richard Voorhees, a character in Julian May's sci-fi series Saga of Pliocene Exile, chooses the Flying Dutchman as his persona in exile, and ends by living out the part.
Time's Fool, a novel in verse by Glyn Maxwell, which recasts the legend on a twentieth-century night train.
"The Flying Dutchman" is a slogan written on planes of KLM.
Davey Jones of Locker fame pilots the Dutchman in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
The Flying Dutchman is the name of the ghost pirate appearing in many episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants
The Flying Dutchman is the mascot of Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
The Flying Dutchman was the mascot of Hofstra University until it was changed to the "Pride."
The British children's book and film series Captain Pugwash features a ship named the "Flying Dustman".
A blue-level ski run on the front peak of Keystone Resort is named Flying Dutchman.
The Flying Dutchman plays a major part in the French comic named De cape et de crocs.
Larry Niven's novel Protector features a spacecraft named the Flying Dutchman, owned by an individual who used the alias Vandervecken.
"The Frying Dutchman" is a Fast-Food Shop in Castletownbere/Ireland
In The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood is forced to enlist the ferrying services of a cursed soul known as The Flying Welshman and his equally cursed dingy.
Is a song from the Dutch Black/Death metal band God Dethroned called "Soul Capture 1562"
The Flying Dutchman in Spongebob Squarepants. Name of Green Ghost that is seen in some episodes.
The Flying Dutchman is the name of a seafood restaurant in Morro Bay, a small town on the Central Coast of California.
...with pictures.
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Source of the Legend
of The Flying Dutchman
(German title: Der fliegende Holländer)
An Opera by Richard Wagner
The legend of the Flying Dutchman is as old as Homer, who showed us Ulysses as an unresting traveler, yearning for home and domestic joys. The Wandering Jew, "accursed and hopeless of all save the end in oblivion," was a later figure of the same type. German mythology embodies the notion in legends widespread and familiar. The Teutonic dead "crossed the water in boats; and northern heroes were sometimes buried on land within their ships, sometimes placed in a ship which was taken out to sea and allowed to drift with the waves." The German Ocean had its own legendary Flying Dutchman in the person of Herr von Falkenberg, who is condemned to beat about the waves until the day of judgment, on board a vessel without helm or steersman, playing at dice with the devil for his soul. Legends with this same central idea are not uncommon. The admitted "mystery chamber" at Glamis castle has never been satisfactorily explained. But, according to one theory, the fourth earl of Crawford is confined, therein, doomed to play dice till the day of judgment as the penalty of a rash vow. Wagner’s Kundry, in "Parsifal," again, as we shall see later, is the representative of one who was condemned to wander through the world because she had laughed at the suffering Christ on the Cross. Thus do the world’s legends synchronise.
The Flying Dutchman was already a very old tale when those daring navigators, the Dutchmen of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, made it peculiarly their own. The Dutch were the old masters of the sea -- before Britannia ruled the waves. The sea was their favourite element; and the struggle of the Flying Dutchman against the angry billows "typified their own battles with the powers of old ocean, and their determination to conquer at all hazards." Hence their eager adaptation of the venerable legend, which seems to embody for ever the avenging vision of men who, resolved to win, had so often dared and lost all. Van Straaten was the name of the skipper in the Dutch version of the story. As a penalty for his sins Straaten was condemned to sweep the seas around the Cape of Storms (the Cape of Good Hope) unceasingly, without being able to reach a haven. Seamen were struck with terror they saw his ghostly ship on the horizon, and, to escape his fatal influence, quickly changed their course.
Wagner first met with the legend when he was a young man struggling with misfortune at Riga. He found it in Heine’s fragmentary story, "The Memoirs of Herr von Schnabelewopski," which is in some sense a sort of autobiographic record. "Heine," says Wagner, "takes occasion to relate the story in speaking of the representation of a play founded thereon, which he had witnessed -- as I believe -- at Amsterdam. This subject fascinated me, and made an indelible impression upon my fancy; still, it did not as yet acquire the force needful for its rebirth within me." There has been some discussion about the play to which Heine referred. One of Wagner’s biographers, the late Dr. Franz Hueffer, very plausibly argues that it must have been a play of Fitzball’s which was running at the Adelphi in 1827 when Heine visited London.
He points particularly to the fact that two essential features of Fitzball’s play, both absent from the old legend, are referred to by Heine in connection with the drama he saw: namely, the presence of the inscrutable Dutchman’s portrait in Daland’s house, and the taking of a wife by the unresting seaman. This latter idea -- the idea of the fated captain being saved by a woman -- was not, however, original with Fitzball. We find it much earlier; though Fitzball certainly seems to have been original in his idea -- a grotsque and utterly unpoetical idea -- of the Dutchman offering his self-sacrificing bride to a sea-monster!
Fitzball is said to have founded his play (the play, remember, to which Heine is assumed to refer) on a version of the legend printed in Blackwood’s Magazine for May 1821. That version ran as follows:
She was an Amsterdam vessel and sailed from port seventy years ago. Her master’s name was Van der Decken. He was a staunch seaman, and would have his own way in spite of the devil. For all that, never a sailor under him had reason to complain; though how it is on board with them nobody knows. The story is this: that in doubling the Cape they were a long day trying to weather the Table Bay. However, the wind headed them, and went against them more and more, and Van der Decken walked the deck, swearing at the wind. Just after sunset a vessel spoke him, asking him if he did not mean to go into the bay that night. Van der Decken replied: ‘May I be eternally damned if I do, though I should beat about here till the day of judgment. And to be sure, he never did go into that bay, for it is believed that he continues to beat about in these seas still, and will do so long enough. This vessel is never seen but with foul weather along with her.
Whether this was Fitzball’s original, whether Fitzball’s was the actual play which Heine saw, are points of no great importance. Wagner admittedly obtained the germ of his story from Heine.
It is interesting to know how he himself looked at the legend. "The figure of the Flying Dutchman," he writes, "is a mythical creation of the folk. A primal trait of human nature speaks out from it with a heart-enthralling force. This trait, in its most universal meaning, is the longing after rest from amid the storms of life." He goes on to say how, after the legend had expressed itself in the Ulysses and Wandering Jew forms:
The sea in its turn became the soil of life; yet no longer the land-locked sea of the Grecian world, but the great ocean that engirdles the earth. The fetters of the older world were broken; the longing of Ulysses, back to home and hearth and wedded life, after feeding on the sufferings of the "never-dying Jew" until it became a yearning for death, had mounted to the craving for a new, an unknown home, invisible as yet, but dimly boded. This vast-spread feature fronts us in the mythos of the "Flying Dutchman," that seaman’s poem of the world-historical age of journeys of discovery. Here we light upon a remarkable mixture, a blend, effected by the spirit of the Folk, of the character of Ulysses with that of the Wandering Jew. The Hollandic mariner, in punishment for his temerity, is condemned by the devil (here obviously the element of Flood and Storm) to do battle with the unresting waves to all eternity. Like Ahasuerus, he yearns for his sufferings to be ended by death; the Dutchman however, may gain this redemption, denied to the undying Jew, at the hands of -- a Woman who, of very love, shall sacrifice herself for him. The yearning for death thus spurs him on to seek this Woman; but she is no longer the home-tending Penelope of Ulysses, as courted in the days of old, nut the quintessence of Womankind; and yet the still unmanifest, the longed-for, the dreamt-of, the infinitely womanly Woman -- let me out with it in one word: the Woman of the Future.
Several writers besides Wagner tried to "improve" upon the original legend. Some made an attempt to bring about the conventional happy ending of the average novel. They wanted to release the Dutchman from his fate. Marryat, in his "Phantom Ship," shows one way of doing it when he introduces an amulet or religious charm. Sir Walter Scott (see "Rokeby," Canto ii, stanza xi.) has another idea -- rather a poor one for him. The vessel, in Scott’s version of the legend, was laden with precious metal. A murder was committed on board, and a plague broke out among the crew by way of punishment. Perpetual quarantine was the result. Every port was barred against the fateful ship, which was thus doomed to float about aimlessly for ever. As an American critic has pointed out, there is no poetry and there is a total absence of the personal tragedy in this version. Heine’s version, which Wagner followed, is in truth the only "happy ending." Let us see how it is reached.
According to
History's Mysteries: Ghost Ships, the
Dutchman appears before something bad happens to another ship.
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The Flying Dutchman
The story of the Flying Dutchman is probably the best known ghost ship. The ship was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope (the southern tip of Africa) when it encountered a bad storm. Because of the captain's refusal to sail for safe harbor, the ship was lost and the captain and crew doomed to sail the seas forever. Richard Wagner wrote a play based on a legend that says the Captain is allowed to go ashore every seven years in order to redeem himself by winning the hand of a maiden.
On January 26, 1923, four seamen sighted what is believed to be the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman. At 12:15 A.M. they noticed a strange light. Looking through binoculars they were able to make out what looked like a ship's hull. The ship was luminous with 2 masts. Instead of sails, it appeared as if there was a thin mist where the sails would be. As the ghost ship neared the sailors' vessel, it suddenly disappeared.
It is said that the appearance of the Flying Dutchman is an omen of disaster and that it is seen most often during stormy weather.
This post has been edited by dragonlady_mothman: 17 April 2006 - 12:02 AM
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but i'll try looking up one for ya 
you have started to become a 'post-whore' lol 
