Case file · Folklore / legend
The Flying Dutchman
A phantom ship doomed to sail forever off the Cape of Good Hope; seeing it is an omen of disaster.
1795 CE · -34.36, 18.47 · status: legend
The account
An early literary mention appears in A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795), and the first full story in Blackwood's Magazine in 1821 named the captain as van der Decken. Sailors told of glowing ghost ships and letters for people long dead.
The sceptical view
It is a sailors' legend that grew in print; reported sightings have no independent confirmation.
Connections in the atlas
- The Lady Lovibond
- ? Why was the Mary Celeste abandoned?
- Disappearance of the SS Waratah
- Van Hunks and the devil on Devil's Peak
- Adamastor, spirit of the Cape of Storms
- The Octavius