Real and Mythical Ghost Ships, Part 2: The Flying Dutchman

And on August 3rd, 1942, another famous incident took place which involved the HMS Jubilee. The night watch, led a man named Davies, noticed a sailing ship in the distance at about 9 pm. It was a schooner of a class that he had never seen before, and had a ghostly, indistinct appearance. Signals from the Jubilee were ignored, and as the seamen continued to watch the apparition, they noticed she was moving with full sail and unnaturally quickly, despite the fact that there was no wind whatsoever that night. After a few minutes, the ghostly sailing ship abruptly vanished, and her appearance was recorded in the Jubilee’s log.

The final sighting of the Flying Dutchman occurred in 1959, when a Dutch freighter called the Straat Magelhaen reported an extremely close encounter with a ghostly sailing ship. Her sails were full, she was moving extremely quickly, and she was so close that the crew of the freighter could clearly see a lone man steering the craft. Collision seemed inevitable, but the apparition vanished right before impact.

There are no major documented sightings of The Flying Dutchman after 1959. The reasons differ, but it could be merely because traffic around the Cape of Good Hope is much lower now than in past centuries, with most ships preferring to sail the much shorter route into the Mediterranean Ocean and through the Suez Canal in order to navigate between Asia and Europe.

Legend vs. Myth

The most commonly accepted explanation for Flying Dutchman sightings is the Fata Morgana, or superior mirage. It is a similar phenomenon to the one a person might see in a desert or on a hot city street, where an illusion of water can sometimes appear. Superior mirages, which are the type suspected of creating Flying Dutchmen, tend to occur in colder areas or in places where there are large differences in temperature between layers of air.

Such mirages have been known to show projected images of landscapes/ships beyond the horizon, and causing them to appear as if they were floating in mid air. They can make a ship/landscape appear upside down. They can also distort the appearance of real, visible objects in ways that make those objects seem to be unnatural and disturbing. They can even cause false sunsets – in these cases, the sun will seem to set, then reappear, then set again. Given the bizarre visual effects that can be generated with a superior mirage, it becomes quite easy to write off most Flying Dutchman encounters.

However, the typical recorded sighting of the Flying Dutchman does not come from an idle tourist or land-lubber. They come from crew members of warships and large merchant vessels, men with years of experience at sea who have sailed all over the world. They come from lighthouse keepers, whose credibility and ability to recognize objects in the ocean have always been crucial to preventing maritime disasters. Some of those logs, especially those written in World War 2, would have been submitted to superior officers who would hardly have been in the mood for joking around. Even if objects were projected/distorted by mirage effects, how many large sailing ships were still at sea in 1942 during the Jubilee sighting, and in 1959 during the Straat Magelhaen encounter, when both observations were at a reasonable distance and crew members clearly identified the unknown craft as a sailing ship?

Perhaps there is no ghostly sailing ship which still plies her trade on the unforgiving seas near the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps there never was such a vessel. However, those who sail that area of the world at night should keep close watch on the dark horizon for a tell tale red glow, a sailing ship which travels at unnatural speed, and pale faced sailors, eternally hoping to mail their letters about a time long past to people long dead.