The Flying Dutchman … a ghost ship?
The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
by Sara Swanson
If you ask anyone in the southwest corner of Washtenaw County what a Flying Dutchman is, they would most likely answer a student at Manchester Community Schools. But outside of the Manchester area … their answer might be spookier.
The Flying Dutchman is a common name for a ghost ship. Sightings of phantom ships occur in different locations and circumstances, separated by hundreds of years; however they are often treated as all being of the same ghost ship. The name given to this ship is the Flying Dutchman. A sighting of the Dutchman was believed to be bad luck and a harbinger of death.
What makes a ghost ship a ghost ship? In some accounts, a ship appears and then disappears. Sometimes the ship is seen to be floating above the water. Sometimes the ship is seen in the distance and sometimes the ship is close enough that a collision is feared, before it abruptly vanishes. Sometimes the ship glows.
The earliest known use of the name the Flying Dutchman for a ghost ship in print is from 1790 but the stories most likely come from a century earlier, as a real 17th-century Dutch captain named Bernard Fokke is believed to have been the captain on which the stories are based. He was famous for how quickly he could sail from the Netherlands to the East Indies, around the Cape of Good Hope. Rumors at the time attributed his speed to a deal with the devil.
Over the decades, stories grew up around the legend of the Dutchman, including one that the crew members were guilty of a terrible crime and therefore cursed to forever sail the seas, and that if a ship got close enough, the crew would ask the living sailors to pass on messages for them. At some point in the stories, the Flying Dutchman ceased to be a vessel of the Dutch East India Company and became a pirate ship, which was the inspiration for the cursed ship The Flying Dutchman captained by Davy Jones in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
While sightings of phantom ships could easily be written off as confusion in bad weather, whale sightings, drunken boasting, or even creations out of boredom, a scientific explanation for many instances exists. A Fata Morgana is a type of mirage responsible for not only phantom ships, but sightings of phantom islands, “fairy castles,” and even UFOs!
A Fata Morgana occurs when rays of light bend as they pass through a layer of significantly warmer air resting over colder, dense air, forming something called an “atmospheric duct” that acts like a refracting lens. This type of mirage is named after Morgan le Fay, the shapeshifting fairy from the legends of King Arthur, due to a belief that these mirages frequently seen in the straits between Sicily and the Italian mainland (hence the Italian name) were fairy castles or false land she conjured to lure sailors to their deaths.
A Fata Morgana can explain all sorts of ghostly attributes the Flying Dutchman has been reported to have. The mirage created from a very real ship on the water can be above the real ship, right-side or upside; appearing as though it is floating above the water, at water level, or made up of a stacking effect of more than one of these at once. Sometimes one will occur of a ship sailing out of sight, below the horizon line, so when the mirage appears, there is no physical ship in sight to explain the image. In all cases, Fata Morganas appear distorted, are in motion, and change quickly.
One of the most famous sightings of a Flying Dutchman was by King George V, king of the United Kingdom from 1910 to 1936 and grandfather of recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II. On a three-year voyage during his teen years, he wrote in his journal about an encounter during the pre-dawn hours of July 11, 1881, off the coast of Australia: “July 11th. At 4am the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving, there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her … At 10.45am the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the foretopmast crosstrees on to the topgallant forecastle and was smashed to atoms.”
What does Manchester athletics’ mascot have to do with a ghost ship? Not much. The name “Dutchmen” in Manchester’s Flying Dutchmen doesn’t refer to the “Dutch” from the Netherlands, but rather is a colloquial way of pronouncing “Deutsche,” the German word for a German person. During the second half of the 1800s an influx of German immigrants settled in the Manchester area and Manchester boasted German-speaking families and institutions like businesses and churches. So, in the first half of the 20th century, when a football announcer referred to a Manchester football player running down the field as a “Flying Dutchman,” the reported origin of our high school mascot, it was not a reference to the Netherlands but to our community’s German heritage.
If you look at Manchester’s Flying Dutchmen logo, however, you will see they feature a pair of klompen or wooden Dutch clogs. As these are absolutely associated with the Netherlands and in no way with Germany, what are they doing in our school logo? Maybe this is our tie to Captain Bernard Fokke of the Netherlands who possibly made a deal with the devil way back in the 1600s in order to speed up shipping for the Dutch East India Company.
Maybe this is our tie to his ship, that stories tell us was the original Flying Dutchman!
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