A scientific American gentleman has been endeavouring to determine the paternity of the grisly and spectral commander of the Flying Dutchman. I wish he had been successful, for ever since I read the “Cruise of the Bacchante” I have been bewildering my brains with the same problem. The princely word of the Royal midshipmen must be taken, and it is plainly stated that at four o’clock a.m. on July 11, 1881, “the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows.” Nothing can be clearer than that; and, besides, there is the additional testimony of the reverend gentleman who accompanied the Princes and edited their interesting observations. “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 two hundred yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up.” This appearance is in strict correspondence with the tradition, but I wish the vessel had not been a brig. I should not like to put my hand to it that such a rig as that of the brig was known in Vanderdecken’s days.^[81] You had four-masted craft in plenty, the fourth mast being called the bonaventure; also abundance of three-masted vessels, the third mast rigged with a lateen sail; but no fabric answering to what we term a brig.

That Vanderdecken ever shifts his flag is not to be supposed. Yet there could be no mistake, for mark what follows: “Thirteen persons altogether saw her, but whether it was Van Dieman or the Flying Dutchman, or who else, must remain unknown.” The ships in company flashed to know if the people of the Bacchante had seen the strange red light, so that probably no “shadowy being” was ever testified to by a greater number of eyewitnesses. But the thing is placed beyond dispute by what followed. “At 10.45 a.m. the ordinary seaman who had this morning reported the Flying Dutchman fell from the fore-topmast-crosstrees, and was smashed to atoms.” And then, “at the next port we came to the admiral was also smitten down.” There was nothing less to expect, but indeed a very great deal more. An old sailor to whom I related this story said that certainly the appearance looked uncommonly like the Flying Dutchman, and for his part he was willing enough to believe it was; if he had a misgiving, it lay in the smallness of the trouble that followed. “The fallin’ of a young seaman from the masthead and the sarcumstance of a hadmiral being took wuss wasn’t consequences sufficient if that there wessel wur the genuine Phantom. The Baykant (so he called her) herself oughter ha’ got lost. That’s what would have happened when I was fust goin’ to sea; but there’s bin a good many changes since then, and who’s agoin’ to say that that there curse ain’t growed weak like physic wot’s kept too long?”

But, be this as it may, there can be no doubt that Vanderdecken is still afloat, cruising about in a ship that glows at night, and whose rotten timbers are charged with the villainous quality of causing disaster and misery to vessels within the sphere of the horizon the ancient Batavian floats in.

This is a scientific age, and it is really time that we found out who this Dutchman is or was. Is there no man clever enough to devise a specific for the neutralization of the evil influence of an endevilled structure? Let such a medicine be discovered, and I’ll warrant no lack of able-bodied Jacks willing to embark in quest of the spectral pest. It would be a venture worth starting a company to undertake. “This company is intended to supply a want that has long been felt.” The object would be twofold: first, to render Britannia’s dominion of the sea more comfortable than it can be whilst Vanderdecken is suffered to sail aimlessly about with a freight of curses in his hold, and Death keeping a look-out at the masthead; and, secondly, to supply the public with an attraction. Well, it will be admitted that the Flying Dutchman would prove a lucrative “draw.” Think of her moored just below London Bridge, and the charge a shilling a-head to view her, small boys half-price! We may take it that Vanderdecken is heartily sick of his hard-up and hard-down life off Agulhas, and would gladly settle down to an immortality of still water (and Hollands), without expecting an apology for the quality of the air of the Pool and the Isle of Dogs.

I think I see the ship in my mind’s eye; a true portrait of a craft of the seventeenth century—great round barricadoed tops, pink-sterned and crowned there with a poop-royal, of a faded yellow, a green-coated swivel or two aft, and a few rusty cannon lodged in wooden beds on her main deck. And what would a chat with Vanderdecken be worth, over a steaming bowl of punch, in his darksome cabin? Rip Van Winkle would be a mere youth—equal to a hornpipe or a waltz—alongside this Dutch skipper; and what yarns could he spin of the Amsterdam of his day, of old Schouten over at Hoorn, of Van this and Van that, of the Dutch Admirals, of the fights in the narrow seas, of their High Mightinesses’ opinion of Cromwell, and of the hydropathic treatment of the English at Amboyna!

Who is he? Marryat tells us that he was a sea captain, whose wife lived with her son Philip on the outskirts of the small but fortified town of Terneuse, situated on the right bank of the Scheldt. But he starts as a spectre, and remains undeterminable down to the last chapter, when he, along with his ship and his son, falls to pieces weeping tears of joy. I love the yarn, but doubt the man. If Marryat is right Vanderdecken is dead and gone. His curse endured long enough only to enable his son to become an old man—call it fifty years—for Philip was twenty or thereabouts when his father’s ghost flew through the window. Now, we know only too well that Vanderdecken is still alive. Besides taking a strictly nautical view of the question, I am disposed to question the accuracy of the novelist on such grounds for example, as these: he represents the Flying Dutchman sailing along with royals and flying jib, when this canvas, as Marryat paints it, was not in use until the close of the last century;^[82] also he depicts her as at one time being so extremely ethereal as to be able to sail through a ship, as though the phantom was formed of mist and snow, and at another time as being substantial enough to support the highly material form of Philip when he stands upon her deck with his father.

Literature abounds in spectral ships; but there is only one Vanderdecken. And how consistently the old Dutchman fits in with the roughness and wildness of typical sea-fancies, one quickly sees when he is matched in his unearthly integrity with the refined but entirely faithless interpretations or reconstructions of the legend by the poet or the romancer. Take, for instance, Thomas Campbell’s “Spectre Boat,” where a certain “false Ferdinand,” having broken a maiden’s heart, is visited by her ghost at sea.

What the wraith said was to this effect: That Ferdinand was a false traitor, for whom his sweetheart’s ghost wanders unforgiven, and that he was to come down—in other words jump overboard—to appease her indignation for his having forced her to break her peace with heaven. As in the case of Coleridge’s Mariner, the spectre has her will; and the last we hear of her and Ferdinand and the boat is—

How poor is all this superfine business of broken vows and revengeful spectres, side by side with the rugged, schnapps’-smelling figure of old Vanderdecken viewing the horny moon with a curse in his eye, or stumping the weather side of his castellated poop with a speaking-trumpet under his arm! Campbell has also put into swinging, melodious verse an old Scandinavian legend, which he calls the “Death-boat of Heligoland.” In this poem he represents a boat furiously rowed by ghosts, whose shrouds were like plaids flying loose to the storm. The watchman sings out to know who they are; and is answered—

says Campbell.

All this is not Vanderdecken, but the poet finely refers to the old Dutchman when he sings of those curses which make horror more deep by the semblance of mirth, and which at “mid-sea appal the chill’d mariner’s glance.” Coleridge also sends a spectral ship to his Ancient Mariner in the vessel that approaches him without a breeze or without a tide, and whose sails glance in the sun, “like restless gossamers.” But, instead of Vanderdecken, we have Death playing at dice with a woman. How heartily the Ancient Mariner must have prayed that the woman would win! Certainly he could be no true sailor who would not so pray.

This gambling fancy may be found in old German legends relating to the death-ship. There is no lack of stories referring to miscreants of all shades who sail about in phantom-ships in company with Satan, who plays day and night with them for their souls. But, as though the artless yarn of Vanderdecken—simple in its elements as a tale by Defoe, and exquisitely in keeping with the stormy seas of that part of the world to which Jack has strictly confined it—were not strong and good enough, a number of monstrous perversions have been launched, and the tradition buried under a hill of absurdities. For example, there is the German notion of a ship whose portholes grin with skulls instead of cannons; she is commanded by a skeleton who holds an hour-glass, and she is manned by the ghosts of sinners. But even here the inventor is unable to manage without our old friend Vanderdecken, and so he affirms that any ship that encounters this horrid craft is doomed. Another version represents the Flying Dutchman as being very nearly as big as the world. The masts are so lofty that when a boy goes up to furl a sail years elapse before he is again seen, and he then comes down an old, white-bearded man. The germ of this may perhaps be found in that wondrous fabric of which Sir Thomas Browne writes: “It had been a sight only second unto the Ark to have beheld the great Syracusia, or mighty ship of Hiero, described in AthenÆus; and some have thought it a very large one, wherein were to be found ten stables for horses, eight towers, besides fish-ponds, gardens, tricliniums, and many fair rooms paved with agath and precious stones.” The enormous phantom ship takes seven years in tacking, whales tumble aboard of her when she rolls just as flying-fish dart into the portholes or channels of earthly vessels; her smallest sail is as big as Europe, and there is a public house, a “free-and-easy,” in every block.

One has to search elsewhere for Vanderdecken. That he was a Dutchman and that the story is Dutch ought to be presumed from the round, plain, bald, and salt character of the yarn. It is a thorough Dutch-cheese of a story. Spain may supply versions charged with spiritual elements and suggesting the Inquisition with the embellishments of silver flames and death’s heads; the French may make a purgatorial job of the fancy and ruin it by an importation of priestly conceptions widely remote from the sea inspirations; German imaginations may garnish it with unnecessary horrors; but it is in the Holland version that we find the true ocean tincture, and the only narrative likely to be accepted by such complete sea-dogs as fill the Dutch, the English, and the American forecastles.

Yet, who was Vanderdecken? An American writer, founding his presumption on a German publication, says that the master of the Phantom Ship was one Bernard Fokke, who lived in the seventeenth century. He was noted for his recklessness and daring, and cased his masts with iron to enable him to carry canvas. Having contrived to sail to the East Indies in ninety days, he was looked upon as a sorcerer. At last he and his ship disappeared, and everybody said he had been carried off by the Devil and forced to confine his navigation to the ocean between the two Southern Capes. Of his crew none remain but the boatswain, cook, and pilot. “He is still to be seen, and always hails ships and asks questions; but they should not be answered—and then his ship will disappear. Sometimes a boat is seen to approach his bark, but when it reaches her all vanish suddenly.” Others say he was a nobleman named Falkenberg, who murdered his brother and his wife and was condemned eternally to sail about the North Sea. On his arrival at the sea-shore he found a boat with a man in it awaiting him. The man said in Latin, “I have been expecting thee.” On which, accompanied by the ghosts of his murdered brother and wife, Falkenberg embarked, and was rowed over to a Phantom Ship that lay off the coast. This vessel is described as painted grey, with coloured sails, and a pale flag. She has no crew, and may be known at night by flames which issue from her masthead.

But all this will not do. Vanderdecken is no nobleman. There was a time when I was disposed to regard him as the Wandering Jew, who, having grown sick of marching about the world, had taken ship for a cruise that, though it lasted several centuries, would be short in comparison with the time his grand tour would occupy. The idea possessed me on hearing of a book entitled “News from Holland,” in High Dutch, printed at Amsterdam in 1647, in which is unfolded the story of two contemporaries of Pontius Pilate, one a Jew, the other a Gentile, both then alive. But it is not to be supposed that the Wandering Jew, whose name was Cartaphilus, and who was keeper of the Judgment Hall in Jerusalem, would voluntarily accept an obligation so naturally obnoxious to the hydrophobic soul of the Asiatic as must be involved in many centuries of trying to get to windward of the Cape. Yet if he be not the Wandering Jew, or Falkenberg, or Fokke, or Klaboteeman, whose ship, according to Longfellow, is called the Carmilhan, or Captain Requiem, of the Libera Nos, or Washington Irving’s Ramhout van Dam, who is Vanderdecken?