The Flying Dutchman Was Real (Just Not the Way Sailors Thought)

For two hundred years, sailors rounding the Cape of Good Hope watched for a ship that came out of the storm under full sail, when no other vessel could carry an inch of canvas. In 1881 thirteen men on a British warship saw her. The ghost ship was never real. What those sailors saw almost certainly was.

In this one: the Cape of Storms and the Dutch East India Company's two-hundred-day voyages to Java; the potters of Delft, who painted ships like these; the first printed sighting, in John MacDonald's Travels (1790); the 1795 phantom that turned out to be a cloud; John Leyden's luminous ship (1803) and Walter Scott's plague ship (1813); Captain Vanderdecken and his oath, first named in Blackwood's Magazine (1821), and his letters to people long dead; Barend Fokke's 158-day voyage and the devil's bargain of Dutch folklore; Heinrich Heine's curse and its way out, and Richard Wagner's storm at Sandwike that became an opera (Dresden, 1843); the strange red light seen from HMS Inconstant on 11 July 1881; then the science: why the horizon is only eleven kilometres away, how cold air bends light and lifts ships into the sky, William Latham seeing France from Hastings (1797), the Fata Morgana and the cold Benguela Current, the floating ship photographed off Cornwall (2021), and why mirages cannot explain a storm; Saint Elmo's fire and Darwin on the Beagle; the rogue waves of the Agulhas Current, World Glory (1968), the Draupner wave (25.6 metres, 1995) and the vanished liner Waratah (1909); real ghost ships: the Mary Celeste, the Baychimo, the Ryou-Un Maru and the Alta.

Chapters:
0:00 A ship that should not have been there
0:29 I. The Cape of Storms
1:43 II. A Ship in Bad Weather
3:23 III. The Captain's Oath
5:33 IV. Thirteen Witnesses
6:34 V. The Bending of Light
8:23 VI. Fire and Water
10:02 VII. Ships With No One Aboard
11:12 Epilogue: What the Sailors Saw

The legend is told as an animated Delft blue tile picture; the science appears in realistic 3D. Scenes that recreate real events or photographs are labelled as reconstructions on screen.

Sources: J. MacDonald, Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa (1790) · "Vanderdecken's Message Home", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (May 1821) · The Cruise of HMS Bacchante 1879-1882, vol. I (1886) · J. K. Mallory, International Hydrographic Review 51 (1974) · W. Latham, Philosophical Transactions (1798) · Met Office · Atmospheric Optics · Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Created by the real people from Winsares Arts Studio.

Winsares Arts Studios Production

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