Ship of the Flying Dutchman
The ghost ship of the Flying Dutchman is a spectral East Indiaman of Dutch maritime legend, doomed to sail the waters off the Cape of Good Hope for ever after its captain, variously named Van der Decken, Falkenberg or the Vanderdecken, swore a blasphemous oath in the teeth of a storm. Mariners reported seeing the phantom vessel from the seventeenth century onward, often glowing with a supernatural light, and a sighting was taken as a warning of disaster or death at sea. The legend was spread by travellers' and sailors' tales in the 1830s, and Richard Wagner's opera Der fliegende Holländer of 1