The Flying Dutchman (Dutch: De Vliegende Hollander) is a legendary ghost ship, allegedly never able to make port, but doomed to sail the seven seas forever. The myths and ghost stories are likely to have originated from the 17th-century Golden Age of the Dutch East India Company. The oldest known extant version of the legend dates from the late 18th century. According to the legend, if hailed by another ship, the crew of the Flying Dutchman might try to send messages to land, or to people long dead. Reported sightings in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed that the ship glowed with a ghostly light. In ocean lore, the sight of this phantom ship functions as a portent of doom. It was commonly believed that the Flying Dutchman was a seventeenth-century cargo vessel known as a fluyt.
Origins
The first print reference to the ship appears in Travels in various part of Europe, Asia and Africa during a series of thirty years and upward (1790) by John MacDonald:
The weather was so stormy that the sailors said they saw the Flying Dutchman. The common story is that this Dutchman came to the Cape in distress of weather and wanted to get into harbour but could not get a pilot to conduct her and was lost and that ever since in very bad weather her vision appears.
The next literary reference appears in Chapter VI of A Voyage to Botany Bay (1795) (also known as A Voyage to New South Wales), attributed to George Barrington (1755–1804):
I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions and doom, but had never given much credit to the report; it seems that some years since a Dutch man-of-war was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one on board, who pretends to have seen the apparition.
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Absolutely fucking livid rn rant incoming under the spoiler TLDR ACAB 1312 Christopher Dorner was the only good cop
spoiler
This weekend my sister went to a sleepover and my mom's car is out of commission so she asked me to go pick her up. On the way back I stop into a gas station and there's a guy with a shopping cart and a sign sitting on the side of the road panhandling. This is incredibly out of the ordinary where I live because we're in the middle of absolutely nowhere with a population of like 100, so I stopped for a second to give him a couple bucks and ask where he was from.
He was super super nice, he said some variation of "God loves you" probably 5 or 6 times during our maybe 2 minute conversation, and he said he used to live in the city about 200km away from here but he recently lost his housing and has been living on the street ever since. He got tired of being harassed by cops in the city so walked to the closest town to try his luck over there, but they got called on him so he moved on again, and so on over the course of a couple months until he ended up here.
I had to bring my sister home, so I ended up leaving but not before other people showed up to talk to him. Seeing anyone who's seemingly homeless is so rare out here that a couple of the people had driven probably 20 minutes just because they heard he was there and wanted to chat/buy him something/give him baked goods. He seemed in good company when I left.
On the drive to my mom's, about 5 minutes later, I see 5 police vans rocket past me with their sirens on. I was almost home by then and I didn't want my sister with me during this, so I sped up and dropped my sister off and immediately started going back to where the man was. The nearest police station is over an hour away, so they had already been called while I was talking to him. By the time I got there the guy was gone and the pigs had left but there was a crowd in the parking lot of the gas station talking about it, how excessive the cops were and how pissed they were that the cops came out for him. Word goes around at the snap of a finger, but not one person out of the 15 or so who I talked to could say why they came out and arrested him. Even in our community Facebook groups everyone was saying that he hadn't done anything all day, and that so many people spoke to him throughout the day that there was effectively no way he could have done something and word not get around.
I'm so fucking pissed, when I was 14 I got stopped and had my bag searched by a cop in the exact same fucking spot who's only reasoning for doing so was "we were bored and looking for something to do" so a goddamn pack of feral hogs coming from outside of our community to harass a man who had done nothing and whom not one person had a problem with really set me off. Calling them filthy fucking swine would be both too generous to the cops and an insult to actual pigs who, unlike the cops, are capable of intelligent thought and can feel emotions other than fear.
Are they keeping him somewhere?
I don't know, the way he described it it sounded like they keep picking him up and letting him go a few hours later, and when it happens too many times he moves on to somewhere else but then the cops get called on him there too. I didn't get to talk to him for very long. Genuinely shocking show of force from them though, it really pissed people off that they sent 10 cops to harass one guy for no fucking reason. Even the pro-police crowd thought it was fucked up.