SEA PHANTOMS
The romance of the sea has always attracted interest, and, as
Buckle once remarked, 'the credulity of sailors is notorious, and
every literature contains evidence of the multiplicity of their
superstitions, and of the tenacity with which they cling to them.' This
is not surprising, for many of the weird old fancies with which the
legendary lore of the sea abounds originated in certain atmospherical
phenomena which were once a mystery to our seafaring community. In a
'New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors' (1761) the writer says: 'I look upon
sailors to care as little of what becomes of themselves as any people
under the sun; yet no people are so much terrified at the thoughts of
an apparition. Their sea-songs are full of them; they firmly believe
in their existence, and honest Jack Tar shall be more frightened
at the glimmering of the moon upon the tackling of a ship, than he
would be if a Frenchman were to place a blunderbus at his head.' The
occasional reflections of mountains, cities, and ships in mirage gave
rise to many strange stories of spectral lands. Early instances of this
popular fancy occur, and Mrs. Jameson, in her 'Sacred and Legendary
Art,' quotes an old Venetian legend of 1339, relating to the ring with
which the Adriatic was first wedded. During a storm a fisherman was
required to row three men, whom he afterwards learns were St. Mark,
St. George, and St. Nicholas, first to certain churches, and then over
to the entrance of the port. But there a huge Saracen galley was seen
with frightful demons on board, which spectral craft the three men
caused to sink, thus saving the city. On leaving the boat, the boatman
is presented with a ring. In the Venetian academy is a painting by
Giorgione of this phantom ship, with a demon crew, who, terrified at
the presence of the three holy men, jump overboard, or cling to the
rigging, while the masts flame with fire, and cast a lurid glare on the
water. Collin de Plancy, in his 'Sacred Legends of the Middle Ages,'
tells us how at Boulogne, in 663, while the people were at prayers,
a strange ship--without guide or pilot--was observed approaching the
shore, with the Virgin on board, who indicated to the people a site
for her chapel--delusions which may be classed in the same category as
the 'phantom ship.' Novelists and poets have made graphic use of such
well-known apparitions, variations of which occur in every maritime
country. But the author accounts for this philosophically, adding that
'a great deal may be said in favour of men troubled with the scurvy,
the concomitants of which disorder are, generally, faintings and the
hip, and horrors without any ground for them.'
There were few ships in days gone by that 'doubled the Cape' but owned
among the crew some who had seen the 'Flying Dutchman,' a phantom to
which Sir Walter Scott alludes as the harbinger of woe. This ship was
distinguished from earthly vessels by bearing a press of sail when all
others were unable to show an inch of canvas.
The story goes that 'Falkenburg was a noble-man who murdered his
brother and his bride in a fit of passion, and was condemned to wander
towards the north. On arriving at the sea-shore, he found awaiting
him a boat, with a man in it, who said, "Expectamus te." He entered
the boat, attended by his good and his evil spirit, and went on board
a spectral bark in the harbour. There he still lingers, while these
spirits play dice for his soul. For six hundred years the ship has
wandered the seas, and mariners still see her in the German Ocean,
sailing northwards, without helm or helmsman. She is painted grey,
has coloured sails, a pale flag, and no crew. Flames issue from the
masthead at night.'[244] There are numerous versions of this popular
legend, and O'Reilly, in his 'Songs of Southern Seas,' says--
Heaven help the ship near which the demon sailor steers!
The doom of those is sealed to whom the phantom ship appears,
They'll never reach their destin'd port, they'll see their homes
no more,
They who see the Flying Dutchman never, never reach the shore.
Captain Marryat made this legend the basis of his 'Phantom Ship,' and
Longfellow, in his 'Tales of a Wayside Inn,' powerfully tells of--
A ship of the dead that sails the sea,
And is called the Carmilhan,
A ghostly ship, with a ghostly crew.
In tempests she appears,
And before the gale, or against the gale,
She sails, without a rag of sail,
Without a helmsman steers.
And ill-betide the luckless ship
That meets the Carmilhan!
Over her decks the seas will leap,
She must go down into the deep,
And perish, mouse and man.
There are, also, a host of stories of spectral ships, some of which
are still credited by sailors. The Germans have their phantom ships,
to meet which is regarded as an omen of disaster. In one instance, the
crew is said to consist of ghosts of condemned sinners, who serve one
hundred years in each grade, until each has a short tour as captain.
This mysterious vessel is described by Oscar L. B. Wolff in 'The
Phantom Ship':
For the ship was black, her masts were black,
And her sails coal-black as death;
And the Evil-One steered at the helm, and laughed,
And mocked at their failing breath.
Swedish sailors have a vessel of this kind. She is so large that
it takes three weeks to go from poop to prow, and hence orders are
transmitted on horseback. Danish folk-lore has its spectral ship, and a
Schleswick-Holstein tradition relates how a maiden was carried off by
her lover in a spectral ship, as one day she sat on the shore bewailing
his absence. In 'Mélusine' for September 1884,[245] it is stated that,
'in many localities in Lower Brittany, stories are current of a huge
ship manned by giant human forms and dogs. The men are reprobates
guilty of horrible crimes; the dogs, demons set to guard them and
inflict on them a thousand tortures. Such a vessel wanders ceaselessly
from sea to sea, without entering port or casting anchor, and will do
so to the end of the world. No vessel should allow it to fall aboard,
for its crew would suddenly disappear. The orders, in this strange
craft, are given through huge conch-shells, and, the noise being heard
several miles off, it is easy to avoid her. Besides, there is nothing
to fear, if the "Ave Maria" is repeated, and the Saints appealed to,
especially St. Anne d'Auray.'
Stories of phantom ships are found, more or less, all over the
world, and are associated with many a romantic and tragic tale. Bret
Harte[246] relates how some children go on board a hulk to play, but it
breaks away from its moorings, drifts out to sea, and is lost. Yet at
times there are heard:
The voices of children, still at play,
In a phantom hulk that drifts away
Through channels whose waters never fail.
And Whittier[247] tells how the young captain of a schooner visits the
Labrador coast where, in a certain secluded bay, two beautiful sisters
live with their mother. Both fall in love with him, and, just as the
younger is about to meet her lover and fly with him, she is imprisoned
in her room by her mother, whereupon her elder sister goes in her
stead, and is carried to sea in the vessel. The disappointed lover, on
learning the deception, returns only to find his loved one dead. But
the schooner, adds Whittier, never returned home and:
Even yet, at Seven Isle Bay,
Is told the ghastly tale
Of a weird unspoken sail.
She flits before no earthly blast,
With the red sign fluttering from her mast,
The ghost of the Schooner Breeze.
In Dana's 'Buccaneer,' the pirate carries a lady to sea, who jumps
overboard, and on the anniversary of her death:
A ship! and all on fire! hull, yards, and mast,
Her sails are sheets of flame; she's nearing fast!
Occasionally a spectre ship is seen at Cap d'Espoir, in the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, which is commonly reported to be the ghost of the flagship of
a fleet sent to reduce the French forts by Queen Anne, and which was
wrecked here, and all hands. On this phantom ship, which is crowded
with soldiers, lights are seen, and on the bowsprit stands an officer,
pointing to the shore with one hand, while a woman is on the other
side. The lights suddenly go out, a scream is heard, and the ill-fated
vessel sinks. Under one form or another, the phantom ship has long been
a world-wide piece of folk-lore, and even in an Ojibway tale, when a
maiden is on the eve of being sacrificed to the spirit of the falls, a
spectral canoe, with a fairy in it, takes her place as a sacrifice.
Dennys, in his 'Folk-lore of China,' gives a novel variety of the
phantom ship. The story goes that a horned serpent was found in a
tiger's cage near Foochow by a party of tiger-hunters. They tried to
ship it to Canton, but during the voyage the serpent escaped, through
a flash of lightning striking the cage and splitting it. Thereupon
the captain offered a thousand dollars to anyone who would destroy
the monster, but its noxious breath killed two sailors who attempted
the task. Eventually the junk was abandoned, and is still believed to
cruise about the coast, and cautious natives will not board a derelict
junk.
One of the chief features of many of these phantom-ship stories is the
idea of retribution for evil deeds, as in the following, told by Irving
in the 'Chronicles of Wolfert's Roost.' A certain Ramnout van Dam had
'danced and drank until midnight--Saturday--when he entered his boat to
return home. He was warned that he was on the verge of Sunday morning,
but he pulled off, swearing that he would not land until he reached
Spiting Devil, if it took him a month of Sundays. He was never seen
afterwards, but may be heard plying his oars, being the Flying Dutchman
of the Tappan Sea, doomed to ply between Kakiot and Spiting Devil until
the day of judgment.' Moore in his account of the phantom ship seen in
the description of Deadman's Island, where wrecks were once common,
writes:
To Deadman's Isle, on the eve of the blast,
To Deadman's Isle, she speeds her fast,
By skeleton shapes, her sails are furled,
And the hand that steers is not of this world.
Turning to our own country, similar phantom vessels have long been
supposed to haunt the coast, and Mr. Hunt[248] describes one that
visited the Cornish shores on the occasion of a storm, and to rescue
which delusive bark help was despatched: 'Away they pulled, and
the boat which had been first launched still kept ahead by dint of
mechanical power and skill. At length the helmsman cried, "Stand by to
board her." The vessel came so close to the boat that they could see
the men, and the bow oarsman made a grasp at the bulwarks. His hand
found nothing solid and he fell. Ship and light then disappeared. The
next day the "Neptune" of London was wrecked, and all perished. The
captain's body was picked up after a few days, and that of his son
also.' Among other Cornish stories may also be mentioned those known
as the 'Pirate-wrecker and the Death Ship;' and the 'Spectre Ship of
Porthcurno.' Occasionally off the Lizard a phantom lugger is seen, and
Bottrell[249] tells how, at times, not only spectral ships, but the
noise of falling spars, &c., are heard during an incoming fog.
Scotch sailors have their stories of phantom ships. Thus a spectral
vessel--the ghostly bark of a bridal party maliciously wrecked--is said
to appear in the Solway, always hovering near a ship that is doomed
to be wrecked; and Cunningham[250] has given a graphic account of two
phantom pirate ships. The story goes that, for a time, two Danish
pirates were permitted to perform wicked deeds on the deep, but were
at last condemned to perish by wreck for the evil they had caused. On
a certain night they were seen approaching the shore--the one crowded
with people, and the other carrying on its deck a spectral shape. Then
four young men put off in a boat that had been sent from one ship, to
join her, but, on reaching the ship, both vessels sank where they were.
On the anniversary of their wreck, and before a gale, these two vessels
are supposed to approach the shore, and to be distinctly visible. A
Highland legend records how a large ship--the 'Rotterdam'--which went
down with all on board, is seen at times with her ghostly crew, a sure
indication of disaster. But perhaps this superstition has been most
firmly riveted in the popular mind by Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner,'
wherein an ominous sign is seen afar off prefiguring the death of
himself and his comrades. It is a spectre ship in which Death and
Life-in-Death play at dice for the possession of the crew--the latter
winning the mariner.
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold;
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The night-mare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
Stories of ghosts having appeared at sea have been told from early
days, and have everywhere been a fruitful source of terror to sailors.
But this is not surprising for, as Scot says,[251] 'innumerable are
the reports of accidents unto such as frequent the seas, as fishermen
and sailors, who discourse of noises, flashes, shadows, echoes, and
other things, nightly seen or heard upon the waters.' Brand,[252] for
instance, narrates an amusing tale of a sea ghost. The ship's cook,
who had one of his legs shorter than the other, died on a homeward
passage and was buried at sea. A few nights afterwards his ghost was
seen walking before the ship, and the crew were in a panic. It was
found however that the cause of this alarm was part of a maintop, the
remains of some wreck floating before them that simulated the dead
man's walk. On another occasion a ship's crew fancied they had not
only seen but 'smelled' a ghost--a piece of folly which so enraged
the captain that he ordered the boatswain's mate to give some of the
sailors a dozen lashes, which entirely cleared the ship of the ghost
during the remainder of the voyage. It was afterwards ascertained that
the smell proceeded from a dead rat behind some beer-barrels. In the
same way, many a ghost story might be explained which, proceeding from
natural causes, has been the source of superstitious dread among the
seafaring community. Cheever, in his 'Sea and Sailor,' referring to
the credulity of sailors, says: 'The sailor is a profound believer in
ghosts. One of these nocturnal visitants was supposed to visit our
ship. It was with the utmost difficulty that the crew could be made to
turn in at night. You might have seen the most athletic, stout-hearted
sailor on board, when called to take his night-watch aloft, glancing
at the yards and tackling of the ship for the phantom. It was a long
time, in the opinion of the crew, before the phantom left the ship.' It
may be remembered that Sir Walter Scott[253] relates how the captain of
an English ship was assured by the crew that the ghost of a murdered
sailor, every night, visited the ship. So convinced were the sailors
of the appearance of this phantom that they refused to sail, but the
mystery was cleared up by the discovery of a somnambulist.
Occasionally, the ghost of a former captain is supposed to visit a
vessel and to warn the crew of an approaching storm. Symondson in
his 'Two Years abaft the Mast' records the appearance of such an
apparition, at one time 'to prescribe a change of course, at another,
in wet and calm weather, quietly seated in his usual place on the poop
deck.'[254] Sometimes similar warnings have come from other sources.
Thus a curious occurrence is told by Mary Howitt, which happened in
1664 to Captain Rogers, R.N., who was in command of the 'Society,' a
vessel bound from England to Virginia. The story goes that 'he was
heading in for the capes, and was, as he reckoned, after heaving the
lead, three hundred miles from them. A vision appeared to him in the
night, telling him to turn out, and look about. He did so, found all
alert, and retired again. The vision appeared again, and told him to
heave the lead. He arose, caused the lead to be cast, and found but
seven fathoms. Greatly frightened, he tacked ship, and the daylight
showed him to be under the capes, instead of two hundred miles at
sea.'[255] With this story may be compared a mysterious story told in
the 'Chicago Times' of March, 1885.
It appears that, as two men had fallen from the topmast head of a
lake-vessel, the rumour spread that the ship was an unlucky one.
Accordingly, writes one of the crew, 'on its arrival at Buffalo, the
men went on shore as soon as they were paid off. They said the ship had
lost her luck. While we were discharging at the elevator, the story got
round, and some of the grain-trimmers refused to work on her. Even the
mate was affected by it. At last we got ready to sail for Cleveland,
where we were to load coal. The captain managed to get a crew by going
to a crimp, who ran them in, fresh from salt water. They came on board
two-thirds drunk, and the mate was steering them into the forecastle,
when one of them stopped and said, pointing aloft, "What have you got
a figurehead on the mast for?" The mate looked up and then turned
pale. "It's Bill," he said, and with that the whole lot jumped on to
the dock. I didn't see anything, but the mate told the captain to look
for another officer. The captain was so much affected that he put me
on another schooner, and then shipped a new crew, and sailed for
Cleveland. He never got there. He was sunk by a steamer off Dunkirk.'
Another curious phantom warning to sailors seen in years gone by
was the 'Hooper,' or the 'Hooter,' of Sennen Cove, Cornwall. This
was supposed to be a spirit which took the form of a band of misty
vapour, stretching across the bay, so opaque that nothing could be
seen through it. According to Mr. Hunt,[256] 'it was regarded as a
kindly interposition of some ministering spirit, to warn the fisherman
against venturing to sea. This appearance was always followed, and
often suddenly, by a severe storm. It is seldom or never now seen. One
profane old fisherman would not be warned by the bank of fog, and,
as the weather was fine on the shore, he persuaded some young men to
join him. They manned a boat, and the aged leader, having with him a
threshing-flail, declared that he would drive the spirit away, and he
vigorously beat the fog with the "threshel," as the flail is called.
The boat passed through the fog, and went to sea, but a severe storm
arose, and no one ever saw the boat or the men again, since which
time the "Hooper" has been rarely seen.' Similarly a mist over the
river Cymal, in Wales, is thought to be the spirit of a traitoress, who
lost her life in the lake close by. Tradition says she had conspired
with pirates to rob her lord of his domain, and was defeated by an
enchanter.[257]
But sailors' yarns are so proverbially remarkable that the reader must
estimate their value for himself, not forgetting how large a factor in
their production is the imagination, worked upon by nervous credulity
and superstitious fear, a striking instance of which is recorded by
a correspondent of the 'Gentleman's Magazine:' 'My friend, Captain
Mott, R.N., used frequently to repeat an anecdote of a seaman under
his command. This individual, who was a good sailor and a brave man,
suffered much trouble and anxiety from his superstitious fears. When
on the night watch, he would see sights and hear noises in the rigging
and the deep, which kept him in a perpetual fever of alarm. One day
the poor fellow reported upon deck that the devil, whom he knew by
his horns and cloven foot, stood by the side of his hammock the
preceding night, and told him that he had only three days to live.
His messmates endeavoured to remove his despondency by ridicule, but
without effect; and the next morning he told the tale to Captain Mott,
with this addition, that the fiend had paid him a second nocturnal
visit, announcing a repetition of the melancholy tidings. The captain
in vain expostulated with him on the folly of indulging such groundless
apprehensions; and the morning of the fatal day being exceedingly
stormy, the man, with many others, was ordered to the topmast to
perform some duty among the rigging. Before he ascended he bade his
messmates farewell, telling them that he had received a third warning
from the devil, and that he was confident he should be dead before
night. He went aloft with the foreboding of evil on his mind, and in
less than five minutes he lost his hold, fell upon the deck, and was
killed on the spot.'
FOOTNOTES:
[244] See Bassett's _Legends and Superstitions of the Sea_, pp. 346,
347.
[245] Quoted in Bassett's _Legends of the Sea_, p. 351.
[246] Poems: _A Greypoint Legend, 1797_.
[247] _The Wreck of the Schooner Breeze._
[248] _Romances of West of England_, pp. 362-364.
[249] _Traditions and Fireside Stories of West Cornwall._
[250] _Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry_, p. 338.
[251] _Discoverie of Witchcraft._
[252] _Pop. Antiq._ iii. p. 85.
[253] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft._
[254] Quoted by Bassett in his _Legends and Superstitions of the Sea_,
p. 288.
[255] _Ibid._ p. 286.
[256] _Romances of West of England_, p. 367.
[257] Wirt Sikes: _British Goblins_.