draught, they had customs besides that of drinking which must have
tended to render them desperately hard and seasoned men. It was their
practice to keep their ships clear, so that the deck was the only bed
they had to lie upon. No hammocks were allowed, no chairs or tables;
they took their meals upon the deck and lay upon it; preserving, in this
direction, the old tradition of the buccaneers, who denied themselves
every imaginable comfort and convenience that they might never be
mistaken for anything else than the savage beasts they were.
It is in the superstitions of the sea that we must search for the
beginning and history of many of the customs which, in modified forms,
lingered down to the period of a late generation of seafarers. They
veined the life with elements both of humour and romance, and I do not
scruple to say that much of the poetry of the profession of the sea has
perished with the extinction of the simple forecastle credulities of
other ages. In the beginning of European navigation, in the times of
Diaz, Cabot, Columbus,[80] De Gama, and earlier yet, the mariner was a
Roman Catholic, devout, profoundly superstitious, perpetually invoking
the protection of the Blessed Virgin and the Saints of Heaven, finding
miracles in the common operations of Nature, peopling the deep with
wondrous monsters, glorifying its blue breast with the gleam and colour
of the enchanted island, gazing awe-struck about him as he sailed along,
and willing to believe anything he was told. I could give you no better
illustration of this than the remark of the Jesuit Anthony Sepp, in his
account of a voyage from Spain to Paraguaná: “Towards the evening,” says
he, “we saw an entire rainbow quite across the sky, resembling our
rainbows.” _Resembling our rainbows!_ As though the worthy father
supposed that rainbows in those unfamiliar seas were very different from
the same radiant arches which span the showers of Italy, Spain, and
Germany! They were prepared for all sorts of wonders, and their
imaginations created what their eyes could not see. The lightning was
not that of Europe; the thunder was the reverberation of some hellish
conflict between armies formed of fiends of Satanic stature; the very
rain was unnatural, being coloured. Religion, or superstition if you
will, interposed to mitigate the horrors of a perfervid fancy, wrought
familiar appearances into celestial expressions, and instructed poor
Jack to calm his perturbed soul, to quell the tempest, to exorcise the
mermaid, to smooth the waters, to disperse the horrid shadows of the
electric storm with litanies, effigies of saints, and spells of many
different sorts. Thus Pirard de Laval (in “Churchill’s Collection of
Voyages,” Vol. i. p. 702) says, “We frequently saw great whirlwinds
rising at a distance, called by the seamen _dragons_, which shatter and
overturn any ship that falls in their way. When these appear the sailors
have a superstitious custom of repairing to the prow, or the side that
lies next the storm, and beating naked swords against one another
crosswise.” This custom long prevailed. Scores of similar practices may
be traced to the primitive superstitions of sailors. They unquestionably
colour the old marine life, and their extinction leaves the calling
uncomfortably bald, I think. The stars in those aged stories seem to
glow the richer for the incense floating up to them from the little
altar on the forecastle, and for the tender strains of a hundred voices
rising in some solemn, melodious canticle. The glory of the setting sun
makes cloth of gold of the sails of those castellated fabrics, and they
look to float over faery seas of purple as we view them through that
atmosphere of superstition, in the midst of which those young and
awe-struck imaginations made their miraculous voyages to the Indies and
to the mighty shores of Columbia.
Footnote 80:
Washington Irving gives several instances of Columbus’ superstitious
nature. As an example: “Seeing all human skill baffled and confounded,
Columbus endeavoured to propitiate heaven by solemn vows and acts of
penance. By his orders, a number of beans, equal to the number of
persons on board, were put into a cap, on one of which was the sign of
the cross. Each of the crew made a vow that, should he draw forth the
marked bean, he would make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santa Maria
de Guadalupe, bearing a wax taper of five pounds’ weight. The admiral
was the first to put in his hand, and the lot fell upon him. From that
moment he considered himself a pilgrim bound to perform the vow.”
Other vows were made and solemn promises fervently addressed to
heaven; but the storm continued to rage, and eventually the saints
were quitted for seamanship and the ship saved.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_WHO IS VANDERDECKEN?_
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.
Footnote 81:
There was a kind of vessel called _brigandines_, but they carried the
rig of neither the brig nor the brigantine as we understand the term.
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.
Footnote 82:
I do not find the “royal” in use much before Howe’s and Jervis’s time.
The “flying gyb” of the beginning of the eighteenth century (at which
date it first appears), was not the sail it now is.
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.
“’Twas now the dead watch of the night, the helm was lashed a lee,
And the ship rode where Mount Etna lights the deep Levantine sea;
When beneath its glare a boat came, row’d by a woman in her shroud,
Who, with eyes that made our blood run cold, stood up and spoke
aloud.”
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—
“And round they went, and down they went, as the cock crew from the
land.”
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—
“‘We are dead; we are bound from our graves in the West,
First to Hecla and then to’——unmeet was the rest
For man’s ear,”
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?
THE END.
-------------------------------------------
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
End of Project Gutenberg's A Book for the Hammock, by William Clark Russell