HMS Bacchante and the Flying Dutchman Sighting

Among the strangest entries in the published journals of any British monarch is the account, set down in the small hours of July 11, 1881, by the future King George V, then a sixteen-year-old midshipman serving aboard the corvette HMS Bacchante. The ship was on the second leg of a long imperial tour, sailing between Melbourne and Sydney by way of the Cape of Good Hope, when the prince and his older brother, Prince Albert Victor, were called to the deck during the middle watch by a sight that the duty officer could not satisfactorily explain. What they saw, they wrote, was the Flying Dutchman.

The Log Entry

The journal entry, later published in The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship Bacchante 1879-1882 under the joint authorship of the two princes, reads with a precision unusual for ghost narratives. At four o’clock in the morning, “the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. 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 on the port bow.” The midshipman of the watch was sent forward to identify her, but on reaching the forecastle could find no trace of any vessel. The night was clear, the sea calm, and visibility extended to the horizon in every direction.

In total, thirteen members of the crew confirmed the sighting in addition to the two princes. The lookout man on the forecastle, who had reported the strange ship, fell from the foremast topgallant later that morning and was killed instantly. A few hours afterward, the ship’s commodore, Admiral Sir William Hewett, was struck down by a sudden fever from which he eventually recovered. The sequence of misfortunes lent the encounter an air of tragic confirmation that would stay with the prince for the rest of his life.

The Legend in Question

The figure of the Flying Dutchman as a phantom vessel doomed to sail the world’s oceans in eternal punishment had circulated in northern European maritime folklore since at least the late eighteenth century. The earliest published account, by John MacDonald in 1790, described a vessel encountered off the Cape of Good Hope under conditions broadly similar to those recorded by the Bacchante’s crew nearly a hundred years later. By the time of the Bacchante voyage, the legend had been adapted into popular literature by Sir Walter Scott, into stage drama by Edward Fitzball, and most famously into opera by Richard Wagner, whose Der fliegende Holländer had received its first performance in Dresden in 1843.

What makes the 1881 sighting unusual is not its content, which conforms closely to the established legend, but the identity and number of its witnesses. The Royal Navy of the late Victorian period kept disciplined logs, and the presence of two princes of the blood on a ship of the line meant that every entry made during the voyage was scrutinised more carefully than usual. The published journals were intended as an official record of the cruise and were edited with the assistance of the Reverend John Neale Dalton, the boys’ tutor and a clergyman not given to credulity in supernatural matters.

Possible Explanations

Skeptics, both in 1881 and since, have proposed several conventional explanations for what the crew observed. The most frequently cited is a Fata Morgana mirage, in which atmospheric layering near the surface of the sea produces a mirrored or distorted image of a distant real ship, often appearing inverted, elongated, or radiantly lit. Such mirages are well documented in the waters off the Cape, where the meeting of the Benguela and Agulhas currents produces unusual temperature gradients in the lower atmosphere.

A second possibility is that the crew observed an unusual display of bioluminescence, in which microscopic marine organisms produce glowing patterns in the wake of currents or large schools of fish. The reported “strange red light” sits oddly with both explanations, however, since neither mirage nor bioluminescence typically produces a reddish hue, and the prince’s account specifically describes the masts and rigging of a brig standing out in the glow.

For another nineteenth-century apparition reported by a Royal Navy crew under disciplined conditions, see our entry on HMS Eurydice, lost off the Isle of Wight three years before the Bacchante voyage.

Legacy of the Sighting

The Bacchante incident has occupied an unusual position in the history of maritime apparitions. It is too well documented to be easily dismissed, yet too closely aligned with an existing legend to be treated as independent corroboration. The death of the lookout shortly after the sighting fed into a long tradition that the appearance of the Dutchman foretells disaster for those who see her, and the prince himself appears to have regarded the experience with sober conviction throughout his subsequent reign.

Modern naval historians have generally treated the entry as an example of how a powerful narrative tradition can shape the perception of a genuinely unusual but mundane atmospheric event. Defenders of the account note that the journal records the testimony of fourteen experienced seamen describing a ship in detail, sending a midshipman to investigate, and finding the sea empty. Whether the Flying Dutchman crossed the bows of HMS Bacchante on that July morning, or whether the Cape of Good Hope merely produced one of its peculiar optical effects at a moment of high suggestibility, the case has survived as the single most prominent royal account of a paranormal encounter at sea.

Sources

• Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales. The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship Bacchante 1879-1882. London: Macmillan, 1886.
• MacDonald, John. Travels in Various Parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa during a Series of Thirty Years and Upward. London, 1790.
• Bassett, Fletcher S. Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors in All Lands and at All Times. Chicago: Belford-Clarke, 1885.
• Pope, Dudley. The Black Ship. New York: Lippincott, 1963.