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.’