The Flying Dutchman - De Vliegende Hollander - a sailing ghost ship living in legends, who fell under the oath curse of its own captain, which made the crew unable to return home for 300 years, doomed to wander forever among the waves.
Often, sailors see the appearance of the "Flying Dutchman" on the border of the horizon, surrounded by the magnificence of a glowing halo - to see a ghost ship is an extremely bad omen.
According to a long-established mythology, if the "Flying Dutchman" meets with another ship, then his crew living out of time tries to send a message through the sailors to their loved ones, who of course are no longer in the world of the living.
Maritime superstitions acknowledge that meeting the Flying Dutchman is an extremely dangerous omen.
However, today we will not stir the well-known legends of the sea, now we will look at the fate of other mysteriously disappeared ships. These will not be stories about the "Flying Dutchman" or "Mary Celeste" ("Mary Celeste", Mary Celeste, "Mary of Heaven") - which was found without a single person on board (and even the remains of people) in December 1872, 400 miles from Gibraltar.
We will probably never know why people left an absolutely serviceable ship. Now it is a classic example of an unknown marine anomaly, showing a prime example of a live ghost ship.
Many no less interesting stories were born about the terrible fate of ships that disappeared in the depths of the sea for no apparent reason. After all, the sea is an element leading its own chronicle of history, building sometimes mysterious zigzags of fate.
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Lost Ship Tales: Ghost Ships
1823. The story of schooner Jenny tells of a lost ship frozen in ice in Drake Passage in Antarctica. Seventeen years later, the disappeared schooner, already overgrown with legends by this time, was found by a whaling ship.
The whaler's crew even found the remains of the captain, preserved and frozen in the captain's chair with a feather clutched in hand. The ship's log kept the last words of the captain about the chronology of the disaster: “May 4, 1823. No food for 71 days, I'm the only one who survived."
The bodies of the captain and 6 other crew members were buried at sea. Later, the Admiralty was told about the loss of the ship. King George Island in Antarctica was named after Captain Jenny in the 1960s. This is somewhat strange, but there are no tales regarding the ship that could tell about his wanderings in the ocean as a ghost.
1909. The passenger steamer Waratah, considered the most powerful ship, on its third voyage between Australia and England, made a planned stop in Durban, South Africa. In this port, only one passenger got off the ship.
Later, he attributed his act to the incredibly difficult atmosphere on the ship. And also claimed an abnormal vision of “a man with a long sword in strange clothes. The "ghost" held a sword in his hand, and his hand was covered in blood."
Naturally, then no one paid special attention to these words, except that he grinned. Warata continued on and sailed to Cape Town with 211 passengers and crew. The vessel was spotted twice by other vessels in the area, but the ship itself never reached its destination.
The huge disadvantage was that there was no ship radio on board the Waratah, and it was impossible to transmit a distress signal in the event of a crash. Despite numerous attempts to find the ship (even more recently, in 2004), no traces of the steamer have been found.
At first, experts believed that the cause of the sinking could be the movement of lead ore cargo in the hold. But then there would be the wreckage of the ship, or the surviving passengers. But not a single hint of a crash, not a single clue to uncover the mysterious disappearance of Warata was found.
The only thing that can be said about this disappearance is the occasional beeping from the fog when it forms in the Cape Town roadstead - with the locators showing a clear path.
Fata Morgana, a classic example of frightening ghost ships.
The year 1928. The five-masted Copenhagen bark was used as a naval training ship, and was the world's largest sailing vessel in those years. Its shipping history dates back to 1913. On its last voyage, the barque sailed from Buenos Aires to Melbourne, without any cargo on board.
The ship exchanged a signal "all is well" with another ship 8 days after sailing, but after that there was complete silence, the connection was cut off. Two years after the disappearance, a ghostly five-mast vessel was seen in the Pacific Ocean, very similar to the missing ship.
Assuming that the ship might still be afloat, a thorough search for the ship began. There have even been found debris labeled 'Kobenhavn' on the west coast of Australia. And later, scraps of the alleged sailor's diary (preserved in a bottle) were found in the South Atlantic.
According to the record, the ship collided with a large iceberg and sank. No other wreckage was found. Although in 1935, a boat with human remains was discovered on the coast of South-West Africa, which was buried there.
True, they have not fully figured out whether they have anything to do with the missing ship.
It is said that sometimes off the coast of Australia, in Port Phillip Bay, out of the misty haze, a five match of a handsome military man looms … still fulfilling the last task.
1955. Merchant ship Joyita set out on a short 48 - hour voyage between Samoa and Tokelau. From the departure point of Samoa, the vessel departed 16 crew members and 9 passengers. The cargo on board was medicine, timber, and food.
Alas, the ship never reached its final destination without sending any distress signal. After an unsuccessful search, they wanted to give up on the ship, when suddenly Joyita was spotted five weeks later, more than 600 miles deviated from the intended route.
Rescuers found a strange picture aboard the ship: the radio was tuned to the international distress signal frequency, the ship's engines were working, and among the medical supplies there was a mass of bandages soaked in blood. Worse, more than four tons of cargo were missing, there were no people or their remains on the ship.
Considering the missing cargo, most likely pirates attacked the ship, suggested one of the versions of the incident. Probably the crew decided to abandon the ship, since all the life rafts were missing. For a long time in the ocean, the ship was able to hold out thanks to the construction of the ship, its hull was equipped with a plug.
Joyita was rescued and sold to new owners, but then acquired an ominous reputation as a cursed ship: her new owners went bankrupt or died, went to prison. As a result, the ship was abandoned, and later completely dismantled into parts.
1978. The freighter MS München left the port of Bremerhaven in Germany on December 7, 1978, bound for Savannah, Georgia. A cargo of steel products was on board, as well as part of a nuclear reactor for Combustion Engineering, Inc.
For Munich, this was the 62nd transatlantic flight, with an experienced crew on board. The weather in those days was not very favorable, but the ship was considered unsinkable according to its characteristics.
On the morning of December 13, a German cruise ship received a radio communication message from MS München about extremely bad weather conditions and minor damage to the vessel. Three hours later, distress signals from Munich were picked up by other vessels, which reported significant deviations from the course.
Scattered Morse code signals have been recorded in Belgium, Spain, giving rise to an international search. The search operation lasted until December 20. In the end, several empty lifeboats were found, with signs of serious damage.
The remains of either the ship itself or the people were never found. One of the versions of the disappearance of the ship suggested: MS München was broken and then sunk by a huge force of "killer wave".
There are few rumors about the missing ship, but they say: sometimes sailors in these places receive strange radio signals from a ship that does not respond to inquiries, lost its course … there is a dense fog around …