The Flying Dutchman

“ Which the Flying Dutchman has won and borne the prize away.
To the Flying Dutchman, &c.
No other horse was ever known to do what he has done,
For more than twenty thousand pounds in prizes he has won; [294]
With Marlow mounted on his back, believe me what I say,
He never run a race but one, but he took the prize away.
To the Flying Dutchman, &c.
So to conclude and make an end, and finish up my song,
Unto the brave lord Eglinton, Flying Dutchman does belong,
So fill your glass and let it pass, and give a loud huzza,
For the Flying Dutchman stands unrivalled at the present day. ”

“ Nor would it have been very easy to prove that he was literally wrong. “Omnibus” was in use wherever the latin language prevailed; and though not specifically designed as a vehicle for passengers and luggage, it was employed to carry all kinds of things—hence the application of it to the modern and very useful Noah’s Ark on four wheels.
A good deal of scepticism has been expressed respecting the “flying Dutchman” of the novelist and others. But I do not see why we should not have a “flying Dutchman,” seeing that we have “flying Belgians.” ”

“ Such is the effect of early prejudices, that, under the muzle of the sun, a Dutchman cannot exist without snuffing the putrid exhalations from stagnant water, to which they have been accustomed from their infancy. ”

“ With all element of terror in it extinguished by time, it is a sight to recall with a sailor's fondness; for indeed the Dutchman was a fine ship, very tall, with port-lids painted red inside, so that with the guns projecting from them, in two tiers, the aspect was that of rows of crimson, wolfish jaws, every beast with his tongue out ”

“ If we Americans, who after all, are homeopathic preparations of Holland stock, can laugh at the Dutch, and call them human beavers, and hint that their country may float off any day at high tide, we can also feel proud, and say they have proved themselves heroes, and that their country will not float off while there is a Dutchman left to grapple it.
There are said to be at least ninety-nine hundred largo windmills in Holland, with sails ranging from eighty to one hundred and twenty feet long. They are employed in sawing timber, beating hemp, grinding, and many other kinds of work ”

“ Here in Java the Dutch have been longer settled than the English in India; they more often remain in the island, and the effect of course is more marked from generation to generation. The Dutchman is a placid, easy-going creature, even in his native Holland, except when roused by some great crisis, like a Spanish invasion, and then he fights with a courage which has given him a proud name in history. But ordinarily he is of a calm and even temper, and likes to sit quietly and survey his broad acres, and smoke his pipe in blissful content with himself and all the world beside. ”

“ The first up, on clearing the scarp, have their eyes upon the Dutchman. His behaviour might cause them surprise, if they could not account for it. As said, the beacon is upon the higher of the two peaks, some two hundred yards beyond the clift’s brow. He is beside it, and apparently beside himself. Dancing over the ground, he makes grotesque gesticulations, tossing his arms about, and waving his hat overhead—all the while shouting as if to some vessel close at hand—calling in rapid repetition:
“Ship, Ahoy! Ahoy!”
Looking they can see no ship, nor craft of any kind. ”

“ Why, a Dutchman never has his spree out! You take and hail a man before the mast, able seaman or what not, when he’s paid off of a cruise—and mind ye, he doesn’t engage for a long spell, doesn’t Mynheer—and he’ll tow you into dry dock, and set you down to your grub, and blow you out with schnaps as if he was a admiral. ”

“ He can do nothing but wait for fair weather, and goes below, leaving his steersman to keep watch. The lad drops asleep, singing of his home, and through the darkness the gloomy vessel of the Dutchman is seen approaching with its blood-red sails. The Dutchman anchors his ship close to the Norwegian barque, and steps ashore. Seven years have passed since he last set foot upon earth, and he comes once more in search of a true woman who will sacrifice herself for his salvation, for this alone can free him from the curse under which he suffers. ”

“ It was now dark, and the Dutch ship anchored within a mile of us. I ordered to look out sharp in the morning; that so soon as the Dutchman began to move we might be ready to follow him; for I intended to make him my pilot. In the morning at half an hour after 5 we weighed, the Dutchman being under sail before; and we stood directly after him. At 8, having but little wind, I sent my boat aboard of him to see what news he had brought from Europe. Soon after we spied a ship coming from the east, plying on a wind to speak with us, and showing English colours. ”

“ A stiver, or five Dutch cents, equal to less than two of our cents, is small enough. There are a great many poor people in Amsterdam who live entirely in cellars. As you have seen, a great many families live in vessels, keeping a pig, hens, and ducks on board, and sometimes even have a little garden on deck. When the Dutchman gets married and sets up in life, he obtains a small boat of from one to three tons, and goes to housekeeping on board. If they prosper, they buy a bigger craft ”

“ About forty or fifty years hence, travellers in this part of the world will come across bands of white-haired and silver-bearded men in strange garbs of ox and mule skin patches, and armed with obsolete weapons, wandering about in pursuit of phantasmal beings to be known in future legends as land Flying Dutchmen. ”

“ A Dutchman with his variegated goods and chattels is an odd sight. I have noticed him and his wife, with four, six, eight, and even ten children, hardly more than a year between their ages, driving their poultry, pigs, and cattle on board the boat, and, after distributing themselves as pilots, draggers, feeders, cooks, cleaners, and general directors, glide off on the canals as if they were sailing on purple seas to the Islands of the Blessed.
The foundations of Amsterdam no longer rest on herring bones. ”

“ Look at our magnificent towns, our canals, our green fields, our gardens and orchards, and just think what our industry has accomplished. A Dutchman has a right to be proud of his country, and so we are, and intend to defend it, as we always have done, to the last drop of our blood. ”

“ The wind is the Dutchman’s; servant before he lets it loose again it has turned ten thousand mills, has pumped the water and sawn the wood, has lighted the town and worked the loom, and forged the iron, and driven the great, slow, silent wherry, and played with the children in the garden. It is a sober wind when it gets back to sea, worn and weary, leaving the Dutchman laughing behind his everlasting pipe. ”

“ He is the intimate fireside friend, the faithful companion of the invalid; his is the first book over which the faces of affianced lovers bend; his verses are the first that children lisp and the last that grand-sires repeat. No poet is so loved as he. Every Dutchman smiles when he hears his name spoken, and no foreigner who has been in Holland can help naming it with a feeling of sympathy and respect. ”

“ After this, I went on shore myself with Captain Merlotte, and some of the men whom I could trust; and we found it true as the Dutchman had related. The Dutchman gave us a long history of his adventures, and how he came to be left there by a ship he came in from Europe, which, he running up into the country for sport with three more of his comrades, went away without them, and left them among the natives, who, however, used them extremely well; and that now he served them for an interpreter and a broker, to bargain for them with the European ships for provisions. ”

“ A sort of simple fellow, the Dutchman already mentioned—who was also much played upon,—shared with me the meaner drudgery, and had more than half of the spleen which the captain and mate must needs spend upon somebody. Indeed, the poor Dutchman, who, although a harmless creature, was a wretched specimen of humanity, came well-nigh being killed by their cruelty ”

“ In any case, what, I wondered, could have put the thought in the Dutchman’s head that something might possibly happen to me while we were at sea. Certainly the experience had already befallen him once since the commencement of the voyage; but with men of such limited intelligence as that of Van Ryn and Svorenssen even such an experience as that usually makes so very transitory an impression that it soon fades. ”

“ The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, oxydized; the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm. In the same way there are two Hollands in every Dutchman: there is the man of the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of others, and there is the man of the dune, of the harbor, the shore, the sea, who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, daring. ”

“ With regard to the affairs of his country generally, the state of mind of the average Dutchman has been well described as that of a man well on in years, who has amassed a fair fortune, and now takes things easily, and loves to talk over the somewhat wild doings of his youth. Nothing is more common than to hear the remarks from both old and young, 'We have been great,' 'We have had our time,' 'Every nation reaches a climax;' and certainly Holland has been very great in statesmen, patriots, theologians, artists, explorers, colonizers, soldiers, sailors, and martyrs. ”

“ Although often akin to the English, the Dutch character differs from it very noticeably in the matter of precision. The Englishman has little precision; the Dutchman has too much. He bends everything to it. He has at its dictates divided his whole country into parellelograms. Even the rushes in his swamps are governed by the same law. The carelessness of nature is offensive to him; he moulds and trains on every hand, as one may see on the railway journey to The Hague. Trees he endures only so long as they are obedient and equidistant: he likes them in avenues or straight lines ”

“ I suppose I should not be too severe upon these merchants among the ruins of their past glory, and, to do them justice, they are accepting defeat like good sportsmen. The Dutchman is as merry as a cricket, despite his £80,000 “gone west,” his thirty years’ work undone for ever, his fine farm burnt to cinders. ”

“ Deliberate as the Dutchman is, he knows when time is precious; the heavy roer is steadily aligned, and, if the aim be true, the monarch of the forest falls dead upon the spot, or, collecting his last energies, springs upon the horses. ”

“ The Dutch are a less savage people than they were, but in the age to which this ship's company belonged they were the most inhuman people in Europe, perhaps in the world, and such were the barbarities they were guilty of, that the passage of two centuries—and it would be the same if it were the passage of two hundred centuries—leaves their crimes as fresh and smoking to God as the blood of their victims at the time of their being done to death. ”

“ He asked me if I had ever seen the Dutchman, and on my answering "No," he [84] said that the usual notion among sailors was that there is but one vessel sailing the seas with the curse of Heaven upon her, but that that was a mistake, as it was an error in the same way to suppose that this ocean from Agulhas round to the Mozambique was the only place in which the Phantom was to be met.
"There's a ship," said he, "after the pattern of this here Dutchman, to be found in the Baltic. She always brings heavy weather, and there's small chance afterwards for any craft that sights her." ”

“ But I do not find that in any department of enterprize, of commercial integrity, and of intellectual vigour, the Dutchman of to-day is behind any European nation whatever, or even the race which achieved so remarkable a position in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. ”

“ It has been observed by some travellers, that the Dutch are much given to a tremulous motion of the head. I saw no instance of this national trait except, where I expected to find it, among old and paralytic persons. The practice of bowing is not confined to the Dutchman, though adduced against him as a sort of blemish by every Englishman who extends his rambles no farther than Holland: throughout Germany the same courtesy is displayed, and even among the common Russian boors the practice of exchanging bows is quite common. ”

“ Dutchman at the Cape, whose ancestors have been “avoirdupoising” there for two centuries, is a better all-round, and very round man, than is his compatriot in race at home among the canals and tulip gardens of Holland. ”

“ Then all New Amsterdam gathered at the Battery and watched for wide sails over a wide ship—a ship almost as wide as long, but in all dimensions so small that we of today would think it no small adventure to make a mere coasting voyage on her. Out of the ship would come arrivals from Holland in wide breeches and noble Dutch hats, solid as the Dutch nation itself. ”

“ Throughout the opera it is made plain that the whole world knows the Dutchman story: mariners shiver when they think of meeting him; children are scared when they are told of him. Yet when the very ship described in the "old ballad," sung in the second act, sails into the fiord with its blood-red sails and black masts, no one evinces the faintest astonishment. Daland has the Dutchman's picture at home; he sees the ship before his eyes; but in a matter-of-fact manner he asks him who he is. Daland's sailors are called on deck to set sail, and pay no attention to so weird a craft. ”

“ The Dutchman seldom owns an acre of land without having a fish-pond. He so delights in still and semi-stagnant water that, not content to be surrounded on every side by canals, ditches, and sluices, he must have an additional pool as impure as odorous under his very nose. In the neighborhood of all the large towns the tradesmen and merchants, having their shops and counting-houses in narrow streets, own a little garden in the outskirts, where, if they have no house, they can at least retire after business and spend a few hours with their families. ”