The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship that has been appearing to sailors near the Cape of Good Hope, which is basically the Atlantic side of the South African coast, for hundreds of years.

To the best of my knowledge the legend doesn’t have its beginnings with a ship actually named the “Flying Dutchman”, but with a passage from George Barrington’s “Voyage to Botany Bay” written in 1795.   Barrington describes a “Dutch Man-of-War” lost off the Cape of Good Hope with all hands that sailors who continue to see her call the Flying Dutchman.  It’s thought that Sir Walter Scott was the first to refer to her as a pirate ship.

It is usually said that those who see the Dutchman are doomed, but it’s also said that the Dutchman often precedes hurricanes, so therein probably lies the basis of that part of the story.

While Barrington may have been the first to put the story in writing, the legend goes back much farther. 

My understanding of the story’s genesis is a Dutch Captain from sometime in the early 1600’s, whose name changes from telling to telling but is most commonly Bernard Fokke.

Fokke was a sea captain of renown who was best known for making passages from the Netherlands to Java and back in speeds that were unheard of at the time.  Many of his contemporaries said he did so as a result of a deal with the devil. 

Interestingly (to me anyway) others say the captain of the Dutchman is Hendrick Vanderdecken, who many of his peers said was fast for the opposite reason.  
 
Vanderdecken raced the devil, and his story was introduced in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1821.
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The most famous witness to the Dutchman was Prince George of Wales (who we all know best as King George V) from the deck of the HMS Inconstant, but sightings and stories have continued to the present day.