Was Davey Jones a real person along with his ship the Flying Dutchmen?
Davy Jones was not the Captain of the Flying Dutchman. It was a sailor’s name for the supposed evil spirit of the sea. “He’s gone to Davy Jones’s locker.” The nautical way of saying that a messmate is dead and has been buried at sea. It has been conjectured that Jones is a corruption of Jonah the prophet who was thrown into the sea. This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is seen in various shapes … warning the devoted wretch of death and woe. The Flying Dutchman is in the superstitions of seamen as a spectral ship that is supposed to haunt the southern seas round the Cape of Good Hope. She is only to be seen in stormy weather and bodes no good to those Who pass her. There are various stories to account for this mysterious and ghostly craft; that worked out by Wagner in his opera Del’ Fliegende Hollander (1843) was partly suggested by Heinrich Heine. Captain Marryat’s novel The Phantom Ship (18
