A March afternoon in 1939, False Bay flat and windless, the sort of day that fills Glencairn beach with families from the Simon’s Town line. Somebody looks up from a sandwich and points. Out on the water, coming in towards Strandfontein with every sail set and drawing, is a ship of a kind nobody has seen outside a picture: broad in the beam, high in the stern, rigged like something from the seventeenth century. There is not a breath of wind. She sails on anyway, steadily, while sixty or so people stand on the sand and argue about her. And then, at the height of the argument, she is not there.

That account appeared in the Cape newspapers and was picked up by the British South Africa Annual for 1939. It is the best-attended sighting of the Flying Dutchman on record, and it happened within sight of a railway station.

The legend it belongs to is older than the colony’s second century. In 1790 a travel writer, John MacDonald, noted that sailors rounding the Cape in bad weather would speak of a Dutch ship that was always trying, and always failing, to make harbour. By 1821 a story in Blackwood’s Magazine had given her a captain, Van der Decken, and a curse: caught in a storm off the Cape, he swore he would round it if he had to beat about until the Day of Judgment, and was taken at his word. Wagner made an opera of it. Sailors made a superstition of it. To see her was to be in for a bad passage, and any letters her crew tried to pass across were not to be touched.

The sighting everyone quotes came from a royal midshipman. The log kept aboard HMS Bacchante on 11 July 1881, traditionally the work of the two young princes serving as midshipmen and later published as “The Cruise of HMS Bacchante,” records that at four in the morning “a strange red light, as of a phantom ship all aglow,” crossed the bows, and that within that light “the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief.” Thirteen people saw it. The ordinary seaman who first sighted her fell from the foretopmast later that morning and was killed. One of the midshipmen keeping that log was Prince George, later King George V. The Bacchante, it should be said, was at that moment between Melbourne and Sydney, nowhere near the Cape. The ship’s name travels.

What the Glencairn crowd saw is anyone’s guess. False Bay throws a superb mirage on a still day, and a real ship far beyond the horizon can be lifted and inverted and dressed in old-fashioned lines by a layer of warm air. Sceptics point at that. Believers point at the sixty witnesses and the lack of any ship reported in the bay that afternoon. Nobody photographed her. In the years since there have been a handful of further Cape claims, mostly from the Cape Point side, mostly at night, mostly from people who had heard the story already.

The wreck of a Dutch East Indiaman would explain a great deal, and the Cape has dozens of them. None of them is Van der Decken’s, because there is no record that he or his ship ever existed. That has not stopped anyone. On a clear evening at Cape Point, with the swell coming in and the light going, people still look for a red glow on the horizon, and every now and then somebody says they have found it.