A Voyage to Botany Bay by George Barrington

Having completely stored the ship with provisions and water, taken in six hundred casks of flour for the colony, and various other stores, the signal was made for the transports to be in readiness to get under weigh. I bade my new friend adieu, hastened on board, and the next morning we worked out of the bay. We had scarcely got a tolerable offing when a very heavy gale blew from the northward, and the sea soon ran mountains high. The vessel being deep loaded, we shipped some very heavy seas, which obliged us to lay too, near four- and-twenty hours.

I had often heard of the superstition of sailors respecting apparitions, but had never given much credit to the report: it seems that some years since a Dutch man of war was lost off the Cape, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitute. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phoenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-- fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman. From the Dutch the English seamen got the infatuation, and there are very few Indiamen, but what has some one one board, who pretends to have seen the apparition.