The Flying Dutchman Finds Its Final Port of Call

11 November, 1681. At sea, position unknown, though by my reckoning we’ve sailed clean off the edge of the chart and into the bit marked ‘Here Be Paperwork’. Winds, fickle. Visibility, a damned sight too good now the fog’s lifted. Current heading, nowhere fast.

The log of the *Flying Dutchman* has seen better entries. For forty years we’ve been at this game: loom out of a squall, look menacing, and disappear again before anyone can ask for our letters of marque. A simple enough commission for Captain van der Decken, a man whose only real sin was trying to round the Cape of Good Hope against a headwind on Good Friday. The Almighty, apparently a stickler for the calendar, cursed him to sail until Judgment Day. A bit much, if you ask me, but the pay is steady, and the grog ration never runs dry. Or it didn’t, until last week.

We were running before a gale off the American coast, a proper cast-iron bastard of a storm. Then comes the fog. Not our usual theatrical mist, mind you. This was a thick, silent, pea-souper with the unnerving quality of tasting like ozone and regret. It clung to the rigging like a second set of sails. The compass spun like a nine-penny strumpet at a fleet review. For three days, we sailed blind and deaf, with van der Decken growing more and more agitated, convinced some other poor soul had poached his haunting grounds. Then the fog cleared. We were becalmed. Not in the horse latitudes, but in a perfect, geometric triangle of uncannily placid water, surrounded by a flotilla of wrecks from every era imaginable. A Spanish galleon wallowed next to a ship with a strange white whale painted on its hull, which in turn was bobbing near a vessel with no sails at all, just a great smoking funnel. And dozens more. The air hummed. Positively thrummed with a low, bureaucratic energy.

That’s when the manifest appeared. One moment, the capstan was bare; the next, there it was: a scroll of parchment, tied with red tape, weighted down by a human skull that looked suspiciously like our ship’s lawyer from the original voyage. The terms were laid out in a fine, spidery hand. By entering the ‘Bermuda Adjudication Zone’, the *Flying Dutchman*, its Captain, and its crew were subject to Final Adherence Review. Our curse of eternal sailing had been… audited. And found to be ‘redundant’. We were no longer damned to sail the seas. We were now permanently moored. Grounded. Not on a reef, but in an inescapable patch of supernatural doldrums, to serve as a navigational warning and cautionary tale. They even confiscated the Captain’s favourite hat for ‘unauthorised spectral emissions’.

So here we float, immortal, immobile, and out of rum. The men are on the edge of a mutiny I might actually encourage. Yesterday, some poor sod who claimed he was a pilot named Taylor flew his craft right into the zone, vanished, and reappeared an hour later asking if we’d seen a whole squadron of his friends. We pointed to a fresh piece of parchment materialising on his navigation table. From the look on his face, I’d say he’s the new watch commander. Van der Decken hasn’t come out of his cabin. He just keeps screaming, ‘I was a legend! A terror of the seven seas!’ I haven’t the heart to tell him that, according to Article 7, Subsection C of our new terms of service, he’s now officially just ‘Maritime Anomaly #417’.