"The Nikkur Holl" is a delightful yarn, full of allusions to folklore and cultural details of fishing village life in the Shetland Isles, supernatural dealings, and ghostly visitations. It comes from the first volume of Tales of a Voyager to the Artic Ocean (1826), by Scottish writer Robert Pearse Gillies. Gillies was a noted translator and critic of German literature of the period, as well as a friend of Walter Scott and James Hogg.
Tales of a Voyager to the Artic Ocean purports to be the memoirs of a former traveler on a Greenland whaler; this conceit is a framing structure around stories told by the various crewmembers of the ship. You can see the traces of this structure in a brief conversation between the characters Captain Shafton and Shipley, early in the narrative.
While Gillies did publish many translations of short stories and novellas from the German, "The Nikkur Holl" is more likely to be a retelling of, or simply a story inspired by, a North Sea folktale, or perhaps a transposed Nordic or Germanic folktale. In any case, I think it's safe to attribute Gillies as the actual author of this piece.
[UPDATE 11 June 2021: I've discovered a charming retelling of "The Nikkur Holl" by the German Romantic author Wilhelm Hauff. You can read about it, along with a copy of the story, here.]
Among other things, "The Nikkur Holl" features the ghostly crew of a wrecked ship, the Carmilhan. I was curious as to whether such a ghost legend really existed, and this quickly led me to "The Musician's Tale, The Ballad of Carmilhan," a poem by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from his collection Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). Longfellow's poem also features a ghost ship called the Carmilhan!
Longfellow's ghost ship was of the "Flying Dutchman" type, a ship doomed to wander forever because of its captain's arrogance. The poem also mentions the "klaboterman" or klabautermann, a supernatural sprite from Baltic and North Sea folklore, who helps around ships and comes to the aid of sailors in distress. According to Wikipedia, the klabautermann dresses in yellow, with a woolen sailor's cap.
Gillies' ghost ship was not a Flying Dutchman. He also didn't mention the klabautermann, although there is a malevolent spirit that dresses similarly:
His dress was of bright yellow canvass, or something like it, and a red night-cap covered his head, with its point sticking upright in the air, while in his hand he held a kind of instrument, that resembled a harpoon at one end and a blubber fork at the other.
By "red night-cap," as we learn later in the story, Gillies means the typical headgear of Dutch sailors at the time. So Gillies' malevolent being looks a lot like a klabautermann (and probably, to be fair, a lot like Dutch sailors in general).
While Gillies' and Longfellow's Carmilhans aren't the same, there's a possibility that Longfellow was making a literary callout. It's worth noting that the other ship in Longfellow's poem, the ship with the klabautermann, is the Valdemar -- which brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", first published in 1845.
The first link in the article above goes to a clean PDF of my transcription of "The Nikkur Holl." Since the story is fairly long, I've also made an epub version of it as well. You do NOT need a Dropbox account to download the epub.