But couldn't that crackling hair have been nothing more than the electrical discharge that Keith called corposant, St Elmo's Fire?
3
I looked, and saw a corposant, as it is called at sea,- aSt.Elmo's fire,-burningat the end of the crossjack-yard.
4
I had seen a ship, and there she was to leeward of us, with the corposant clinging to one of her spars.
5
Meanwhile, determined Paul flew hither and thither like the meteoric corposant-ball, which shiftingly dances on the tips and verges of ships' rigging in storms.
6
There was fever between the decks; there was fever in black hearts; of dark nights a corposant burned now at this masthead, now at that.
7
Everybody knows nowadays that a corposant is nothing whatever but an electrical phenomenon, and therefore merely an indication that the atmosphere is surcharged with electricity.
8
Presently a bright star suddenly appears under the faintly gleaming corposants.
9
Corposant, they usually call it, in Salem.
10
I have heard sailors speak of those lights as witch-lights, death-gleams, and corposants, and their appearance is said always to foretell disaster.
11
The strange atmospheric phenomena, especially of the tropics, have been christened by the Spaniard and Portuguese, the Corposant, the Pampero, the Tornado, the Hurricane.
12
It was known among seamen by the name of CORPOSANT, or COMPLAISANT, being a corruption of "cuerpo santo," the name it received from the Spaniards.
13
"Why, I think it was a terribly unfortunate affair; but I don't believe that the corposant had anything to do with it," answered I.