Page "St. Elmo's fire" Paragraph 16

In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana, Jr. describes seeing a corposant in the Horse latitudes of the northern Atlantic Ocean.

However, he may have been talking about ball lightning ; as mentioned earlier it is often erroneously identified as St. Elmo's fire: " There, directly over where we had been standing, upon the main top-gallant mast-head, was a ball of light, which the sailors name a corposant ( corpus sancti ), and which the mate had called out to us to look at.

They were all watching it carefully, for sailors have a notion, that if the corposant rises in the rigging, it is a sign of fair weather, but if it comes lower down, there will be a storm ".