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Updated: June 26, 2025
I have doubled the Horn, brothers, in a King's ship, and I have seen the bright cloud that never sets, and have held a living corposant in my own hand: But these are things which any man may look on, who will go upon a yard in a gale, or ship aboard a Southseaman: Still, I pronounce it uncommon for a vessel to see her shadow in the haze, as we have ours at this moment for there it comes again! hereaway, between the after-shroud and the backstay or for a trader to carry sail in a fashion that would make every knee in a bomb-ketch work like a tooth-brush fiddling across a passenger's mouth, after he had had a smart bout with the sea sickness."
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. Unfortunately, as an omen, it came down, and showed itself on the top-gallant yard-arm.
She was fearfully close, but appeared to be at the moment sheering away from us. She looked long enough for a three-masted vessel, but one mast only was standing, evidently the mainmast. The corposant appeared to have attached itself to the stump of her foremast, which had been carried away about fifteen or twenty feet from the deck, and I thought her bowsprit seemed also to be missing.
For a moment I was puzzled to account for so strange a phenomenon, and then the explanation came to me in a flash. I had not been deceived when I believed I caught sight of a shadowy something sweeping athwart our bows. I had seen a ship, and there she was to leeward of us, with the corposant clinging to one of her spars.
I had just time to give the order to bear up in pursuit, and to get the schooner before the wind, when the corposant seemed to settle down nearer to the water, and in another instant it had vanished.
The strange atmospheric phenomena, especially of the tropics, have been christened by the Spaniard and Portuguese, the Corposant, the Pampero, the Tornado, the Hurricane. Then follows a host of words of which the derivation is doubtful, such as sea, mist, foam, scud, rack. Their monosyllabic character may only be the result of that clipping and trimming which words get on shipboard.
This disagreeable state of affairs continued without break of any kind until about five bells in the first watch, when a cry of astonishment and alarm broke from the watch on the forecastle-head at the sudden appearance on the bowsprit of a ball of light of a sickly greenish hue, which I immediately recognised as a corposant, although I had never seen one before, but had frequently heard them spoken of and described.
I therefore turned to Saunders with some remark upon my lips in reply to his, when I saw the corposant suddenly leave the gaff- end and go driving away to leeward on the wings of the gale.
We were off the yard in good season, for it is held a fatal sign to have the pale light of the corposant thrown upon one's face. As it was, the English lad did not feel comfortably at having had it so near him, and directly over his head.
Now, what d'ye think of that, sir?" "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. "Well, sir," answered the mate, "I only hope that it hadn't; because, d'ye see, if your view is the correct one, we needn't fear anything happening in consequence of Why, bust me, but there's another of 'em!" It was true.
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