¹ ’Shining exhalations that appere in tempestes’, the fire of St Elmo or St Clara or St Helen or St Nicolas, ‘a vapor called by the Mariners a Corpo Zanto’, or, in Classical times, the fire of Castor and Pollux, the twin-brothers of Helen of Troy; this phenomenon, under whatever patronage, has always been regarded by seamen as beneficent, perhaps for the reason cited by William Dampier in the seventeenth century ‘ . . . the thunder and the rain abated and then we saw a Corpus Sant at our main top-mast head. This Sight rejoiced our men . . . for the height of the storm is commonly over when a Corpus Sant is seen aloft’. The colour of this electrical discharge is said to appear either bluish-white or reddish. It was presumably with this phenomenon in mind that Macaulay wrote:
Safe comes the ship to haven
Through billows and through gales
If once the Great Twin Brethren
Sit shining on the sails.

And St Luke also, of gentile stock and tradition, could hardly have missed the significance of his own narrative when he wrote of the ship ‘whose sign was Castor and Pollux’, that brought St Paul, after shipwreck and storm in another vessel, safe to Caesar. Luke was writing a straight, ungarnished narrative of actual events; had he been using those events symbolically and to subserve a theme, he might have made the second vessel, that bore the sign of the Heavenly Twins, suffer, but survive, the great storm. Cf. also Macbeth I, 3.