The Living Light (O lume vivo)

“I saw and clearly saw, the living Light, / Which sailor-people hold their Patron-saint, / In times of trouble and the winds’ rude fight, / And sable orcan when man’s heart is faint” (“Vi, claramente visto, o lume vivo / Que a marítima gente tem por santo / Em tempo de tormenta e vento esquivo, / De tempestade escura e triste pranto.”) [English translation by Richard Francis Burton, London 1880]

With these four verses Luís de Camões (Os Lusíadas, 1572) mentioned a curious weather phenomenon which took place during a tempest on his ship while sailing to the East. Such an episode was also described several decades later by William Shakespeare in The Tempest, in connection with the character of Ariel, a spirit with special skills capable of causing storms. Our current explanation is that a bright luminous plasma was generated by an electric discharge in an atmospheric electric field. The intensity of the effect, a blue or violet glow around the object, often accompanied by an audible discharge, was proportional to the strength of the electric field and therefore noticeable primarily during storms or volcanic eruptions. This impressive phenomenon gave rise to a wide variety of explanations, and it was discussed also in more technical maritime literature, like the Arte de navegar published by Simão de Oliveira in 1606.

Oliveira devoted an entire chapter to the “light that appears on certain areas of the ships, after great storms” (Chapter 52). He started by naming this light in many ways, such as S. Frei Pedro Gonçalves, Santelmo, or Corpo Santo. The first of these names referred to Pedro Gonçalves Telmo (hence English “St Elmo’s fire”), the patron saint of sailors, a Spanish catholic priest, born in 1190, to whom various miracles were attributed. The most spectacular was that of Baiona’s big storm, when Saint Telmo asked the winds to stop blowing. Oliveira then went on to explain that this strange event also happened to the ancient sailors, even before the saint was born. The ancients called it Castor and Pollux, when two lights appeared, and Helena when it manifested itself in the form of only one light. Helena was a bad sign, but Castor and Pollux meant happiness.

Finally, Oliveira concluded the chapter by stating that these fires were no sign of a saint, or of a miracle, but were the result of antiperistasis, which was a term used to explain various events, where one quality heightened the force of another opposing, quality. He linked the phenomenon to the ship’s rocking. The ship “sent” —as he put it— “viscous excitements”, that generated the light. Although the author emphasized that such a phenomenon could happen in many other places, like prisons, churches, over sweaty horses or even on the head of strangled prisoners, the textual tradition linked it mostly to maritime contexts. Oliveira’s explanation of the phenomenon had its origins in sailors’ experiences and accounts (oral and written, especially rutters, like D. João de Castro’s texts) of long-distance voyages, where “the living lights” were frequent signals for sailors. [Leonor Pedro & Luana Giurgevich]