Captain Ahab is on deck after a night of thunder and lightning. "The not yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk and, striding in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails, the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was known only by the spread intensity of his place, where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat," writes Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851).
But all is not as it should be. That morning the compass says the ship is heading east-southeast, and yet the sun is astern and there is a nasty moment for the helmsman and the first mate Starbuck as the terrifying commander reacts in fury. "But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed 'I have it! It has happened before. Mr Starbuck, last night's thunder turned out compasses - that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it?'" Melville explains: "The magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with the electricity beheld in the heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled at, that such things should be."