him to answer, "Up along the top ridge" – before there was a big burst of flaming hydrogen from a point he estimated to be about one-third the ship's length from the stern. William L. Laurence St. Elmo's fire was reported by The New York Times reporter William L. Laurence on August 9, 1945, as he was aboard Bockscar on the way to Nagasaki. In popular culture In literature One of the earliest references to the phenomenon appears in Alcaeus's Fragment 34a about the Dioscuri, or Castor and Pollux. It is also referenced in Homeric Hymn 33 to the Dioscuri who were from Homeric times associated with it. Whether the Homeric Hymn antedates the Alcaeus fragment is unknown. The phenomenon appears to be described first in the Gesta Herwardi, written around 1100 and concerning an event of the 1070s. However, one of the earliest direct references to St. Elmo's fire made in fiction can be found in Ludovico Ariosto's epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516). It is located in the 17th canto (19th in the revised edition of 1532) after a storm has punished the ship of Marfisa, Astolfo, Aquilant, Grifon, and others, for three straight days, and is positively associated with hope: In William Shakespeare's The Tempest (c. 1623), Act I, Scene II, St. Elmo's fire acquires a more negative association, appearing as evidence of the tempest inflicted by Ariel according to the command of Prospero: The fires are also mentioned as "death fires" in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Later in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature associated St. Elmo's fire with a bad omen or divine judgment, coinciding with the growing conventions of Romanticism and the Gothic novel. For example, in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), during a thunderstorm above the ramparts of the castle: In the 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, the author describes the fire occurring while sailing during a subterranean electrical storm (chapter 35, page 191): In Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, Starbuck points out "corpusants" during a thunder storm in the Japanese sea in chapter 119, "The Candles". St. Elmo's fire makes an appearance in The Adventures of Tintin comic, Tintin in Tibet, by Hergé. Tintin recognizes the phenomenon on Captain Haddock's ice-axe. The phenomenon appears in the first stanza of Robert Hayden's poem "The Ballad of Nat Turner"; it is also