The chill reached the marrow of our bones.

From Sea-Cursed, edited by T. Liam McDonald et al. The Ship of Silent Men by Philip M. Fisher. A description of conditions at sea as a context for storytelling.

They were a superstitious lot, too - Belgians and Swedes and Welsh - and I found myself colder yet as I listened to the yarns they told. At sea, with the illimitable waste about one, and the loneliness of it all, stories of the strange and unexplainable always thrill more than they do on land. And when they are told when the actual conditions then existent are strange and unexplainable, too, and the nearest land is a mere speck seven hundred miles back, the thrill changes into something more like a spine-prickling uneasiness. The crew were that way - and the passengers three.

The cold became more penetrating. The bridge officer - wool-wrapped - paced stumblingly. The radio had lapses of an hour long - the wireless operator was frantic. The shadows below decks became as of the dead alive, and the black gang forgot its tales, and cursed softly.

Then came darkness, and with it a doubled phosphorescence in our wake. The air was permeated with that weird sea feel, hardly to be called an odor, or ozone. And at about seven bells of the first watch, just before midnight, the steel rigging was alive with bluish flickering - electric streamlets, running, pausing, dancing, now quiescent and dying dim - now pulsingly alive, now peacefully aglow - now madly, enthusiastically, and at times almost malevolently, rampant.

The deck watch shivered a bit from more than the cold - the below-decks crew, about to come on watch and up for a breath of air, stared thoughtfully and stowed back their half-filled pipes, and felt their way down to the comfort of their still steady engines.

Eight bells, and midnight came. The chill reached the marrow of our bones. The electricity on the rigging silently threatened. The shadows blacked and grayed with a hundred shifting, shapeless things that stared and kept one's chin on one's shoulder in breathless moments when the lights went nearly out.