Steaming from New York to the Azores in 1867, Mark Twain noted a curious companion overhead:

We had the phenomenon of a full moon located just in the same spot in the heavens at the same hour every night. The reason of this singular conduct on the part of the moon did not occur to us at first, but it did afterward when we reflected that we were gaining about twenty minutes every day because we were going east so fast — we gained just about enough every day to keep along with the moon. It was becoming an old moon to the friends we had left behind us, but to us Joshuas it stood still in the same place and remained always the same.

(From The Innocents Abroad.)

02/11/2025 Reader Catalin Voinescu writes:

Mark Twain is talking absolute nonsense here.

The moon is in (almost) the same phase as seen from all over the world. It rises and sets at roughly the same local time, regardless of longitude, and the relation between phase and time of day when the moon is visible is the same everywhere (the full moon peaks at midnight; a week later, the last-quarter moon rises around midnight, peaks in the morning and sets around noon; and so on).

Even ignoring moon phase and local time, the moon rises, peaks and sets almost 50 minutes later every day, so gaining 20 minutes every day would not be enough.

(Thanks, Catalin.)