It works the same as in Vanilla.
You would be resurrected where you started, even if you could ride the boat as a ghost.
As I recently did the beta, you “leap frog” your corpses to the next spirit healer.
A fellow Night Elf and I did this, doing “the wetlands run.” We took the boat to the Wetlands, then you run and die and pop up again near where the boat dropped you in the Wetlands. As you get further, the resurrect point moves. It works best if it is done with even ONE other player, who could be a like minded stranger (due to randomness, a different one of you is likely to be the one the gator kills next time.)
Doing some quick searches, I read that they patched being able to do it as a ghost, BUT that then it worked that if you got on the boat as a GHOST, you were then alive on the boat when it zoned.
So you’d have to test it yourself, to see what happens in Classic.
Found it, with a more carefully worded search:
So that guy got sent home, yes.
So your best bet is do like I did, corpse leap frog. You are trying to get as far as you can, before you die. If it is far enough, you’ll res far enough along that the next time you won’t be back where you started. In my first few deaths, after getting off the boat to the Wetlands (from the NE areas), I was back in the town by the boat. Eventually, I was in the middle of the Wetlands, on the road.
We were lucky and did not die after that, being able to run up the pass road with no mobs, then kind of angle out of the tunnel and bypass the camps there. I made it to IF without dying again, then took the tram to stormwind.
I felt pretty cool, though. The earliest I tried this in Vanilla, solo, was level 10 on my NE Holy Priest and NE Hunters. This nice passerby, in the stress test, said she thought we could do it at level 5 
It worked!