http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/daily-tpod/This sleek iron sailing ship is a modern technical marvel. She is the fastest steam clipper in the world and on this trip she will break the Melbourne to England record by touching down in 58 days. Built for the Australian run, she is 80 meters long and weighs 3000 tonnes. She is carrying 388 passengers and 112 crew. But what else? This is a ‘gold’ ship. She is bursting with over 70,000 ounces of gold ($98 million today), 48,000 newly minted sovereigns, and the personal gold wealth (uncalculated) of passengers who struck it rich on the Victorian goldfields.
As you steam by Perth on September 1, 1859 all the passengers are delighted by an incredible phenomena. It is the ‘Aurora Australis’, but one so bright it lights up the night as if it were day. The captain, Thomas Taylor, notes he has never seen an Aurora this close to the equator before.
Skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. On the other side of the world, a brilliant Aurora Borealis is seen as far south as the Caribbean and Hawaii. This was the largest geo-magnetic storm ever recorded (NASA). Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. But this was only the first portent from the heavens.
Just two months earlier a massive earthquake had occurred in Erzurum, Turkey, of force 9 on the Mercalli scale. Over 16 thousand people had perished. Was there a strange connection between these two events? But even stranger coincidences were to follow.