On the 25th of October in 1859, the steam clipper Royal Charter rounded the island of Anglesey off the coast of Wales on what was supposed to be the celebratory last evening of its two-month journey from Melbourne to Liverpool. Some 500 men, women, and children were nearly home, many feeling blessed with fortunes worked from Australia's goldfields. Many of the passengers had gold crammed into pockets, hidden in money belts, stuffed into their luggage, and locked up in the strongroom. It was a ship of fabulous wealth.

After completing 59 days of a 60-day journey, the passengers were toasting each other at the dining table. But then the day's weather suddenly turned murky, the barometer falling. As the Royal Charter neared Anglesey's rocky cliffs, a menacing haze overtook the skies of early evening. No one knows whether the ship's experienced captain, Thomas Taylor, saw these and other telltale signs, but eyewitnesses reported that a battle between ship and storm raged over the next 12 hours. "Confronted with a decision—59 days out from Melbourne on a 60-day voyage, passengers toasting him at the dining table," Moore writes in The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, "Taylor chose to sail on."

The decision is one of the most second-guessed in the history of meteorology. It is also one of the most fateful. The Royal Charter bashed onto the rocks, all but 41 of its passengers crushed or drowned, many weighted down by the gold in their pockets.