The Book of the Damned

Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 32-280: Extract from a letter from Mr. Douglas Carnegie, Blackheath, England. Date some time in 1906-- "This last voyage we witnessed a weird and most extraordinary electric display." In the Gulf of Oman, he saw a bank of apparently quiescent phosphorescence: but, when within twenty yards of it, "shafts of brilliant light came sweeping across the ship's bows at a prodigious speed, which might be put down as anything between 60 and 200 miles an hour." "These light bars were about 20 feet apart and most regular." As to phosphorescence--"I collected a bucketful of water, and examined it under the microscope, but could not detect anything abnormal." That the shafts of light came up from something beneath the surface--"They first struck us on our broadside, and I noticed that an intervening ship had no effect on the light beams: they started away from the lee side of the ship, just as if they had traveled right through it." The Gulf of Oman is at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 33-294: Extract from a letter by Mr. S.C. Patterson, second officer of the P. and O. steamship Delta: a spectacle which the Journal continues to call phosphorescent: Malacca Strait, 2 A.M., March 14, 1907: "... shafts which seemed to move round a center--like the spokes of a wheel--and appeared to be about 300 yards long. The phenomenon lasted about half an hour, during which time the ship had traveled six or seven miles. It stopped suddenly."