Certain natural disasters acquire a name by which they are universally remembered for decades, or even centuries after their occurrence. Examples are the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the Big Wind of 1839 in Ireland, and the Lisbon Earthquake, 1755. The Saxby Gale in Nova Scotia is another case in point.
It began with a letter in the London Standard late in 1868: "I beg leave to state, with regard to 1869, that at 7 a.m. on October 5th, the moon will be at that part of her orbit which is nearest to the Earth. At noon the same day, the moon will be on the Earth's equator, and at 2 p.m., lines drawn from the Earth's centre would cut the sun and moon in the same arc of right ascension. The moon's attraction and the sun's attraction will therefore be acting in the same direction. I have discovered some years since that neither the moon nor the sun ever crosses the Earth's equator without causing great atmospheric disturbances, especially in the winter months, and the disturbance is greatly intensified when the new moon in perigee happens at such periods."
The letter was signed S.M. Saxby RN, of Faversham in Kent, and he repeated his warning in a second letter to the paper on September 16th, 1869.
Stephen Martin Saxby was a 65-year-old retired naval engineer who had published several unremarkable books on navigation, astronomy and related weather matters. He was not well thought of in official circles, however, and had several verbal altercations with Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who had pioneered scientific weather forecasting in Britain several years before.
Nothing more might have been heard of Saxby's premonitions had they not been noticed by a resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia, who also dispatched a letter to his local paper: "My attention has been drawn," wrote Frederick Allison to the Express on September 30th, "to a letter of Capt Saxby RN to the Standard of London in which a remarkable atmospheric disturbance is predicted for the coming 5th of October, as the result of the relative positions of the Earth, the sun, and the moon, on that day."
Saxby's predictions, published 11 months before, proved to be correct for Nova Scotia. The remains of a hurricane moved up the eastern seaboard on October 4th, and lashed the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The phenomenal spring tides caused widespread flooding overnight, extensive damage to property around the Bay of Fundy and considerable loss of life. Saxby's Gale, 131 years ago today, had found its niche in history, and for years afterwards people argued about the predictive skills, or luck, of Stephen Saxby.