On 25 October 1859, the iron-hulled steam clipper Royal Charter was within twelve hours of arriving in Liverpool when the gale that would later be called the Royal Charter Storm caught her off Anglesey. She was driven onto the rocks below the headland north of Moelfre. More than four hundred and fifty people - passengers returning from the Australian gold rush and crew - died in the surf. A memorial stands on the headland and an obelisk in Llanallgo churchyard records the lost. Charles Dickens, then editing All the Year Round, came to Anglesey to cover the disaster and stayed long enough to write a vivid essay about the parish priest who recovered bodies from the rocks. The Royal Charter storm killed at least 800 people across the British Isles, more than any single storm of the nineteenth century. The Met Office began issuing the first British storm warnings the following year, partly in response. The wreck still lies on the seabed, where divers occasionally find sovereigns from her famously rich cargo.

Richard Evans (1905-2001) lived in Moelfre and served on the lifeboat for fifty years. Forty-eight of those years he was on the active crew; nineteen he was coxswain. The Hindlea rescue on 27 October 1959 became the textbook example of small-boat seamanship in extreme conditions. The Hindlea had lost engine power off Moelfre in a force-twelve easterly gale. The Moelfre lifeboat - the wooden Watson-class Edmund and Mary Robinson - launched into seas that were breaking over the boathouse roof. Evans manoeuvred alongside the coaster ten separate times as both vessels pitched and surged on twenty-foot swells, the lifeboat crew snatching one or two Hindlea sailors each time. The whole crew of eight was saved. Evans won his second RNLI Gold Medal. The first he had earned eighteen months earlier for rescuing the crew of the Dutch coaster Saint Kentigern. In 2004 a bronze statue of him in his lifeboat oilskins was unveiled outside the Seawatch Centre by Prince Charles. Evans died in 2001 at ninety-five.

Not every famous ship in Moelfre's history wrecked here. On 30 July 1862 the screw sloop Enrica - newly built in Liverpool and about to be commissioned as the Confederate States warship CSS Alabama - sheltered in Moelfre Bay while evading both British customs authorities and the USS Tuscarora, which had been sent to capture or sink her before she could begin her commerce raiding career. The Alabama would go on to sink or capture more than sixty Union ships before the USS Kearsarge finally sank her off Cherbourg in 1864. For a few hours in the summer of 1862, the most consequential commerce raider of the American Civil War rode quietly at anchor in this small Welsh bay. The wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe lived on Anglesey for the last decades of his life and painted the Moelfre lifeboat and her crews repeatedly. His pictures - meticulous, lit by the changing northern light - are now considered the standard visual record of the RNLI in the mid-twentieth century.

Moelfre wraps around a small harbour sheltered by a headland and the rocky islet of Ynys Moelfre, where seals haul out and porpoises pass by in the kelp. The 2011 census measured 710 people in the village itself, 1,064 across the wider community that takes in Marian-glas, Llanallgo, Brynrefail and Mynydd Bodafon. The community holds fourteen Scheduled Ancient Monuments - more than any other on Anglesey - including the Neolithic Lligwy Burial Chamber and six Iron Age hut groups. The current lifeboat station houses the Tamar-class Kiwi and an inshore inflatable D-class. The RNLI Seawatch Centre next door tells the village's lifeboat story, with the Evans statue outside watching the sea he watched for fifty years. There were no street lights in Moelfre until well after the Second World War, when they were finally installed as a memorial to the village's war dead - which means that the maritime history of the village is built into its streetlamps.