The Royal Charter Storm — also called the Great Storm of 1859 — was the most violent weather event to strike the Irish Sea in the nineteenth century. It announced itself in the English Channel about three o'clock on the afternoon of 25 October with a sudden wind shift and rising speed, ripped up the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, drifted north, hit Anglesey by eight o'clock that evening, and reached its maximum force over the River Mersey around midday on the 26th before continuing north into Scotland. The winds passed Force 12 on the Beaufort scale and were well over 100 miles per hour. A wind pressure of 28 pounds per square foot was measured at the Mersey — more than had ever been recorded in Britain. Across the British Isles that night, about 133 ships sank and another 90 were badly damaged, according to the Board of Trade. The total death toll was estimated at around 800, including some killed on land by falling masonry. In two days, the British Isles lost twice as many people at sea as had been lost in the whole of the previous year.

The Royal Charter carried between 376 and 390 passengers and a crew of around 110 — the exact figures will never be known because the passenger lists at the company office in Liverpool burned in a later fire. They were a cross-section of mid-Victorian emigration in reverse: gold miners returning rich after years of brutal work in the Victorian and New South Wales fields, families joining husbands or fathers who had gone ahead and made enough to send for them, returning soldiers, a few people who had simply tried Australia and were coming home. Many were Welsh, many were English, some were Irish. They had crossed the Indian Ocean and rounded the Cape, and they were two hours from the Mersey when the wind turned. Witnesses on shore described people clinging to the rigging while the ship broke up, then dropping into surf that was beating against rocks. A handful of strong swimmers, mostly young men, made it the short distance to the cliffs. About forty people survived. More than four hundred and fifty did not, and of those, a great many — by all accounts a sad and shocking number — drowned weighed down by the gold they were carrying home, the wealth they had worked years for becoming the thing that pulled them down.

Moelfre was a small fishing village. The dead came ashore for weeks. The rector of nearby Llanallgo, Stephen Roose Hughes, organised the recovery, identification, and burial of the bodies — work that would eventually contribute to his own death from exhaustion in 1862. He answered, by hand, more than a thousand letters from grieving families. He kept careful records of personal effects and bodies so that relatives travelling to Anglesey could identify their dead. The churchyard at St Gallgo's at Llanallgo filled with new graves, and the tombstones — many of them paid for by relatives in Australia or in English and Welsh industrial towns — are still there today, names cut into stone above a quiet field a mile from the rocks that killed the people they remember.

The wreck was a national event. Charles Dickens, who was running the magazine All the Year Round, travelled from London to Anglesey to report on what had happened. The piece he wrote — collected in The Uncommercial Traveller — focused not on the spectacle of the wreck but on Stephen Roose Hughes, on the work of the village, on the dignity of the burials and the grief of the families who came looking for their dead. It is one of the better pieces of Victorian journalism, partly because Dickens, for once, dropped the comedy and let the small Welsh churchyard speak for itself. The storm also changed something material. Captain Robert FitzRoy of the Meteorological Office — the same FitzRoy who had captained HMS Beagle and given Charles Darwin his most consequential voyage — used the disaster to argue for a national gale warning service. The first warnings went out in 1860, and the modern shipping forecast is descended from them. Many lives that would have been lost in later storms were not, because of what was lost in this one.

The Royal Charter rocks are still there, on a stretch of the east Anglesey coast that locals will walk to and point out. Memorials have been put up — a stone above the wreck site, plaques in Moelfre's small RNLI museum, the graves at Llanallgo, the church website that still bears the name 'Royal Charter Church'. Every so often a coin from the wreck washes up on the beach below, or an amateur diver brings something to the surface. The remains of Saint Brynach's church at Cwm-yr-Eglwys in Pembrokeshire — battered into ruin by the same storm — are also still visible. The gale warning service that FitzRoy began still issues its forecasts in the polite, measured voice that the BBC has used for over a century. Names: Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne. Irish Sea: gale 8 to severe gale 9, occasionally storm 10 at first.

The wreck site lies at approximately 53.354°N, 4.235°W, on the east coast of Anglesey just north of Moelfre village. From altitude in clear weather the geography of the disaster is starkly visible: the Royal Charter was within sight of Point Lynas Lighthouse (3 km north) and roughly 90 km from her destination at Liverpool. The east-northeast wind that drove her ashore came directly out of what is now a busy approach corridor for Liverpool John Lennon Airport. RAF Valley (ICAO EGOV) lies 30 km to the west. The cluster of related sites — wreck site, memorial, St Gallgo's churchyard at Llanallgo (3 km southwest), and the village of Moelfre — can all be seen from a single low-altitude transit along the coast.