Captain’ Cook’s last voyage included a search for a shipping route across the top of Canadfa. His ships logs indicate the Arctic had a similar lack of ice to that of today. However, his voyages had another interesting happenstance. In the autumn of 1770 Captain Cook’s ship and the crew of Endeavour, struck the Great Barrier Reef, off eastern Australia. They were laid up for 7 weeks while repairs to the ship were made. It then set sail, and near Timor, north of Australia, red aurorae were seen in the night sky. The event was noted in the ship’s log by two interested parties onboard. The ship’s log relays they were unsure quite what they had seen as Timor is way south of where auroral phenomena normally occur. A study by Japanese researchers has made a connection of the Captain Cook aurora with a 9 day display recorded by Chinese sky watchers. Seen also across Japan and SE Asia. Thereby, the auroral display has now been authenticated.
All this can be found in a study by Jeffrey Love of the US Geological Survey in the April 2025 journal Space Weather. He and his colleagues analysed 54 geomagnetic storms, using both magnetometer data as well as aurora sightings by people and organisations. One of the key findings they made is that the auroral display noted in Captain Cook’s ship log was probably the equivalent in size to that of the 1859 Carrington Event. They also found another big geomagnetic storm a few days prior to the Carrington big one, in 1859. It occurred on a Sunday and in those days nobody worked on a Sunday and the observertories were unmanned. In particular, the one at Kew. However, people recorded seeing auroral displays as far south as Havana in Cuba. Love’s tam estimate it at two thirds of the Carrington Event – which is in fact a pretty big one.
The post at https://spaceweather.com on June 23rd, 2025 also has a link to the article.