A "Rain of Blood"

Captain Joshua Slocum was the first person to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat. Spray. In 1900, he published a best-selling book about the trip, Sailing Alone Around the World. The book has become a classic of nonfiction sea adventure prose. In the passage below, Slocum describes a strange natural phenomenon that occurred during his stay in Melbourne, Australia.

The Spray (From: Wikipedia)

It took him three years, 1895-1898, to accomplish this feat. He sailed a 37-foot yawl that he built himself while in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He called it the

"I should mention that while I was at Melbourne there occurred one of those extraordinary storms sometimes called 'rain of blood,' the first of the kind in many years about Australia. The 'blood' came from a fine brick-dust matter afloat in the air from the deserts. A rain-storm setting in brought down this dust simply as mud; it fell in such quantities that a bucketful was collected from the sloop's [Spray] awnings, which were spread at the time. When the wind blew hard and I was obliged to furl awnings, her sails, unprotected on the booms, got mud-stained from clue to earing.

"Red dust storm at Belmore Bridge, Maitland, New South Wales, Australia"
(From: Wikimedia Commons)

The phenomena of dust-storms, well understood by scientists, are not uncommon on the coast of Africa. Reaching some distance out over the sea, they frequently cover the track of ships, as in the case of the one through which the Spray passed in the earlier part of her voyage. Sailors no longer regard them with superstitious fear, but our credulous brothers on the land cry out 'Rain of blood!' at the first splash of the awful mud." (p. 177, Dover Edition, 1956) --Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World