The HMS Caroline "Chinese Lanterns" off Quelpart (Jeju)

HMS Caroline was a Satellite-class composite screw sloop, launched at Sheerness on 25 November 1882 and later reclassified as a corvette. In 1890 she was recommissioned at Hong Kong for the China Station. From November 1892 her commanding officer was Captain Charles James Norcock, who later became a Vice-Admiral. In February 1893 she was on passage between Shanghai and the western entrance of the inland sea of Japan. Her course took her past Quelpart, the island known today as Jeju.

24 February 1893. About 10 p.m. ship's time. Lat. 32° 58′ N, long. 126° 33′ E, sixteen to seventeen miles south of Quelpart island. A windy, cold, moonlight night. The officer of the watch reported "some unusual lights" between the ship and Mount Auckland, the old chart name for Hallasan.

Norcock described them. "To the naked eye they appeared sometimes as a mass; at others, spread out in an irregular line, and, being globular in form, they resembled Chinese lanterns festooned between the masts of a lofty vessel."

"They bore north (magnetic), and remained on that bearing until lost sight of about midnight." The ship moved on. The bearing never changed. To the officers, that meant the lights were not on land.

Exactly twenty-four hours later, they were back. For a time they were eclipsed by a small island, so they lay farther off than the land itself. They bore north at about the same speed and direction as the Caroline, throwing a reflection with a glare on the horizon beneath them. Through the telescope the globes looked reddish. They seemed to emit a faint smoke.

Charles Fort put the watch at seven and a half hours. Robert Neff, writing in the Korea Times, says the lights seemed to shadow the warship throughout the night, running parallel to it, and only disappeared with the morning's dawn.

Norcock's letter carried another report. Captain Castle of HMS Leander had seen lights in the same general locality, at about the same time. He altered course and made toward them. In Fort's words, "The lights had fled from him." Other accounts say they moved higher in the sky.

Norcock offered his own answer. The lights were "something in the nature of St. Elmo's fire." His letter appeared in Nature on 25 May 1893 as "An Atmospheric Phenomenon in the North China Sea." No Admiralty inquiry is known.

More than a century later, Martin Shough proposed Japanese squid-fishing boats burning fires as lures. A constant bearing and an island passing in front both point to very distant sources, and a reddish glow with faint smoke suits fire on the water. Castle's lights, which fled and climbed, fit less easily. Neither Neff nor Shough could find the Caroline's logbook.

Charles Fort placed the case in The Book of the Damned in 1919 as an example of "unison of movement", beside the 1904 report from USS Supply. It has stayed a Fortean classic ever since, a Royal Navy captain's careful account of lights that kept company with his ship for two nights off Jeju.