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An Electric fire-ball wrecks government-house, PARRAMATTA.
SYDNEY, TUESDAY, 9th. NOVEMBER, 1820
On Saturday last, government-house at Parramatta was visited by a tremendous thunderstorm. Between nine and ten o'clock in the morning, after an immense burst of thunder, the house was struck in the roof by an electric fire-ball, which descended from one floor to another, until it finally made its passage out, partly by the windows shivering them in pieces, and partly through the solid wall itself; which it perforated in His EXCELLENCY the Governor's Office, leaving a hole rather larger than that of a musket ball.
The lightning entered through a dormant window in the roof, thence burst through the upper ceiling, and pulling down the plaister for the space of about a yard square, it struck against the chamber doors with such violence as to drive several of them off their hinges, and to throw them in the opposite sides of the rooms, shattering them, and their casements in several places; thence ranging along the lobby it descended by the great staircase into the back. hall, where it committed similar destruction as above.
Entering His EXCELLENCY'S Office it struck the chair His EXCELLENCY was accustomed to sit on; but providentially he was at the time absent on his tour through New Western Country. This portion of the electric matter, after shattering also an umbrella, passed through the wall and become spent, only afterwards breaking a hole through a pane in a window at the end of the house.
The other portion of the electric matter burst through the back windows of the hail, and then became finally expended. Several hundred panes of glass were broken into minute particles by this terrific explosion, and the house was almost in one instant of time left nearly a wreck, and full of a suffocating smell of sulphur. Indeed, the smoke was so great, that it was for some time imagined that the house was on fire, but this was nothing more than the result of the bursting of the immense ball of electric fire.
Perhaps there was never a more awful visitation of the kind, than this; and it is a matter of astonishment, that no personal harm was sustained by any of the numerous family contained in Government-house. Most providentially it happened, that Mrs. MACQUARIE, with her darling boy, had that morning breakfasted in an apartment which was the only one in the house not visited by this scourge, and to this cause may be attributed their almost miraculous escape.