17. April

Signed in the siege camp outside Granada, three and a half months after the city fell. Ferdinand and Isabella made Columbus Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy of whatever he found, with a tenth of all its wealth for himself and his heirs.

Sailing for France to find a way through to Asia. Further south he had looked across the Outer Banks, seen open water, and decided it was the Pacific; maps showed “Verrazzano's Sea” for decades.

Virginia’s convention voted to leave on 17 April, then Arkansas (6 May), North Carolina (20 May) and Tennessee, whose voters confirmed it on 8 June. The border slave states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri stayed in the Union, some of them under federal guns.

Fought over control of Korea. Japan won at Pyongyang and off the Yalu and took Port Arthur, where its troops killed large numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians after the capture, as Western correspondents reported.

China recognised Korea’s independence and ceded Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong Peninsula, and agreed to pay 200 million taels. Six days later Russia, Germany and France forced Japan to give Liaodong back.

The beach at Cape Valentine flooded at high tide, so they moved seven miles west to a spit named after Frank Wild. Twenty-two men lived there for four and a half months under the two upturned boats, with a blubber stove, Hussey’s banjo, and Wild in command.

Ella Baker of the SCLC called the sit-in students together at her alma mater over Easter weekend and urged them to stay independent of the older groups. They formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which would carry the movement into rural Mississippi and Alabama.

About 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed on Cuba’s south coast to overthrow Fidel Castro. Kennedy withheld air cover, and within three days most were captured; Castro later traded them for $53 million in food and medicine.

And there’s one whole side of that spacecraft missing. — Lovell The crew saw the damage for the first time and photographed it. The heat shield had sat next to the blast, and nobody knew if it was cracked. Transcript: Apollo 13 Flight Journal

After three and a half days cold, the command module was powered up from its batteries. The procedure had been written in three days instead of three months. Walls and panels dripped with condensation, but nothing shorted; Ken Mattingly, the man Swigert replaced, was among the capcoms.

Aquarius as lifeboatApollo 13

And, Jack, I got LM power on. — Haise Built to keep two men alive for two days, the lunar module kept three alive for nearly four. Power and water were rationed, the temperature fell to about 3 °C, and Haise came home with an infection that kept him down for three weeks.

Farewell, Aquarius, and we thank you. — Joe Kerwin, Houston The lifeboat was cut loose to burn up in the atmosphere. Transcript: Apollo 13 Flight Journal

From the top of the atmosphere, 122 kilometres up at 11 kilometres a second, to the water: 14 minutes, the first few in a radio blackout.

Odyssey, Houston standing by. Over. — Kerwin Okay, Joe. — Swigert The blackout was predicted to end 3 minutes 38 seconds after entry. Swigert answered more than a minute and a half later than that. Transcript: Apollo 13 Flight Journal

In the South Pacific south-east of American Samoa, 6.5 kilometres from the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima. The crew were on its deck 45 minutes later.

Officially Laos was neutral, so the bombing was secret. In about 580,000 missions the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance, on the Trail in the south and on the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese around the Plain of Jars in the north. About 30 percent of the cluster bomblets…

Crowds cheered the black-clad fighters for a few hours. Then the Khmer Rouge ordered the whole city emptied, sick and wounded included. Former officials were killed; Cambodia’s genocide had begun.