8. August

It took home the envoys of nineteen countries and went further than ever. Squadrons reached Aden and the Swahili coast, and the fleet came home with lions, leopards, zebras, ostriches and giraffes for the imperial menagerie.

Caravels landed 235 captives at Lagos, and they were divided into lots in a field outside the town gate, parents parted from children. Prince Henry, on horseback, took his royal fifth: 46 people. His own chronicler recorded the scene. But what heart could be so hard as not to be pierced with…

Caravels unloaded 235 captives taken on the West African coast, and they were divided in a field outside the town, families pulled apart. Henry watched on horseback and took his fifth, 46 people. His own chronicler, Zurara, wrote that the scene moved him to tears.

Tycho Brahe’s UraniborgUraniborg

King Frederick II gave Tycho the island of Hven, and he built a castle-observatory on it, later adding the underground Stjerneborg. With great quadrants and sextants and no telescope, he measured the planets to about one minute of arc for twenty years, until he fell out with Christian IV and left.

this hill she says her nation calls the beaver’s head from a conceived remblance of it’s figure to the head of that animal — Lewis She told them her people’s summer camp was near, on a river beyond the mountains that ran west. It was the first sign they were close to the Shoshone.

A correspondent reports “one of the greatest and suddenest storms on record”. After the tempest breaks, a little past midnight, a foreign schooner under full sail is driven into the harbour and onto Tate Hill Pier, its helm lashed to a dead man whose hands are tied to a spoke with a crucifix…

Lucy walks in her sleep twice in the storm, and Mina undresses her each time without waking her. Next morning they walk down to the harbour, where “the big, grim-looking waves” force in through the narrow mouth “like a bullying man going through a crowd”. Mina is glad Jonathan was not on the sea…

The Russian schooner Demeter sails from Varna on 6 July with silver sand and fifty boxes of earth, and is driven into Whitby in the storm that the Dailygraph dates 8 August. The captain’s log is the only record of the voyage.

On a racecourse south of Le Mans, Wilbur flew for under two minutes, banking through smooth turns that no European machine could make. The French aviator Léon Delagrange said it for everyone watching: Nous sommes battus. — “We are beaten.”

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s small force of German officers and African askari tied down far larger British, Indian, South African, Belgian and Portuguese armies for four years and never surrendered until after the Armistice. Most of the dead were African carriers, pressed into service by every side…

The ship sailed from Plymouth four days into the war, under Frank Worsley. Shackleton stayed behind to settle the money and followed by mail steamer, joining her in Buenos Aires. He called the voyage out “uneventful”.

First the British whale-catcher Southern Sky from South Georgia, then the Uruguayan trawler Instituto de Pesca No. 1 from the Falklands, then the schooner Emma from Punta Arenas: each was turned back by pack ice short of Elephant Island, as the southern winter set in.

It opened east of Amiens with British, Australian, Canadian and French troops and hundreds of tanks; Ludendorff called 8 August “the black day of the German Army”. From then on the Allies attacked all along the line and the German army fell back until it asked for terms.

Paid for largely by the newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst, the airship circled the globe from Lakehurst to Lakehurst in about 21 days, stopping only at Friedrichshafen, Tokyo and Los Angeles.

The Congress demanded that the British leave at once, and Gandhi told the crowd in Bombay: “Do or die”. The whole leadership was arrested the next morning, and the rising that followed was put down with some 100,000 arrests.

With Japan at India’s border, Congress demanded that Britain leave at once. At the maidan he gave a mantra: “We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.” Before dawn the whole Congress leadership was in custody, and the rising that…

Sent by the Army, Yoshio Nishina flew into the ruined city and confirmed that it had been an atomic bomb, the weapon his own programme had not been able to build.

Molotov handed Japan’s ambassador the declaration in Moscow that evening, and just after midnight local time more than 1.5 million Soviet troops attacked Manchuria from three sides. The Kwantung Army fell apart.

Iain Macmillan stood on a stepladder in the road while a policeman held the traffic, and took six frames in about ten minutes. The fifth, with the four in step, became the cover; the crossing is now a listed site.

Wallace Broecker argued that a natural cooling was hiding the effect of CO₂ and would soon give way to a rapid rise. The title of his paper, “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, helped put global warming into everyday use.

Between Pioneer Venus 2 and Magellan the United States launched nothing to the planets. Budgets went to the Space Shuttle, NASA sent nothing to Halley’s Comet, and Galileo waited on the ground after the Challenger disaster. The Voyagers kept the American flag flying.

Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and nine others won eight games by an average of almost 44 points and beat Croatia 117–85 in the final. Their coach never called a time-out.

Opened at 8 p.m. on 8/8/08, eight being a lucky number in Chinese. The torch relay drew protests over Tibet across the world, and China won the most golds. Michael Phelps won eight, a record for one Games.

Held a year late under a state of emergency, with almost no spectators: athletes competed in empty venues, and the rebuilt National Stadium stood on the site of the 1964 one.