6. September

Five ships and about 270 men sailed from Sanlúcar under a Portuguese captain in Spain's pay. One ship and 18 of those men came back three years later, having sailed round the world without meaning to.

Juan Sebastián Elcano brought her home with 18 men. Charles V gave him a coat of arms crowned by a globe and the motto Primus circumdedisti me: “You were the first to go around me.”

The seventy-one-year-old sultan died in his tent the night before the Hungarian fortress fell. The grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha hid his death from the army until the new sultan, Selim II, could reach it.

It burned about 436 acres, 373 of them inside the City wall. Only six deaths were verified at the time, and that figure is still often repeated. Neil Hanson argues the real toll was far higher, in the hundreds or even thousands: the poor and the unrecorded, and bodies consumed by heat fierce…

New outbreaks were put out as they started. The homeless camped in the open fields around the City, from Moorfields to Islington and Highgate, and the King, afraid of a rising, promised bread every day and markets around the edge of the ruins.

Up at five, Pepys heard of a fire breaking out at Bishopsgate, where no fire had yet been near. It was soon put out, but it gave people, and Pepys too, “great grounds … to think that there is some kind of plot in this”. Diary entry: 6 September 1666

An opera seria, K. 621, for Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia, written in a matter of weeks, with the simple recitatives probably left to his pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

With the Prussians advancing, crowds broke into the Paris prisons and killed the inmates after mock trials. Pierre Caron’s count is 1,100 to 1,400 dead, about half the prisoners, most of them common criminals. The same day Danton told the Assembly what France needed: “audacity, more audacity,…

Seward tells Arthur that Lucy “had gone back a bit”, and that Mrs. Westenra has consulted him: he has told her that his “old master, Van Helsing”, the great specialist, is coming to look after her.

“Terrible change for the worse. Come at once; do not lose an hour.” Seward holds back his telegram to Arthur until he has seen Van Helsing.

Leon Czolgosz shot him in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a gun hidden under a handkerchief. He died eight days later at the Milburn House, where he had been staying; the Secret Service took on full-time protection of presidents soon after.

After a trial cruise in the North Atlantic, the Fram sailed from Kristiansand with nineteen men, ninety-seven dogs, four pigs, six carrier pigeons and one canary, by Nilsen’s count. The Greenland dogs came aboard at Kristiansand to cross the equator twice.

A parliamentary messenger, Dimitri Tsafendas, stabbed the prime minister at his seat in the House of Assembly. Tsafendas was found unfit to stand trial and held for the rest of his life. B. J. Vorster, the minister of justice, succeeded Verwoerd.

A rescue attempt at the airfield late on 5 September failed, and all nine hostages were killed in the firefight that ran past midnight, along with the West German police officer Anton Fliegerbauer. Five attackers died; three were captured and freed seven weeks later after a hijacking.

A memorial service filled the Olympic stadium, and IOC president Avery Brundage told it that the Games would continue. Competition resumed the next day, after a pause of about thirty-four hours.