22 de septiembre

The English prince, the future Edward I, reached Acre with about a thousand men, too few to do more than raid. Often counted as the Ninth Crusade, it ended with a ten-year truce.

Henry’s guns battered the port for five weeks, but dysentery did more harm to his own army than the defenders did. It killed the Bishop of Norwich and the Earl of Suffolk, whose son died at Agincourt a month later, and sent hundreds more home sick.

The Nez Perce road over the Bitterroot Mountains, in early snow. Game was scarce; the men lived on portable soup and their own colts. Clark went ahead with six hunters to find food on the far side.

In low cliffs near Bahía Blanca Darwin dug out the bones of giant ground sloths and other extinct mammals. They were larger cousins of the sloths and armadillos still living on the same continent, a pattern he later called the succession of types.

Five days after Antietam, Lincoln warned that on 1 January everyone enslaved in a state still in rebellion “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”. He had waited for a victory, so it would not read as desperation.

Lucy is buried: “It is all over.” Arthur goes back to Ring and takes Quincey Morris with him, and Seward, who thinks Quincey “bore himself through it like a moral Viking”, closes his diary of the case. She lies in the tomb of her kin “away from teeming London”, where “the sun rises over Hampstead…

Walking down Piccadilly after Mr. Hawkins’s funeral, Mina feels Jonathan clutch her arm: a tall thin man with a beaky nose and pointed beard is watching a girl in a victoria. “It is the man himself!” Jonathan says, “I believe it is the Count, but he has grown young.” At home a telegram from Van…

Seeing poor Tamil farmers who could not afford the handspun cloth he was urging on them, he shaved his head and gave up his shirt and cap for a short dhoti. He wore little else for the rest of his life, in London included.

Five finance ministers agreed at the Plaza Hotel to push the dollar down. The yen roughly doubled in value in two years, and the Bank of Japan cut rates to cushion exporters, pouring cheap money into Japanese shares and land.