2 octobre

The Ming history counts 62 treasure ships and some 27,800 men; a later source adds 255 smaller vessels for 317 in all, which Dreyer thinks counts some ships twice. It sailed by Champa, Java, Palembang, Malacca and Sumatra to Ceylon and Calicut, the great pepper port of the Malabar coast, and back.

A strip of vines outside the Porta Vercellina, between Santa Maria delle Grazie and San Vittore. He kept it through every change of ruler and left it in his will. The deed of gift is dated 2 October 1498, and a ducal letter confirmed it in April 1499. In 2015 it was replanted in the garden of the…

Up the St Lawrence to an Iroquoian town on the island he named Mont Royal. That winter, scurvy was killing his men until their hosts showed them a cure: a tea of white cedar. Cartier also borrowed their word for a village, kanata.

The spectacle-maker Hans Lipperhey of Middelburg showed the States General “an instrument for seeing far”. They turned the patent down because others plainly knew the trick, and within a year spyglasses were on sale across Europe.

Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle-maker from Middelburg in Zeeland, showed the Dutch parliament in The Hague an instrument for seeing far and asked for a patent. Within weeks two other men claimed the same trick. The States paid him 900 guilders for instruments but never granted the patent: too many…

For nearly three centuries the working telescope was a lens at the end of a tube. A single lens bends each colour differently, so early refractors grew absurdly long to keep the blur down, until two-glass achromatic lenses arrived in the 1750s. The last of the giants was the 40-inch at Yerkes.

A ten-gun survey brig sent to chart the coasts of South America, which came home by way of the Pacific and the Cape. Darwin was seasick for most of the voyage and spent more than three years of the five on land, riding across the pampas and the Andes while the ship surveyed. He sent home crates of…

Seward puts a man in the corridor to note any sound from Renfield’s room. The party, after dinner, finds Harker’s clue “may be an important one”. Renfield is quiet; then, mid-sentence, a wild yell seems to come from his room.

At Poplar Jonathan finds Bloxam, who carried nine of the boxes from Carfax to a house in Piccadilly, helped by an old man “with a white moustache, one that thin you would think he couldn’t throw a shadder”. The Count lifted his end like “pounds of tea”. The house, he describes, has a stone front…

Mina, “terribly weak and spiritless”, writes that Renfield asked to see her that afternoon. “Poor man, he was very gentle”, and when she left he kissed her hand and bade God bless her, which affects her deeply.

The chief engineer, Zhan Tianyou, had studied at Yale, and this was the first railway in China designed and built by Chinese engineers. He took it over the mountains at Badaling with a switchback at Qinglongqiao.

A Black American revue starring the 19-year-old dancer Josephine Baker, with Sidney Bechet in the band, took Paris by storm. Baker stayed and became a French star, and jazz became the sound of the city’s années folles; Bechet was back in France for good by 1950.

Operation Typhoon brought German spearheads within sight of the city in the frosts of late November. On 5 December Zhukov counter-attacked with divisions brought from Siberia: the first great German defeat of the war.

The Polish Home Army rose to free the capital before the Red Army arrived. The Soviets halted across the Vistula, and the Germans crushed the rising in 63 days. Estimates of the civilians killed run from 150,000 to 200,000; afterwards Hitler ordered the city razed.

Ten days before the opening, soldiers and police opened fire on a student rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Official counts at the time were about two dozen dead, and the number is still disputed. The National Security Archive documented 44 deaths, 34 of them by name; other estimates run to…

A Mi-8 flying over Unit 4 caught its rotor on a crane cable and fell beside the reactor building. All four crew were killed.

The act banned new American investment in South Africa, imports of its coal, iron, steel, uranium and farm produce, and South African Airways flights to the United States. President Reagan vetoed it, and the Senate overrode him 78 to 21: the first override of a presidential veto on foreign policy…

A record 159 nations came, despite North Korea’s boycott. Tennis returned with professionals, and Steffi Graf added the gold to her four majors: a Golden Slam.

The Soviet Union came to the Summer Games for the first time in Helsinki, and from then on the medal count was a scoreboard between two systems. It topped the table at six of the nine Summer Games it entered, the last in Seoul.

Four Summer Games in a row were cut short of the full world: Africa walked out of Montreal, the West stayed away from Moscow, the East from Los Angeles, and North Korea and a handful of allies from Seoul.

President Joko Widodo opened the 142-kilometre, China-backed line from Jakarta to Bandung, running at up to 350 kilometres an hour. It cost $7.3 billion, well over budget, after years of delays.