20 maggio

The first man ashore met two merchants from Tunis who spoke Castilian and Genoese. Asked what had brought them so far, he said they had come “in search of Christians and of spices”. The gifts da Gama offered the Zamorin, cloth, hats, sugar and honey, were laughed at by his officials.

The first ship to sail from Europe to India anchored off the Malabar coast after ten months at sea. The Zamorin of Calicut was unimpressed by the gifts he was offered: striped cloth, hats and washbasins.

Thomas Thorpe entered “a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes” and printed 154 sonnets with “A Louers complaint”, dedicated to the mysterious “Mr. W. H.” Two had appeared in a miscellany in 1599.

The seventeen-year-old sultan planned to raise a new army in Anatolia. The Janissaries deposed him and strangled him in the Yedikule fortress, the first sultan killed by his own subjects.

Krakatau had last erupted in 1680–81. From May 1883 it erupted on and off all summer, and to the people of Batavia, used to earthquakes and volcanoes, it soon became what the Royal Society’s report called “a nine-days’ wonder”.

The northern peak, Perboewatan, began to erupt. The commander of the German warship Elisabeth estimated the dust column at 11 kilometres, the explosions rattled windows in Batavia, 160 kilometres away, and dust fell 300 miles off.

Shovels No. 222 and No. 230, working from opposite ends, met on the floor of the Cut, 40 feet above sea level. The digging through the divide was done, apart from the slides.

Resting in the lee of a rock, Worsley and Crean fell asleep at once. Shackleton knew sleep there could turn into death; after five minutes he woke them and told them they had slept for half an hour.

At 6.30 Shackleton thought he heard a steam whistle. They watched the chronometer, and at seven, the hour the whalers were called to work, it came “right to the minute”: the first sound made by other people that they had heard since December 1914.

From a final ridge they saw a whale-catcher entering the bay 2,500 feet below, then the sheds of Stromness, and shook hands. The only way down was through a 25- to 30-foot waterfall; they left the rope hanging in it.

Shackleton, Worsley and Crean left McNish, McCarthy and Vincent under the boat and set out by moonlight with a 50-foot rope, an adze, a Primus and three days’ food, with screws from the boat driven into their boot soles for grip. Shackleton later wrote that it often seemed to him “that we were…

Two boys ran from them. The station manager, Thoralf Sørlle, who had known Shackleton in 1914, did not know the bearded man at his door. Shackleton’s first question was when the war had ended; it had not.

The journalist Missy Meloney heard from her that America had about fifty grams of radium and her laboratory hardly more than one. Meloney’s appeal to American women raised $100,000 for a gram, which Harding handed over at the White House. The night before, Marie had a lawyer draw up a paper…

Alone for 33 hours 30 minutes and 3,610 miles (5,810 kilometres), in a Ryan monoplane with no forward window: he looked ahead through a periscope. The flight won the $25,000 Orteig Prize, and some 100,000 people met him at Le Bourget.

Five years to the day after Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart flew her red Lockheed Vega from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, in about 15 hours, with a leaking fuel tank and flames from a cracked exhaust manifold. Blown north of her course, she landed in a pasture at Culmore, near Londonderry.

Students from Nashville took up the ride. A mob met them in Montgomery and beat John Lewis, Jim Zwerg and others; the Justice Department’s John Seigenthaler was knocked unconscious. The next night a mob besieged a mass meeting at First Baptist Church until federal marshals and then the National…

On a visit to Bulgaria, Khrushchev later recalled, he looked across the Black Sea towards Turkey, where American Jupiter missiles were being installed within range of Moscow, and thought of giving the Americans a taste of the same medicine from Cuba. It would also shield Castro from the invasion…

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier and colleagues isolated a new retrovirus from a patient’s lymph node. Robert Gallo’s laboratory reported the same virus in 1984, and it was named HIV in 1986. Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Working from a lymph node removed from a Paris patient in January 1983, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Jean-Claude Chermann and Luc Montagnier’s group found reverse-transcriptase activity: the signature of a retrovirus. They called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus, LAV.

Japan’s Venus climate orbiter. Its main engine failed during the burn to enter orbit on 6 December 2010, and it sailed past into orbit around the Sun.