21 maggio

Charles VI made Henry V his regent and heir to the crown of France, disinheriting his own son, “the so-called Dauphin”. Henry married Charles’s daughter Catherine at Troyes on 2 June. The two crowns were to be joined for ever in one king.

A royal decree cut the official value of shares and banknotes in stages to about half. The outcry was so great that it was withdrawn within a week, but nobody trusted the notes again.

Two weeks of assaults on entrenchments. “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” Grant wrote to Washington. 30,000 casualties (NPS).

Worsley went round the coast in a whaler and brought back McNish, McCarthy and Vincent, and the James Caird. The three did not recognize him clean-shaven: they had expected Shackleton to come himself.

Mallory, Edward Norton and Howard Somervell climbed the North Ridge to about 8,225 metres, higher than anyone had been, and turned back in the early afternoon. Henry Morshead, frostbitten, had waited at their tent. On the way down three of them slipped and Mallory held them with his axe.

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.

Gandhi had been arrested at night at Karadi on 5 May. The poet Sarojini Naidu led volunteers towards the salt pans in columns, and police beat them down with steel-tipped lathis, row after row. Webb Miller of the United Press wrote: “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the…

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.

Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman ran a small, cheap reconnaissance in the monsoon and climbed 26 lesser peaks. Among the Sherpas was Tenzing Norgay, about twenty, on his first Everest expedition; Shipton said he took him partly for his grin. Looking down the Khumbu Icefall, Shipton thought it “did not…

Wilfrid Noyce and the Sherpa Annullu broke through to the South Col, about 7,900 metres. Seeing them up there, the Sherpas below followed with the loads the next day.

An amendment to the Commonwealth Electoral Act let Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people enrol and vote federally, sixty years after the 1902 Act shut most of them out. Enrolment stayed voluntary for them, though compulsory for everyone else, until 1984.

With the rupiah down about three-quarters and riots in Jakarta, Indonesia’s president of 31 years stepped down.