26 december

Sent downriver for food, Francisco de Orellana could not get back upstream and went on to the Atlantic, the first European to travel the river. His chronicler told of women warriors, and the river took the name of the Amazons. He also saw crowded towns that later travellers could not find;…

The only performance of Lear the records date. The 1608 quarto’s title page says it was played “before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes”: 26 December 1606, by the Stationers’ Register entry of the next year.

The commission the journey was for: the opening opera of the Milan carnival season, K. 87, by a composer of fourteen. The singers had tried to swap in arias by others; the premiere was a success and it ran for more than twenty nights.

K. 135. The first night started three hours late, because the Archduke had to finish his New Year letters to the imperial family first, and ran until two in the morning. It still ran for the season.

After crossing the icy Delaware overnight, Washington surprised the Hessian garrison and took about 900 prisoners. Leutze’s famous painting of the crossing shows a flag that did not yet exist.

A second element, with Gustave Bémont: its activity was about 900 times uranium’s. Proving it took four years of crystallising tonnes of pitchblende residue in a leaking shed, for a tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

A second element, with the chemist Gustave Bémont, hiding in the barium fraction and far more active than uranium. Eugène Demarçay found a new line in its spectrum. To convince the chemists they would have to isolate enough of it to weigh.

With Gustave Bémont, the Curies reported a second new element, whose spectral line Eugène Demarçay confirmed. Proving it took Marie Curie almost four years of processing pitchblende residue in a shed, for about a tenth of a gram of radium chloride in 1902.

McCartney’s film of a coach trip, largely improvised, went out on BBC1 at peak time — in black and white, which drained its colour-drenched sequences. The critics loathed it; the double EP of its songs, out on 8 December, sold well.

The upper house of the Supreme Soviet voted the union out of existence. One of the two sides of the Cold War was gone, and fifteen countries stood where there had been one.

The Pacific had had a tsunami warning system since 1949; the Indian Ocean had none: no deep-ocean pressure sensors, few tide gauges reporting in real time, and no agreed way to reach people on the coast. The wave took hours to cross it, and on most shores the first warning was the sea itself.

It was 07:58:53 on a Sunday morning in Aceh, the day after Christmas. The USGS rates it Mw 9.1, the third-largest earthquake recorded since 1900; Stein and Okal, using the Earth's slowest vibrations, put it at 9.3. It moved the planet's mass enough to shorten the day, NASA calculated, by 2.68…

The break began about 30 kilometres down on the boundary where the India plate slides under the Burma microplate, and ran north beneath the Nicobar Islands towards the Andamans. Over about eight to ten minutes some 1,300 kilometres of fault slipped (estimates run from 1,200 to 1,600), lifting the…

PLTD Apung 1, a floating power station of about 2,600 tonnes moored off Ulee Lheue, was lifted and carried about three kilometres inland to Punge Blang Cut. It was never moved back; it is a memorial now, and the picture on this timeline's cover.

The waves came over the city's coastal districts between about 08:20 and 08:45 local time, 6 to 12 metres high at the shore, and flooded up to about four kilometres inland. Indonesia's losses, almost all in Aceh, came to 167,540 dead and missing, about three in every four of the disaster's toll;…

The rupture ran almost beneath the Nicobar Islands, and the wave struck low, flat Car Nicobar within about half an hour, around seven in the morning Indian time. It swept through the Indian Air Force station, where more than a hundred personnel and family members died.

On Simeulue, closest of all to the epicentre, the sea came within about eight minutes. Islanders had kept a story from the tsunami of 1907: when the ground shakes and the sea draws back, run for the hills. They called it smong, and ran; of about 78,000 people, seven died.

Fifteen minutes after the shock, working from the first seismic waves, Hawaii put the magnitude at 8.0 and told its Pacific contacts: “No destructive tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data.” The bulletin was for the Pacific; the centre had no one to send it to in the…

At Lhoknga and Leupung, west of Banda Aceh, survivors and stopped clocks put the first wave at 13 to 21 minutes after the shock, a little after 08:10 local time. Along this coast it rose more than 30 metres up the hillsides, the highest run-up of the whole disaster.

About two hours after the shock, the French-American satellite Jason-1 passed over the Indian Ocean and its radar altimeter caught the leading crest, about 60 centimetres high in the open sea: the first time a satellite had measured a tsunami in mid-ocean. The data were analysed only days later.

On Mai Khao beach in Phuket, ten-year-old Tilly Smith, on holiday from Surrey, saw the sea froth and draw back and remembered a geography lesson given two weeks earlier. She told her parents it was a tsunami; the beach was cleared, and about a hundred people got away before the wave arrived.

With the magnitude raised to 8.5, the centre added: “There is the possibility of a tsunami near the epicenter.” Aceh had already been struck. Harvard's analysis later that hour gave 8.9, but the centre still had no gauge data from the Indian Ocean to show whether a wave had formed.

About two hours after the shock, just before 09:00 local time, the wave struck the east coast from Trincomalee to Batticaloa and the Ampara district, where Kalmunai was worst hit. Survey teams measured run-up of up to about 12 metres. Sri Lanka's dead and missing came to 35,322.

The wave reached Chennai at about 09:00 Indian time, when the city's long beach was full of Sunday walkers, fishing families and cricket games. India's dead and missing, in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Pondicherry and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, came to 16,269.

On the resort coast north of Phuket the wave came after 10:00 local time, up to about 10 metres high, and reached far inland across low ground. A police patrol boat guarding a member of the Thai royal family was carried about two kilometres from the sea, where it still lies. Thailand's dead and…

The low coast of this fishing district took the worst of the wave in India: about 6,000 people died in the district, some of them Christmas pilgrims at the shrine of Velankanni, a few kilometres south.

On Phuket's west coast the sea drew back at about 09:30 local time, baring the reef, and many people walked out to look. The first crest came at about 10:00, through Patong's beachfront and into its streets.

At about 03:30 wire reports of deaths in Sri Lanka told the warning centre what its instruments could not. Its staff began calling anyone they could reach, through the US State Department and Pacific Command among others; there was no list of contacts for the Indian Ocean to call.

The wave bent around the island's southern tip and ran up the west coast. At about 09:30 local time the crowded Colombo–Matara train, the Samudra Devi or Queen of the Sea, had stopped at Peraliya when the waves reached it; a later, larger wave overturned the carriages. Estimates of the dead run…

At about 09:20 local time the wave washed over the atolls, where most of the land lies less than a metre above the sea. It flooded much of Malé; the country's dead and missing came to 108. The reefs that ring the atolls took much of its force.

About seven hours and 5,000 kilometres from the epicentre, towards midday local time, the wave came ashore on the Puntland coast of Somalia, 5 to 9 metres high. Hafun, on its low peninsula, was hit hardest. The Tsunami Evaluation Coalition counts 289 dead and missing in Somalia, the most of any…