9 maart

Giovanni de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s son, made a cardinal at thirteen and pope at 37. His court spent freely on music, hunts and Raphael, and kept a white elephant, Hanno, sent by the king of Portugal. To pay for St Peter’s he sold indulgences across Germany.

The Dutch governor at Amboyna accused the English factors of plotting to seize the fort, had them tortured into confessions and beheaded twenty men: ten Englishmen, among them the chief factor Gabriel Towerson, nine Japanese soldiers and a Portuguese. It ended the Company’s bid for the clove and…

It opens in a pin factory, where ten workers who each do one step make “upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day”. Wealth, Smith argued, comes from the division of labour and free exchange, not from hoarded gold.

The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever. Adam Smith spent pages of his book on the Company as the case against monopoly: a merchant cannot be a good sovereign, he argued, because the two interests pull against each other.

John Quincy Adams argued their case. Justice Story, for the court, held they had been kidnapped and were free. Thirty-five survivors sailed home to Sierra Leone that November.

Verdi’s third opera made his name. Its chorus of Hebrew exiles, “Va, pensiero”, later became an anthem of Italian unification, though historians find little evidence that the first audiences heard it that way.

On the second day the Union’s Monitor, with its revolving turret, arrived and fought the Virginia to a standstill for hours: the first battle between ironclads. Every wooden navy in the world was obsolete.

Lincoln handed Grant his commission as lieutenant general, the first to hold the full rank since George Washington. He planned simultaneous advances on every front, so the Confederacy could not shift troops from one to another.

The Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, the party’s chaplain and photographer, died of scurvy on the sledge that had carried him for forty days. The others buried him in the ice shelf and hauled Mackintosh and Hayward on to Hut Point.

More than 300 B-29s flew in low at night and dropped incendiaries on the wooden houses of eastern Tokyo. The fire burned about 41 square kilometres. Estimates of the dead run from about 80,000 to over 100,000: probably the deadliest air raid in history.

King led some 2,000 marchers to the bridge, knelt in prayer and turned back, honouring a federal court order. That evening white men beat the Boston minister James Reeb in Selma; he died two days later.

Three days after its twin, about 8,000 km from the nucleus, with clearer pictures.

Christopher Wallace was shot in his car at a stoplight after leaving a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum, and died in hospital, aged 24. His second album, Life After Death, came out sixteen days later. No one has been charged.

From the day the money markets froze to the low in American shares. The S&P 500 lost 57 per cent from its October 2007 high.

The Dow closed at 6,547.05 and the S&P 500 at 676.53, down 57 per cent from its peak of October 2007. From the next day, shares began a rise that ran for eleven years.

OV-103, the most-flown spacecraft in history: 39 missions and a year in orbit. It launched Hubble, flew both return-to-flight missions, and took John Glenn back to space at 77.

Five games against one of the best Go players of the era. Go has too many moves to search by brute force, and experts had expected a win like this to be a decade away. DeepMind’s program, trained on human games and then on games against itself, won 4–1.

Delivered from a Chinese yard at 24,346 TEU, 399.99 metres by 61.3. Sixty-seven years earlier the Ideal X had carried the equivalent of about a hundred.