26 oktober

When daylight returned, on the third day counting from the last he had seen, his body was found whole and unhurt, still in the clothes he had worn, “more like a man asleep than dead”. Latin text: Pliny, Letters 6.16

The couple’s only visit to Salzburg together. The mass, K. 427, was left unfinished, but its completed movements were sung at St Peter’s, most probably with Constanze as a soprano soloist.

Against the current in a 55-foot keelboat and two pirogues, rowed, poled, sailed and hauled from the bank by towrope: about 1,600 miles in five and a half months. The river was already a trade road, run by St. Louis traders and by the nations who controlled its villages.

Another day without word of the Czarina Catherine. Fog is reported north and south of the port, which may be why the ship has not been signalled, and the party goes on watching.

Itō, four times prime minister and the first Resident-General of Korea, was shot on the station platform by An Jung-geun, a Korean independence fighter. An was hanged in 1910 and is honoured in both Koreas.

A day out, a stowaway was found in a locker: Perce Blackborow, a young Welsh sailor who had been turned down in Buenos Aires. Shackleton raged at him, then told him that if anyone had to be eaten he would be the first. He signed on as a steward.

About 48 hours from the government’s raid on the Bolshevik press to the Congress of Soviets taking power. There was little fighting: trams ran and theatres played while the Military Revolutionary Committee took over the city one building at a time. It ran from 6 to 8 November in the West.

Around 05:00 local time the Congress adopted Lenin’s appeal “To Workers, Soldiers and Peasants!”, read out by Lunacharsky: all power passed to the soviets.

Adopted late that evening: an appeal to all warring nations for an immediate armistice and a peace without annexations or indemnities, and a promise to publish the tsar’s secret treaties.

Adopted in the small hours: landlords’ estates were confiscated without compensation and handed to peasant committees. Lenin took the text almost whole from the SRs’ programme.

Japan sent almost all its remaining fleet against the American landings in the Philippines, in four actions over three days: the largest naval battle in history. It lost the super-battleship Musashi, four carriers and its navy’s power to fight.

With tribal fighters from Pakistan advancing on Srinagar, Maharaja Hari Singh signed an instrument of accession dated this day; Indian troops flew into Srinagar the next morning. The first war between India and Pakistan followed.

The Boeing 707 Clipper America flew New York to Paris with a fuel stop at Gander, three weeks after BOAC’s Comet 4 beat it to the first transatlantic jet service. The 707 became the jet that shrank the world.

Sailors from the destroyers Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., named after the President’s elder brother, and John R. Pierce boarded a Lebanese freighter under Soviet charter. They found paper, sulphur and truck parts, and let her through: the one boarding of the quarantine, chosen to prove it was real.

Over lunch the KGB’s Washington station chief, Aleksandr Feklisov (known as Fomin), floated a deal to John Scali of ABC News: missiles out under UN inspection for a promise not to invade. Each man later said the idea was the other’s; Soviet archives suggest Moscow had not sent it.

…we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. A long, emotional letter, arriving in pieces from 18:00 Washington time, offered what Feklisov had hinted at: no more weapons…

Members of the Order of the British Empire, on the Prime Minister’s list. Some earlier holders sent their medals back in protest. Four years later Lennon returned his, over Biafra, Vietnam and his single “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts.

When the West declined, China built and paid for 1,860 kilometres of line giving landlocked Zambia a route to the sea that avoided white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. At the peak about 13,500 Chinese and 38,000 African workers were on the line; more than 160 died, 64 of them Chinese.

A hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, caught variola minor after riding for a few minutes in a vehicle with two sick children. He recovered, and was the last person to catch smallpox naturally. He later worked as a polio vaccinator, and died of malaria in 2013 during a polio campaign.

Enterprise rode on the back of a modified Boeing 747: five captive flights unmanned, three with a crew aboard, then five free flights gliding down to the runways at Edwards.

Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia, was the last person to catch smallpox naturally; he recovered. In May 1980 the World Health Assembly declared the disease eradicated, the only human disease so far wiped out.