March 19

The last Song fleet was destroyed in the Pearl River delta. The minister Lu Xiufu jumped into the sea with the boy emperor on his back, and for the first time all of China was ruled by the Mongols.

The last Song loyalist fleet was destroyed off Yamen in the Pearl River delta by the Yuan admiral Zhang Hongfan. The minister Lu Xiufu leapt into the sea with the seven-year-old emperor Zhao Bing on his back, and the Song ended.

Playing stopped as the queen lay dying, and the worst plague of the age followed: some 30,000 Londoners died in 1603. The King’s Men toured and played for James at Wilton House and Hampton Court until the Privy Council let the playhouses open again.

Scott, Wilson and Bowers pitched their tent on the evening of Monday 19 March, 11 miles short of One Ton Depot by Scott’s reckoning, and a blizzard closed in. Scott’s right foot was frostbitten; a plan for Wilson and Bowers to fetch fuel was never carried out.

Some 40,000 women marched to the Tauride Palace, led by the doctor Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, until the government promised them the vote. A law of July made Russia the first great power to give women the vote, in time for the Constituent Assembly.

From a new compilation of fossil families, they found four extinctions in the sea statistically distinct from the background: the end-Ordovician, end-Permian, end-Triassic and end-Cretaceous. A fifth, in the Late Devonian, stood out but was not statistically significant in their data. Together…

Zidovudine, first made as a cancer drug in 1964, became the first approved HIV drug. In its trial 19 of 137 people on placebo died against 1 of 145 on AZT. At about $8,000 a year, it was among the most expensive drugs ever sold.