March 26

The king of Castile refused to lift his siege when plague broke out in his camp, and died of it on Good Friday: one of the few reigning monarchs the Black Death killed.

At the peace of Utrecht, Spain granted Britain’s South Sea Company the right to supply its American colonies for thirty years: 144,000 “piezas de Indias”, 4,800 a year. A pieza was a unit of labour, not a person, so the real number of people was higher.

Texans marching on Colorado’s gold fields won the fight in the pass, but a Union detachment under John Chivington burned their supply train at Johnson’s Ranch, and the Confederate invasion of New Mexico fell apart. Chivington led the Sand Creek Massacre two years later.

General Charles Bruce led the first attempt on the summit, with about 160 men. It was the first to carry bottled oxygen: four cylinders on a frame, some 14.5 kilograms. The porters called it “English air”, and several climbers thought using it unsporting.

In 1956 the Soviet bloc founded the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, and Georgy Flerov's laboratory there became Berkeley's rival. From element 102 on, almost every discovery was claimed by both. In the 1980s West Germany's GSI in Darmstadt took the lead with Yuri Oganessian's “cold…

James Cameron went down alone in a 7-metre sub that dropped upright like a torpedo, taking 2 h 36 min to reach the bottom. A hydraulic leak and failing thrusters cut his time there to about three hours, and the ascent took only 70 minutes. Local time 05:15 to noon.

A container ship outbound from Baltimore lost power and struck a pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which fell into the river and killed six road workers. The port’s main channel was closed for eleven weeks.