November 29

Twelve years after completion, part of the high vault and its buttressing fell. The choir was rebuilt at the same height with extra piers squeezed between the old ones, turning four-part vaults into six-part ones; the repair dragged on for decades.

Thomas Best’s two ships beat off a Portuguese squadron at the anchorage off Surat. Showing the Mughals that the English could stand up to the Portuguese at sea won the Company leave to trade at Surat, its first foothold in India.

Leopold Mozart took his children Nannerl and Wolfgang, then seven, on three and a half years of concerts at courts and in public halls. In Frankfurt the fourteen-year-old Goethe heard Wolfgang play; in London the boy met Johann Christian Bach and wrote his first symphonies.

Leopold took leave from court and put the family on the road for three and a half years: through southern Germany and the Rhineland to Paris, on to London for fifteen months, back through the Low Countries, Paris again and Switzerland. The children, eleven and seven at the start, played at courts…

Short of water after navigation errors, the crew of the Liverpool-owned Zong began throwing captives overboard: 54 women and children that day, 42 men on 1 December, 36 more later, and 10 jumped. Accounts put the dead at between 130 and 142. The owners claimed on their insurance, and in 1783 Lord…

Thirty-four games, 25 of them drawn: Alexander Alekhine won six to Capablanca’s three. It stayed the longest title match until 1984, and the two never played a rematch.

Pan Am’s Martin M-130 flying boat left Alameda before a crowd and island-hopped to Manila in six days, using bases Pan Am had built on Midway, Wake and Guam. Passenger service followed in October 1936.

Prime Minister Ben Chifley unveiled the Holden 48-215 at General Motors-Holden’s Fishermans Bend plant: the first car mass-produced in Australia, designed for its roads. Australian car making ended in 2017, when Holden closed its last plant.

Atari's first hit. The prototype, installed in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, stopped working within days: its coin box had overflowed with quarters.

The Federal Assembly deleted the article of the constitution that gave the Communist Party the leading role in society. East Germany’s parliament did the same on 1 December.

A steel arch 108 metres high and 257 metres wide, built beside the reactor, was slid 327 metres on rails to cover Unit 4 and the old sarcophagus. It weighs 36,000 tonnes and is meant to last a hundred years.