November 7

From the Cape Verde islands da Gama swung far out into the South Atlantic and did not see land for three months, by far the longest passage out of sight of land any European crew had made.

Virginia’s royal governor, driven onto a ship off Norfolk, promised freedom to enslaved men who belonged to rebels and would fight for the king. Hundreds escaped to him and formed the Ethiopian Regiment; smallpox killed many of them. It freed no Loyalist’s slaves, and Dunmore was a slaveholder…

Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See. — Clark What Clark saw from opposite Pillar Rock was the wide estuary, still some twenty miles from the sea. He stood on the open Pacific shore at Cape Disappointment on 18 November.

A law declared every African landed in Brazil free. It was so little enforced that “para inglês ver”, “for the English to see”, became the phrase for any law made for show. Hundreds of thousands were landed illegally over the next twenty years.

The line was the price of British Columbia joining Canada. Andrew Onderdonk’s contracts through the Fraser Canyon used upward of 15,000 Chinese labourers, on lower pay and in more dangerous work than white crews. The Canadian Encyclopedia gives an estimate of at least 600 dead; in 1885, with the…

Donald Smith, one of the company’s directors, drove a plain iron spike in Eagle Pass after the first one bent. The first through train from Montreal reached Port Moody on the Pacific on 4 July 1886.

Japan, Britain’s ally since 1902, declared war on Germany in August and besieged its Chinese naval base with a small British contingent. The seaplanes of the Wakamiya flew some of the first air raids launched from a ship.

The steamer from Auckland carried sick passengers and was not quarantined. About 8,500 people, roughly a fifth of Western Samoa, died within weeks. American Samoa, 60 kilometres away, closed its ports and recorded no deaths.

Founded by three collectors, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, and opened in rented offices nine days after the Wall Street Crash with Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh. Its director, Alfred Barr, was twenty-seven.

After the Calcutta killings of August 1946, Muslim mobs in this eastern Bengal district attacked Hindus. At seventy-seven he walked barefoot from village to village for months, staying in Muslim homes and asking Hindus to return.

He came into court in a traditional kaross and conducted his own defence. From the dock: “I consider myself neither legally nor morally bound to obey laws made by a Parliament in which I have no representation.” The sentence was five years: three for incitement and two for leaving without a…

A NATO exercise rehearsed the release of nuclear weapons, with new procedures Moscow had not seen before. Some Soviet forces were put on alert. A later U.S. intelligence review concluded “we may have inadvertently placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger.”

The Los Angeles Lakers star retired at a press conference at the Forum. He went on to play in the 1992 Olympics and has lived with HIV for more than three decades, which did as much as any campaign to change what people thought the virus meant.

Its sock-puppet mascot had starred in a Super Bowl advert that January. The company announced it would close 268 days after its shares began trading.

With Kevlar linings in its fuel tanks and new tyres, Concorde flew passengers again, into an airline slump after the attacks of 11 September. In April 2003 both airlines announced they would retire it that year.