October 16

On his way home from the Council of Constance, which had just ended the Great Schism by electing him, the pope consecrated the high altar of a church that was barely half built.

The two Protestant bishops were burned outside the town wall, where a cross in the road of Broad Street marks the spot. Foxe gives Latimer’s words: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put…

At the mouth of the Snake about 200 men came singing and dancing down from their villages, formed a ring round the camp and danced; these were Wanapam and Yakama people, whose salmon fishery ran for miles along the river.

Mina’s hypnotic report is “still the same: lapping waves and rushing water, darkness and favouring winds”. The ship must pass the Dardanelles, so the party expects a report.

Tchaikovsky conducted his Sixth Symphony, which ends in a slow movement that fades into silence. Nine days later he was dead, officially of cholera. The date was 28 October in the Gregorian calendar.

Lord Curzon split Bengal into a Hindu-majority west and a Muslim-majority east. The protest, the Swadeshi boycott of British goods, was the first mass nationalist movement; the partition was reversed in 1911.

Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne and Fania Mindell opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States, where giving out contraceptive information was a crime. Women queued down Amboy Street. Police closed it after nine days, and Sanger served 30 days in the workhouse.

Shortly before 09:00 Washington time Bundy went up to Kennedy’s bedroom, where the President was still in his pyjamas reading the papers, and told him: the Soviets had offensive missiles in Cuba.

From the morning Kennedy saw the photographs to the morning Khrushchev said the missiles would go. Robert Kennedy’s memoir of it, Thirteen Days, gave the crisis its American name; in Cuba it is the October Crisis and in Russia the Caribbean Crisis.

At 11:50 about a dozen advisers gathered in the Cabinet Room, later formalized as the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Kennedy had a hidden microphone running; the tapes, released from the 1980s on, let historians hear every option argued, from doing nothing to invasion.

Two support cables snapped during launch and Alvin sank to 1,500 m with its hatch open; the three men on board got out. When it was raised ten months later, the crew’s sandwiches were still soggy but edible: a first hint of how slowly things decay in the cold deep.

On the 200 metres podium the two Americans bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists during the anthem. The silver medallist, Australian Peter Norman, wore their Olympic Project for Human Rights badge. The US team sent Smith and Carlos home.

Rahima Banu, a three-year-old girl on Bhola Island, Bangladesh, was the last person known to catch the deadlier form of smallpox. An eight-year-old neighbour reported the case for the reward. Guards watched her house day and night until she recovered, and everyone nearby was vaccinated.

David Jewitt and Edward Danielson found it with the 5-metre Hale telescope and an electronic CCD camera, at magnitude 24 and more than 11 times Earth’s distance from the Sun: three years before perihelion.

The Park’s director, Massimo Osanna, announced the “XVI K Nov” scrawl from the new excavations in Regio V. It could not have survived long on a wall being redecorated, he argued, so it was written in October 79, a week before the eruption. It revived an autumn date that some had argued for since…