October 25

People who had crowded into the vaulted boat sheds on the beach, waiting for rescue by sea, died where they sat. The heat, around 500 °C, killed them in a fraction of a second, before they could move to protect themselves. Later surges and flows buried the town under some 20 metres of rock. The…

At last the darkness thinned into smoke or mist, and daylight came back, with the sun “luridus”, pale yellow as in an eclipse. Everything was buried in ash as if in snow. They went back to Misenum and spent an anxious night waiting for news. Pliny gives no hour. Latin text: Pliny, Letters 6.20

By Sigurdsson’s reckoning a surge (S3) stopped at the walls around 06:30 and the next (S4) swept through the town about 07:30, killing everyone still there. In the Garden of the Fugitives, 13 people were caught as they tried to cross a vineyard towards the Nocera gate; their plaster casts lie…

At the first hour of the day, around dawn, the light was still faint and the buildings were tottering, so Pliny and his mother left the town with a panicking crowd. Carts slid about on level ground, and the sea seemed to be sucked back, stranding sea creatures on the sand. A black cloud split by…

At Oplontis, 5 kilometres west of Pompeii, the great villa thought to have belonged to Nero’s wife Poppaea was empty, perhaps under repair. Nearby, in the storerooms of a second villa, excavators found 54 people who had sheltered with their jewellery and coins. They died in the same morning’s…

The wind carried the column south-east, over Pompeii, 10 kilometres from the vent. Pumice fell on the town at some 15 centimetres an hour, about 2.8 metres of it by morning, and roofs gave way under the weight. Of the 1,044 victims Luongo and colleagues could place in the deposits, 394 lay in this…

Pliny the Younger studied, bathed, dined and slept badly. That night the tremors grew so strong that everything seemed not just to shake but to overturn. He and his mother sat in the forecourt, and he called for a volume of Livy and went on making notes from it, “whether from courage or…

To calm the household, Pliny bathed and dined cheerfully, or pretended to, told them the fires on the mountain were empty farmhouses, and went to sleep: he was a heavy man, and his snoring could be heard from the door. The courtyard filled with ash and pumice until they woke him before he was shut…

Darkness fell, not like a moonless or cloudy night, but as in a closed room when the lamp has been put out. — Letters 6.20 The cloud hid Capri and the headland of Misenum. His mother begged him to leave her and save himself; he took her hand and made her walk. They heard women shrieking, children…

On the shore it was “darker and thicker than any night”. He lay down on a sail and twice asked for cold water. Then flames and a smell of sulphur drove the others off; he stood up, leaning on two slaves, and at once collapsed. His nephew thought the dense fumes choked him, as his windpipe was…

Shortly after midnight the column began to collapse. Its fall fed avalanches of gas, ash and rock that raced down the slopes faster than anyone could run. Sigurdsson counts six surges, S1 to S6, each reaching farther than the last. Of the victims placed in Pompeii’s deposits, 650 died in the…

About nineteen hours from the first column to the surge that reached Stabiae. Vesuvius threw out some 4 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash, a VEI 5 eruption. Volcanologists call this kind “Plinian”, after Pliny the Younger’s description. About 1,150 bodies have been recovered at Pompeii, with a…

On St Crispin’s day the French men-at-arms advanced on foot over a narrow, rain-soaked ploughed field between two woods and were shot at and crushed together. The traditional figures give about 6,000 English against 20,000 to 30,000 French; Anne Curry’s count from the pay records gives about 8,700…

Blown off the new fast route to Java, the Eendracht hit the west coast of Australia. Hartog nailed an inscribed pewter plate to a post: the oldest European object known from Australia, now in the Rijksmuseum.

Seward misses his phonograph (“To write diary with a pen is irksome”) and, after the telegram, feels “what men feel in battle when the call to action is heard”. Harker whets the great Ghoorka knife he now carries, a kukri, and the party hides its excitement from Mina.

At 10:00 local time, with the Winter Palace still in the government’s hands, Lenin’s proclamation announced that the Provisional Government had been deposed and power had passed to the Military Revolutionary Committee.

In the late morning Kerensky left the capital in a Pierce-Arrow, followed by a car flying the American flag, borrowed from the US embassy. He went by Gatchina to Northern Front headquarters at Pskov.

At 14:35 local time, his first public appearance since July, Lenin told an emergency session that the workers’ and peasants’ revolution the Bolsheviks had always spoken of had been accomplished.

At 21:40 local time the cruiser, anchored in the Neva, fired one blank round from her bow gun as the signal to attack. Soviet legend later had her shelling the palace; her crew wrote to Pravda to deny it within days.

At 22:40 local time in the Smolny’s assembly hall, about 650 delegates, some 300 of them Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks and right SRs walked out in protest; Trotsky sent them to “the dustbin of history”.

Around 23:00 local time the fortress fired on the Winter Palace. Of some 30 to 35 rounds, only two hit, chipping a cornice.

Its defenders, officer cadets, a few Cossacks and a company of the women’s battalion, had drifted away all evening. At about 02:10 local time Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko arrested thirteen ministers in a small dining room and marched them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. The storming later filmed by…

The Provisional Government’s last cabinet. It ended under arrest in the Winter Palace, all but its head: Kerensky had left to find troops.

Charles Howard-Bury led a party to find the mountain and a way up it. George Mallory and Guy Bullock did the climbing. Henry Morshead and Oliver Wheeler, with the Indian surveyors Lalbir Singh Thapa, Gujjar Singh and Turubaz Khan, mapped about 31,000 square kilometres that no outsider had surveyed.

Pilots of a special attack unit flew their bomb-laden Zeros into American escort carriers off Samar and sank the St. Lo. By the war’s end thousands of young pilots had died in such attacks.

At a Presidium meeting Khrushchev said the missiles could go if Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba, though he wanted to see what more he could get first.

Adlai Stevenson demanded a yes or no from the Soviet ambassador, Valerian Zorin, who said this was not a court of law. Stevenson: “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision.” Then he had the U-2 photographs put up on easels in the chamber.

On a visit to Finland, Gorbachev’s spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov told American television that the Brezhnev doctrine was dead. Now it was the Frank Sinatra doctrine: “He has a song, I Did It My Way. So every country decides on its own which road to take.”