42 stories from this century.
In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Read the story →For 417 years Ayutthaya was the capital of Siam — an island city of golden temples that Europeans compared to Paris. After a fourteen-month siege, Burmese armies stormed it on 7 April 1767, burned it, and carried off tens of thousands of captives. Siam rebuilt downstream within a generation; the capital became, eventually, Bangkok. Ayutthaya itself was never reoccupied as a capital — its ruins stand as left.
Read the story →On 28 April 1789 Fletcher Christian seized HMS Bounty and set Captain Bligh adrift with 18 men in an open launch. Bligh sailed it 3,618 nautical miles to Timor and lived to be court-martialled and acquitted. The mutineers vanished with Tahitian companions to unlocated Pitcairn Island, burned the ship — and were found 18 years later: one ageing mutineer, nine widows, and a village of children.
Read the story →In 1701 Lord Asano drew his sword against the court official Kira inside Edo Castle and was ordered to die the same day. His leaderless samurai — ronin — waited nearly two years, then stormed Kira's mansion in the snow, took his head to their master's grave, and surrendered. The shogunate's verdict: honourable seppuku for all 46 who stood trial. Japan has argued about them ever since.
Read the story →John Harrison, a self-taught Yorkshire carpenter, spent his life building clocks accurate enough to carry longitude to sea. His 1759 watch H4 lost only seconds on a transatlantic trial — meeting the £20,000 Longitude Prize's terms — but the Board of Longitude paid in grudging halves until King George III himself intervened. A copy of H4 guided Captain Cook.
Read the story →The French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil left home in 1760 to observe the transit of Venus from India. War kept him at sea for the 1761 transit; he waited eight more years for the 1769 one — which a single cloud obscured. He returned after eleven and a half years to find himself declared dead, his wife remarried, and his estate divided.
Read the story →In the autumn of 1726, Mary Toft of Godalming appeared to give birth to a series of dead rabbits. The king's own surgeon-anatomist endorsed the miracle; London's medical elite descended on the case. In December she confessed to the hoax, and the careers of her believers collapsed with her.
Read the story →After crushing the Mughal army at Karnal in February 1739, the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah occupied Delhi. A riot and false rumour of his death triggered a day-long massacre — perhaps 20,000-30,000 killed — and a plunder so vast that Persia's taxes were remitted for three years. The Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond left India in his baggage.
Read the story →On the night of 22 October 1707, a Royal Navy fleet returning from the Mediterranean — its position miscalculated — drove onto the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. Four ships and up to 2,000 men were lost, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell among them. The catastrophe pushed Parliament to the Longitude Act of 1714 and its £20,000 prize.
Read the story →In November 1780 the kuraka José Gabriel Condorcanqui — Túpac Amaru II — executed a Spanish corregidor and raised the southern Andes against colonial abuses. The rebellion he started outlived him: captured in April 1781, he was forced to witness his wife's execution and was quartered in Cuzco's plaza. The wars that followed killed on the order of 100,000 people.
Read the story →Anne Bonny and Mary Read were captured along with the pirate captain "Calico Jack" Rackham off Jamaica on 22 October 1720. Tried for piracy at Saint Jago de la Vega the following month, both pleaded pregnancy. Their executions were postponed; the men of the crew were hanged on 18 November. Mary Read died in prison of fever in April 1721. Anne Bonny's fate is unknown.
Read the story →Robert Clive's force of 3,000 men defeated the Bengali Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah's army of 50,000 at Plassey on 23 June 1757. Clive had previously bribed the Bengali commander Mir Jafar to defect at the battle. The British East India Company became the effective sovereign of Bengal within weeks. The transfer of Indian tax revenue to the Company funded the early Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Read the story →Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) was a 4-foot-3 former kitchen servant who became the senior assistant in her brother William Herschel's astronomical observatory at Slough. She discovered eight comets between 1786 and 1797, catalogued 561 new stars and 14 nebulae, and was the first woman in any country paid by a national government as a working scientist — £50 per year from George III from 1787.
Read the story →Captain James Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii Island on 14 February 1779. He had returned to repair a broken mast, conflict had escalated after a ship's cutter was stolen, and his attempt to take the Hawaiian high chief Kalani'opu'u hostage in retaliation produced a beach fight in which he was struck on the head and stabbed multiple times. He was 50.
Read the story →Émilie du Châtelet's French translation and mathematical commentary on Newton's *Principia* was completed in summer 1749 while she was carrying a fourth child at age 42. She finished the manuscript at Lunéville on 1 September 1749, gave birth on 4 September, and died of puerperal fever on 10 September. The translation, published posthumously in 1759, remained the standard French Newton until the 20th century.
Read the story →Benjamin Franklin's June 1752 kite-and-lightning experiment is one of the most-told stories in the history of science. The contemporary documentation is thin. Modern historians of science consider it possible that Franklin never actually performed it.
Read the story →A Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille fortress prison on 14 July 1789. Bernard-René de Launay surrendered after the outer gates fell. The crowd released seven inmates and killed the governor. The date became the French national holiday in 1880.
Read the story →Jean-François de La Pérouse's two-ship Pacific expedition departed Brest in August 1785 with 220 men. Their last known position was Botany Bay in March 1788. The ships and crews disappeared in the southwest Pacific. The Irish merchant Peter Dillon located the wreckage on a reef off Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands in 1827 — thirty-nine years after the disappearance.
Read the story →The Lunar Society of Birmingham met about fourteen times a year between approximately 1765 and 1813, always on the Monday nearest the full moon (so members could ride home by moonlight). The members included James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, and Josiah Wedgwood. They built the Industrial Revolution in their spare time.
Read the story →General James Wolfe led approximately 4,500 British troops up the unguarded cliffs above Quebec on the night of 12-13 September 1759. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham that followed on the morning of 13 September lasted approximately 20 minutes. Both Wolfe and the French Marquis de Montcalm were killed. Quebec surrendered on 18 September. The Seven Years War concluded with British control of French North America.
Read the story →The Reign of Terror ran from 5 September 1793 to 27 July 1794. The Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre executed about 17,000 people for political offences. About 10,000 more died in prison without sentence. Robespierre himself was guillotined on 28 July 1794.
Read the story →The South Sea Company's January 1720 deal with the British Treasury exchanged government debt for company shares. The share price rose from £128 in January to £1,050 in late June. It collapsed to £190 by the end of September. Many of the Whig political class were ruined; several Treasury and Mint officials were imprisoned; Isaac Newton lost about £20,000 of his own money in the crash.
Read the story →Toussaint Louverture led the Saint-Domingue revolution from 1791 to 1801 and was the effective ruler of the colony — the wealthiest slave-economy in the Atlantic — when he wrote a constitution making himself governor for life in July 1801. Napoleon sent a 30,000-man army to depose him in 1802. Toussaint was captured by deceit, taken to the Fort de Joux in the French Jura, and died there of pneumonia on 7 April 1803.
Read the story →Josiah Wedgwood produced the *Am I Not a Man and a Brother?* anti-slavery medallion in 1787 as a free contribution to the substantial Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. About 15,000 were distributed in the first two years. It became the substantially substantively most-circulated political image of the 18th century and the substantial visual template of the British abolitionist movement.
Read the story →General Lord Cornwallis surrendered approximately 7,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia, on 19 October 1781. A combined Franco-American army of approximately 17,000 under George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau had besieged the position for three weeks. The French Atlantic fleet under Admiral de Grasse had blockaded the seaward escape. The British government opened peace negotiations within months.
Read the story →A magnitude 8.5–9.0 earthquake struck Lisbon at approximately 9.40 AM on 1 November 1755 — All Saints Day, when the city's churches were full. The earthquake, the fires that followed, and the tsunami forty minutes later killed approximately 30,000 to 50,000 people. The European Enlightenment never substantially recovered the cosmic optimism of the early 18th century.
Read the story →Henri-François-Xavier de Belsunce was Bishop of Marseille from 1709 to 1755. He refused to leave the city during the 1720 plague, administered last rites at street corners, organised parish-by-parish burial details, and substantially defined the visible Catholic authority during the worst summer months. The French Catholic tradition substantially canonised him in popular memory.
Read the story →The Mur de la peste was a dry-stone wall approximately 27 km long, with guard posts at 100-metre intervals, built across the limestone garrigue of the Comtat Venaissin between September 1720 and August 1721. It enforced the cordon sanitaire that kept the Marseille plague from spreading north into the French interior.
Read the story →The Chevalier Nicolas Roze organised the clearing of approximately 1,200 plague corpses from the Esplanade de la Tourette at Marseille in September 1720. He used condemned galley convicts as labour, promising their freedom if they survived. Eight of his hundred labourers did.
Read the story →Voltaire wrote the *Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne* in mid-November 1755 — three weeks after the earthquake — as a direct philosophical attack on the Leibnizian doctrine of optimism. Rousseau answered with a long defence in August 1756. The argument substantially defined the French Enlightenment's theological position for the next generation.
Read the story →Augusta of Saxe-Gotha was 32 when her husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, died unexpectedly in 1751. She lived another twenty-one years as the senior court figure of the Leicester House faction, raised the future George III, and substantially shaped the early Hanoverian succession before her death in 1772.
Read the story →Hans Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 expecting to find the lost Norse community. He found Inuit. Over the following fourteen years he learned the local Kalaallisut language well enough to compile the first European dictionary and grammar of any Inuit language — published in 1750 by his son Paul.
Read the story →Leicester House stood on the north side of Leicester Square from 1635 to 1791. It served twice in the 18th century as the alternative royal court for the heir-presumptive who was politically estranged from the reigning Hanoverian monarch — under George II's rebellion against George I, and again under Frederick Prince of Wales's rebellion against George II.
Read the story →The *Grand Saint-Antoine* arrived at Marseille on 25 May 1720 with a hold full of Levantine silk and several already-dead crew members. The harbour authorities knew the ship was infected. They cleared it anyway. The resulting outbreak killed about half of Marseille and approximately 100,000 people across Provence over two years.
Read the story →John, 2nd Baron Hervey was vice-chamberlain to George II from 1730 to 1740. His private *Memoirs* — kept up nightly for ten years, suppressed by his family for ninety, finally published 1848 — are the single best source on the personalities and politics of the early-Hanoverian court. Lord Hervey was also the witty pen behind much of the period's anonymous verse satire.
Read the story →Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the differential and integral calculus in the 1670s and 1680s. Newton accused Leibniz of plagiarism in 1699. The subsequent thirty-year priority war split the European mathematical community along Newtonian-British and Leibnizian-Continental lines and substantially retarded British mathematics for the next century.
Read the story →Caroline of Ansbach, Queen of Great Britain, had been carrying a strangulated umbilical hernia for fourteen years when it ruptured in November 1737. She had concealed it from everyone including her doctors. She died after twelve days of pain. She was 54.
Read the story →Daniel Defoe was five years old during the Great Plague of London in 1665. He published *A Journal of the Plague Year* in 1722 as if it were the first-person account of an eyewitness. Critics took a hundred and fifty years to figure out that he had invented most of it.
Read the story →In June 1783 a 27-kilometre fissure opened in southern Iceland and erupted for eight months. It killed about a fifth of Iceland's population. The sulphur cloud killed an estimated 23,000 in England. The crop failures it caused across Europe fed directly into the French Revolution of 1789.
Read the story →Frederick, Prince of Wales died in March 1751, aged forty-four. The story that a cricket ball had killed him survived for two centuries. His lungs had killed him.
Read the story →Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
Read the story →On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.
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