Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1772 Moored in Table Bay, Charles Clerke, the second mate on Captain Cook’s ship, Resolution, writes: ‘Our people (are) all in perfect health and spirits, owing, I believe, in a great measure to the strict attention to their cleanliness .... Anchor’d here a Dutch East India Ship from Middleburg (Holland). She’s been four months upon her passage – has buried 150 men with the scurvy and sent about 60 to the hospital here’. The following day he writes: ‘anchor’d here a Dutch East India Ship from Zealand (Holland) bound to Batavia, she has been out 23 weeks and buried 41 men.’ Such was life at sea in those bygone days.
1899 The 118-day siege of Ladysmith by the Boers begins.
1907 US banker JP Morgan locks over 40 bankers in his library to force them to find ways to avert the New York banking crisis.
1924 The Sunday Express publishes first British crossword puzzle.
1932 The ‘Great Emu War’ begins as Australian soldiers armed with Lewis Guns seek to cull the Emu population over crop destruction in Western Australia.
1944 German concentration camp Auschwitz, in Poland, begins gassing inmates, most of whom, but not all, are Jews.
1958 Matthews ‘Loop-en-Val’ Motshwareteu, one of SA’s greatest middle- and long-distance athletes, is born in Soweto.
1960 Penguin Books is cleared of obscenity in a trial over Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
1988 The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain media attention is launched from MIT.
1994 A river of fire, ignited by an oil tank explosion, surges through an Egyptian village, killing more than 410 people.
1999 Gunmen assassinate Prince Cyril Zulu, the mayor-designate of Durban.
2019 Springbok fly-half Handré Pollard lands 6 penalties and 2 conversions in Yokohama as the Boks beat favourites England, 32-12 for their 3rd World Cup title. Cheslin Kolbe and Makazole Mapimpi score the tries. Bok No. 8 Duane Vermeulen is the man-of-the match.
2020 Heart-throb actor Johnny Depp loses his libel case against the UK newspaper The Sun, which had called him a ‘wife-beater’ and said that he had assaulted his wife, actress Amber Heard.
2021 Jihadist gunman ambush and kill 69 people, including a local mayor, in south-west Niger, adding to the 530 already killed in 2021.
2022 Ethiopia’s government and Tigrayan authorities reach an agreement at peace talks in South Africa to end fighting after two years of conflict.