1608
Champlain Founds Quebec
With twenty-eight men and a small fortified storehouse beneath the cliff at the narrowing of the Saint Lawrence, Samuel de Champlain laid out the Habitation de Quebec. Only eight survivors would see the spring. New France had a capital, and the fur trade a northern gateway, though the settlement clung to survival for years through alliance with the Algonquin and Montagnais.
Lippershey Applies for Telescope Patent
A German-Dutch spectacle-maker named Hans Lippershey submitted to the States-General in The Hague a device of two lenses in a tube that made distant objects appear three times closer. His patent was refused because others had it too, but news of the instrument traveled fast, all the way to Padua.
John Smith Rescued by Pocahontas
According to his own later account, the Jamestown adventurer John Smith was spared execution at a Powhatan feast when the chief's young daughter Matoaka, nicknamed Pocahontas, cradled his head in her arms. The story, probably half-legend, would become the founding myth of Anglo-Indian relations, retold and romanticized through centuries of American literature, painting, and film.
El Greco Paints View of Toledo
The aging Cretan-born painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known in Spain as El Greco, produced an almost hallucinatory landscape of the Castilian city beneath a churning green sky. There is no human figure in it. Landscape painting had discovered, centuries ahead of schedule, how to convey inner weather, and the canvas remains one of the most emotionally charged cityscapes ever painted.