1770
Cook Sights Eastern Australia
Endeavour's lookout Zachary Hickes saw a long low coast from the masthead. Cook named the point Point Hicks and turned north. For the next four months he sailed up the unknown east coast of New Holland, naming Botany Bay and nearly losing his ship on the Great Barrier Reef. At Possession Island he claimed the entire eastern coast for Britain, an act whose consequences for Aboriginal peoples would be catastrophic.
Beethoven Born in Bonn
In a narrow house on the Bonngasse, a court musician's son was baptized. His alcoholic father, hoping for another Mozart, would beat him at the clavier past midnight. The boy's ears would fail him; his will would not. He would change what music was allowed to say. By the time deafness fully consumed him he had composed nine symphonies that redrew the boundaries of orchestral expression.
Great Bengal Famine
Monsoons failed; Company tax collectors did not. Peasants sold their bullocks, then their children, then starved. An estimated ten million people - a third of Bengal - died. The Company's directors in London blamed the weather; their clerks in Calcutta had been issuing rice-monopoly licenses all year. The catastrophe prompted the first parliamentary inquiry into the Company's conduct and stirred Edmund Burke to his earliest indictments of imperial greed.
Boston Massacre
A snowbound crowd taunted a British sentry on King Street; a squad reinforced him; someone fired; five civilians died, including the dockworker Crispus Attucks. Paul Revere engraved a lurid print showing the soldiers firing on command. John Adams defended the redcoats in court - and got most of them acquitted.
Battle of Chesme - Russian Fleet Burns Ottomans
Catherine's Baltic Fleet, guided by British advisors, cornered the Ottoman navy in Chesme Bay on Anatolia's coast and set it ablaze with fire-ships. The Mediterranean Turks lost twenty warships in a single night. Europe suddenly remembered that Russia existed; the Ottomans never truly recovered their naval nerve. Catherine commissioned a celebratory column at Tsarskoye Selo, and Russian prestige in the Mediterranean surged overnight.
Cook Lands at Botany Bay
The Endeavour anchored in a shallow bay on Australia's eastern coast. Joseph Banks collected so many botanical specimens that Cook named the place Botany Bay. The Aboriginal people who watched from the shore had lived there for sixty thousand years. Eighteen years later, the first convict ships would arrive at the harbor next door.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy Born
In a Brahmin family of Bengal, a son was born who would grow to condemn sati, translate the Upanishads, argue with Christian missionaries in Sanskrit and Persian, found the Brahmo Samaj, and become the first Indian social reformer to think in both Eastern and Western languages at once. He would die in Bristol in 1833.