1795
Third Partition Erases Poland
Russia, Prussia, and Austria signed the final partition. Poland-Lithuania - a state that had been among Europe's largest for three centuries - vanished from the map. It would not reappear for 123 years. The Polish king abdicated and lived out his days in Russian exile, drawing a pension. Polish soldiers, poets, and intellectuals scattered across Europe, keeping alive a national idea that no partition could extinguish.
British Capture the Cape of Good Hope
With the Dutch Republic conquered by France, Britain seized its overseas colonies 'in trust.' A small expedition landed at Simon's Town and occupied the Cape. The strategic halfway house to India was now British. It would change hands once more before becoming permanent British territory in 1806. The Cape's diverse population of Dutch settlers, Khoisan peoples, and Malay slaves found themselves under yet another European flag.
Treaty of Greenville
After Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers, twelve Native American nations of the Ohio country ceded most of modern Ohio to the United States. It opened the Northwest to settlers and broke the Shawnee-led confederacy Tecumseh would try to rebuild twenty years later. The frontier lurched another five hundred miles west.
Vendémiaire and the Whiff of Grapeshot
A royalist mob in Paris marched on the Convention. A young Corsican artillery general, Napoleon Bonaparte, placed cannons loaded with grapeshot and swept the streets clean. Thousands died in half an hour. The grateful Directory gave Bonaparte command of the Army of the Interior. A reputation was made. Within a year he would be commanding the Army of Italy and beginning the conquests that would reshape Europe.
French Directory Established
A new constitution created a five-member Directory ruling jointly with a bicameral legislature. It was meant to be moderate, the bourgeois exit from the Terror's excesses. In practice it was corrupt, unstable, and dependent on the army - the army its own generals were now learning to command for themselves.
Mungo Park Explores the Niger
A young Scottish surgeon walked inland from the Gambia into Mali, enduring imprisonment by a Moorish chief and long fevers. He became the first European to reach the upper Niger River - and to report that it flowed eastward, contrary to geographers' guesses. His book made him famous; his second voyage would kill him.