Today in history
Today is Thursday, May 25, the 145th day of 2017. There are 220 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1622 — What is believed to be the first English ship to reach Australia, the 500tonne Tryal ,is wrecked on rocks off the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia. Ninetyseven of the 143 aboard perish.
1840 — Lieutenantgovernor William Hobson orders troops to Port Nicholson (Wellington) to quell rebellious New Zealand Company settlers.
1850 — Refusing to give in to Bishop Selwyn’s demand that all missionaries forgo large land claims, the Rev Henry Williams is dismissed from the Church Missionary Society.
1858 — The Strathallan sails from Otago for London with 800 bales of wool valued at £19,000, the first direct export to the United Kingdom.
1861 — The Press in Christchurch begins publication. Founder James FitzGerald produced the newspaper on a handoperated press in a cottage in Montreal St.
1880 — The Dunedin Municipal Chambers building is opened.
1894 — The Central Otago railway line to Hyde is opened.
1895 — Irish playwright Oscar Wilde is convicted on a morals charge in London and is later sentenced to prison.
1914 — Britain’s House of Commons passes the Irish Home Rule Bill, but Irish autonomy remains suspended during World War 1.
1915 — In Europe, the second Battle of Ypres ends, with casualties around 105,000. The Germans use poison gas for the first time.
1922 — The steamer Wiltshire is wrecked off
Great Barrier Island.
1935 — American athlete Jesse Owens sets six world records in 45 minutes at the United States Big Ten Championship at Ann Arbor, Michigan.
1951 — Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean,
British foreign office officials, disappear from London. It is later discovered they had spied for Russia.
1963 — The leaders of six African nations, meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, form the Organisation of African Unity.
1978 — Around 600 police officers remove 200 Maori protesters from Bastion Point, Auckland, after 506 days of occupation and charge them with wilful trespass. Two further occupations of the land followed in 1982, and in 1987 the Waitangi Tribunal recommended Bastion Point be returned to Ngati Whatua ownership.
1979 — America’s worst air disaster occurs when a DC10 crashes at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, killing 273.
1982 — In the Falklands War, the British ships
Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor are sunk, with the loss of 24 lives.
1986 — Thirty million people worldwide join in pop singer Bob Geldof’s ‘‘Race Against Time’’, to raise money for the starving in Africa.
1994 — Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn ends a 20year exile in the West and goes back to Russia.
2001 — Erik Weihenmayer, an American, is the first blind person to scale Mount Everest. Sherman Bull, a 64yearold American doctor with him, becomes the oldest person to climb the mountain.
2004 — At least 1950 people are killed in floods in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, many of them swept away when rainswollen rivers burst their banks.
2008 — New Zealand Indy Car driver Scott Dixon wins the prestigious Indianapolis 500 from pole position.
2012 — A magnitude5.2 earthquake centred 10km east of Christchurch sparks the evacuation of the city’s Red Zone, where up to 1000 workers were involved with the central city rebuild and demolition. The event was followed by a magnitude3.6 quake four minutes later.