Moments in time

• On Aug. 18, 1590, 100 colonists are discovered to be missing from the Roanoke Island colony in present-day North Carolina. The only clue to their disappearance was the word “CROATOAN” carved into the palisade built around the settlement.

• On Aug. 19, 1812, during the War of 1812, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution defeats the British frigate Guerriere. Witnesses claimed that the British shot merely bounced off the Constitution’s sides, as if the ship were made of iron. Since 1934, “Old Ironsides” has been based at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston.

• On Aug. 15, 1859, Charles Comiskey, namesake of Chicago’s Comiskey Park, is born in Chicago. Comiskey became the first and only baseball player to later own a team, the White Sox.

• On Aug. 14, 1933, a devastating 267,000-acre forest fire is sparked in the Coast Range Mountains in northern Oregon. An official investigation found that the fire stemmed from friction produced when loggers dragged a large Douglas-fir log across a downed tree.

• On Aug. 13, 1948, U.S. and British planes airlift a record 5,000 tons of supplies into occupied Berlin. The huge resupply effort was carried out in weather so bad that some of the 700 pilots referred to it as “Black Friday.”

• On Aug. 16, 1955, famous entertainer and civil-rights activist Paul Robeson loses his court appeal to force the Department of State to grant him a passport. It had insisted that Robeson first sign an affidavit declaring he was not a member of the Communist Party. Robeson had refused.

• On Aug. 17, 1987, Rudolf Hess, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s former deputy, is found strangled to death in an apparent suicide in Spandau Prison in Berlin. At 93, Hess was the last surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle and the sole prisoner at Spandau since 1966.