ON THIS DAY MAY 24

1500 Bartolomeu Dias, Portuguese discoverer of the Cape of Good Hope, drowns at sea.

1697 A winter gale wrecks the Dutch ships Oosterland and Waddingsveen in Table Bay.

1844 Samuel Morse taps out “What hath God wrought”, the world’s first telegraph message.

1870 Jan Smuts, one of South Africa’s most accomplished sons and one of Cambridge’s three brightest stars, is born near Malmesbury.

1890 Graf Leo von Caprivi succeeds Otto Bismarck as Chancellor of Germany, lending his name the former Caprivi Strip in Namibia.

1900 The UK annexes the Orange Free State, changing the name to Orange River Colony.

1902 British General Sir Ian Hamilton attends General Smuts’ birthday party: “I sat between Botha and De la Ray. On Botha’s right was De Wet, on De la Ray’s left sat Smuts. I had the most enchanting evening, and never wish to eat my dinner in better company.”

1904 Paul Kruger settles in a villa in Clarens, Lake Geneva.

1921 The first Comrades Marathon (87km) is run by Vic Clapham and his friends to remember the suffering and hardship troops endured in World War I, and the camaraderie that got them through such deprivations.

1921 Police fire on the “Israelites” (a sect led by evangelist Enoch Mgijima) at Bulhoek, near Queenstown; 193 are killed.

1930 Amy Johnson becomes the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia.

1940 South African Airways suspends regular commercial services because of World War II.

1940 Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.

1941 The German battleship Bismark sinks the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood – only three of her crew survive.

1943 The submarine U-441 shoots down a Sunderland seaplane over Gulf of Biscay, south of the Celtic Sea.

1958 United Press International is formed. 1970 The drilling of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the world’s deepest (12 262m) begins in the Soviet Union. (Microscopic plankton fossils were found 6km down.)

1972 The first hijacking of a South African Airways plane takes place.

1976 In the Judgment of Paris, California wines rate higher than French ones, upsetting the apple cart.

1991 Israel conducts Operation Solomon, evacuating Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

2000 Israeli troops withdraw from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.

2001 Sherpa Temba Tsheri, 15, becomes the youngest person to climb to the top of Mount Everest.