Today in history

On Jan. 18, 1778, English navigator Capt. James Cook reached the Hawaiian Islands, which he dubbed the “Sandwich Islands.”

In 1788 the first English settlers arrived in Australia’s Botany Bay to establish a penal colony.

In 1911 the first landing of an aircraft on a ship took place as pilot Eugene Ely brought his Curtiss biplane in for a safe landing on the deck of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Harbor.

In 1912 English explorer Robert F. Scott and his expedition reached the South Pole, only to discover that Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. (Scott and his party perished during the return trip.)

In 1919 the World War I Peace Congress opened in Versailles, France.

In 1943 during World War II, the Soviets announced they had broken the long Nazi siege of Leningrad.

In 1967 Albert DeSalvo, who claimed to be the Boston Strangler, was convicted in Cambridge, Mass., of armed robbery, assault and sex offenses. (Sentenced to life in prison, DeSalvo was killed by a fellow inmate in 1973.)

In 1990 a jury in Los Angeles acquitted former preschool operators Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges. Also in 1990 in an FBI sting, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was arrested for drug possession. (He was later convicted of a misdemeanor.)

In 1991 financially strapped Eastern Airlines shut down after 62 years in business.

In 2002 Sara Jane Olson, a 1970s radical-turned-suburban mother, was sentenced in Los Angeles to 20 years to life in prison for plotting to blow up a pair of police cars 27 years earlier.