TODAY IN HISTORY

1770 Captain Cook leaves Botany Bay.

1840 The “penny black’’ stamp, issued in Britain, goes into circulation there as the first prepaid adhesive postage stamp in history.

1860 General Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Thousand Redshirts’’ sail from Genoa to conquer Sicily and Naples, pushing Italy towards unification.

1875 Ernest Giles and his party leave Beltana, South Australia, to cross to the west coast by camel over the Great Victoria Desert.

1910 Britain’s King Edward VII dies in London after a nine-year reign. The sports fan was popular, despite scandals.

1917 Dr Daniel Mannix becomes Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne after the death of Archbishop Carr.

1937 The German airship Hindenburg explodes on landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey (pictured). Horrified spectators watch the dirigible burn; 36 die.

1954 Roger Bannister breaks four-minute barrier for the mile, at Oxford.

1960 Princess Margaret marries commoner Anthony Armstrong-Jones in London’s Westminster Abbey.

1974 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt quits after an aide is charged with spying for East Germany.

1984 A mutilated body of a tortured man is found weighed down in the Murrumbidgee River near Griffith during a Mafia power struggle. A similar corpse is found the next day. They are Rocco Medici and his brotherin-law Giuseppe Furina.