TODAY IN HISTORY

1502 Explorer Christopher Columbus sets sail with four ships from Cadiz, Spain, on his fourth and final voyage, on which he charts the Caribbean.

1671 Thomas Blood, Irish adventurer better known as Captain Blood, steals the crown jewels from the Tower of London.

1901 Federal Parliament opens for the first time, in its borrowed homes of Melbourne’s Exhibition Building and then the Victorian Parliament.

1919 A national seamen’s strike starts with stoppages in Queensland. The pay dispute lasts all winter and cuts off fuel supplies, causing unemployment.

1926 US Navy Commander Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett become first people to make a plane flight over the North Pole.

1927 The Duke of York opens Parliament House in Canberra. The crowd outside the building supports an Aboriginal elder, King Billy, as police try to move him on because he is deemed inadequately dressed.

1936 Seven months after invading Ethiopia, Italy annexes the country as part of Italian East Africa.

1976 Ulrike Meinhof, 41, leader of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof leftist terrorist group, hangs herself in prison.

1986 Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who in 1953 assisted Edmund Hillary on the first assent of Mt Everest, dies at age 71.

2006 Gold miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb leave Tasmania’s Beaconsfield mine, as a twoweek rescue ends their ordeal trapped 1km underground.