TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Saturday, February 13, the 44th day of 2021. There are 321 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1869 — The Rev John Whiteley and seven other European settlers are murdered at White Cliffs, Taranaki.
1874 — Mongol, a steamship, arrives at Port Chalmers and is immediately quarantined on account of scarlet fever, measles, and bronchitis on board. Mongol, having left Plymouth on December 23, had just made the quickest direct passage from England to New Zealand on record. Fifteen children and one adult had died on the journey.
1931 — An aftershock measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale rocks the Hawke’s Bay region, one of many tremors to have plagued the region since the destructive earthquake 10 days earlier.
1968 — Ten thousand US troops are prepared for transportation to South Vietnam as the war escalates in that country.
1974 — Sergeant Murray Hudson dies attempting to save the life of another soldier during a live grenade training exercise at Waiouru military camp. For this selfless act, Hudson received a posthumous George Cross, the second of only three awarded to New Zealanders since the medal’s establishment in 1940. New Zealand escaped prisoner of war David Russell, was the first for his actions in northern Italy in 1945; and Port Chalmers Police Sergeant Stewart Guthrie, the third for his action at Aramoana in 1990.
1981 — Some 800 pigs and a pet sheep are slaughtered and burnt on a farm near Temuka in a suspected outbreak of footandmouth. It is later discovered that some of the pigs had developed blisters on their snouts due to diet and not as a result of footandmouth.
1983 — At 44 for six in reply to Australia’s 302, New Zealand was heading for an embarrassing defeat in the second final of the limited overs World Series Cup at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, until Lance Cairns took guard with his bat ‘‘Excalibur’’. After Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee, welcomed him to the crease by hitting him on the head with a short pitched delivery, Cairns displayed little respect for the Australian bowling attack, swatting six sixes in a score of 52 from 25 balls. One of his two sixes off the bowling of Lillee was smacked onehanded over the fineleg boundary. New Zealand lost the match by 149 runs, but the match will forever be remembered for the battling of Cairns.
1991 — US planes destroy a bunker in Baghdad that allies had identified as a military site, but apparently contained civilians. The reported death toll ranged from 40 to 500.
2002 — The Scottish Parliament votes to ban foxhunting, making Scotland the first part of Britain to ban the centuriesold sport.
2008 — Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd makes a formal apology to the Aboriginal people and the stolen generation.
2012 — A sleeping teenager is rescued by a friend who scales the wall to the second floor of Dunedin’s Kingsgate Hotel, in Smith St, when fire breaks out in a vacant room on the floor above him.