ON THIS DAY

MAY 3

1491 Kongo monarch Nkuwu Nzinga is baptised by Portuguese missionaries, adopting the baptismal name of João I.

1785 The Brederode, sailing for the Dutch East India Company and carrying a cargo of porcelain, tin and spices, runs aground near Cape Agulhas; 12 of her 92 crew drown

1810 English Romantic poet George Gordon Lord Byron swims the Hellespont (modern day Dardanelles).

1835 Cape Governor Sir Benjamin D’Urban accepts the landless Fingos as British subjects and promises them land. They are the first Bantu tribe to come under White rule.

1845 A fire in a Canton, China, theatre kills 1 600 people

1900 British General Lord Roberts leaves Bloemfontein for Pretoria, taking 44 000 men, 18 000 horses and 1 200 artillery pieces. He leaves to the strains of, We are marching to Pretoria, which is heard for the first time. 1913 Raja Harishchandra, the first full-length Indian feature film, is released, marking the birth of the Indian film industry.

1915 Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae writes the celebrated and muchquoted World War I poem, In Flanders Fields. 1928 Twelve Japanese civilians are killed by Chinese forces in Jinan, China, leading to Japanese retaliation in which 2 000 Chinese civilians die over the next few days.

1945 The German ship Cap Arcona, which is laden with prisoners, mostly from concentration camps, is sunk by the Royal Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 5 800 people. 1978 The first unsolicited bulk commercial email (spam) is sent

1983 USSR leader Yuri Andropov reduces the number of Soviet nuclear weapons in Europe. 1988 A police raid in Florida yields 4 200kg of cocaine smuggled in from Colombia.

2000 The sport of geocaching begins.

2007 Briton Madeleine McCann, 3, disappears from the Portuguese hotel her parents are staying in, starting the most heavily reported missing-person’s case in modern history.