ON THIS DAY

MARCH 27

1876 The first issue of the Cape Times, a small four-page sheet, appears in Cape Town.

1871 The first international rugby football match takes place. Scotland defeats England.

1881 A Boer force of 150 men storms Majuba and drives out 400 British troops in the decisive battle of the Anglo-Transvaal War.

1886 Geronimo, the Apache warrior, surrenders to the US Army, ending the main phase of the Apache Wars.

1915 “Typhoid” Mary, the first healthy carrier of disease identified in the US, is arrested and returned to quarantine for the rest of her life on an island in New York after spending five years evading health authorities and causing several outbreaks of typhoid.

1977 Tenerife airport disaster: Two Boeing 747 airliners collide on a foggy runway in Spain’s Canary Islands, killing 583 people (all 248 on the KLM plane and 335 on the Pan Am jumbo). Incredibly, there were 61 survivors.

1980 A lift in the Vaal Reefs gold mine plunges more than 1 900m killing all 23 miners aboard.

1980 With spectacular fury and before the world’s gathered TV cameras, Mount St Helens in Washington state erupts. The explosion is the deadliest and most economically destructive volcanic eruption in US history.

1980 The oil platform Alexander Kielland collapses in the North Sea, killing 123 crew.

1984 Beginning of “tanker war”: over the next 9 months, 44 ships, including Iranian, Iraqi, Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti tankers, are attacked by Iraqi or Iranian war planes or damaged by mines.

1985 A school bus with 76 pupils from Hoërskool Vorentoe onboard, plunges into the Westdene Dam, between Melville and Sophiatown in Johannesburg. Of the 72 occupants, 42 drown in the bus and two were declared dead on arrival at hospital.

1999 Kosovo War: An American F-117A Nighthawk is shot down by a Yugoslav missile – the only stealth fighter to be lost in combat.

2016 A suicide blast in Lahore, Pakistan, claims more than 70 lives and leaves almost 300 injured. The target was Christians celebrating Easter.

2020 South Africa says it has recorded its first Covid-19 death. | The Historian