ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 2

31BC In the Battle of Actium, off the western coast of Greece, forces of Octavian defeat troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

1192 Richard I of England and Saladin sign the Treaty of Jaffa, ending the Third Crusade.

1666 The Great Fire of London begins at 2am in Pudding Lane; 80% of London is destroyed.

1806 A massive landslide destroys the town of Goldau, Switzerland, killing 457.

1814 Dirk van der Hoff is born in Dordrecht, Holland. He proposed the name ‘Pretoria’. 1848 Sir Harry Smith proclaims the territory between the Orange and Vaal rivers British territory, discounting protests by Voortrekker leader Andries Pretorius.

1870 Prussian forces take Napoleon III of France and 100 000 of his soldiers prisoner in the Battle of Sedan.

1898 In the Anglo-Egyptian War, Lord Kitchener’s force decisively defeats the Dervishes at the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, taking Khartoum.

1898 The machine gun is first used in battle, in the Anglo-Aro War in Nigeria.

1901 The vice-president of the US, Theodore Roosevelt, first utters the famous phrase, “Speak softly and carry a big stick” at the Minnesota State Fair.

1909 Britain’s King Edward VII signs South Africa Act, creating the Union of South Africa from the colonies of the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Orange River Colony, and Transvaal.

1944 Holocaust diarist Anne Frank sent to Auschwitz concentration camp.

1945 Japan signs the act of unconditional surrender to the Allied nations on the American battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

1958 The “Architect of Apartheid” Hendrik Verwoerd is appointed prime minister.

1987 In Moscow, the trial begins for Mathias Rust, 19, who flew his Cessna airplane undetected into Red Square.

1998 The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.

2001 Chris Barnard, medical pioneer who performed the first heart transplant, dies of an acute asthma attack in his hotel room in Paphos, Cyprus, where he was holidaying.

2015 Earth’s trees number just over 3 trillion according to study in “Nature” by Thomas Crowther of Yale University. | The Historian