Dec 24 in History

1476 — Some 400 Burgundy soldiers freeze to death during the siege of Nancy.

1524 — Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, who discovered a sea route around Africa to India, dies in Cochin, India, where he served as Viceroy. 1818 — “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”) is performed for the first time by Father Joseph Mohr and Franz Xaver Gruber at St Nicholas parish church in Oberndorf, in the Austrian Empire. Father Joseph, a young priest, wrote the lyrics in 1816. Before Christmas 1818, he asked Gruber, a schoolmaster and organist from Arnsdorf, to compose a melody. 1865 — Several veterans of the Confederate Army form a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan.

1871 — Verdi’s opera “Aida” has its world premiere at the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo, Egypt.

1905 — Howard Hughes, American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, film director, philanthropist and (in the last years of his life) eccentric recluse, is born in Humble, Texas. 1920 — Enrico Caruso, Italian opera singer, suffering poor health, gives his last public performance, singing Jacques Halévy’s “La Juive” at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. After further health setbacks, he returns to Naples, where he dies on August 2 1921, aged 48, of peritonitis from a burst subphrenic abscess.

1922 — Ava Gardner, actress and singer (“Mogambo”, “On the Beach”, “Night of the Iguana”), is born in Grabtown, North Carolina.

1927 — Mary Higgins Clark, author (“Where are the Children?”, “A Cry in the Night”, “A Cradle Will Fall”), is born in the Bronx, NYC.

1971 — LANSA Flight 508, a LANSA Lockheed Electra OB-R-941 commercial airliner, crashes in the Peruvian rainforest in a thunderstorm. Juliane Koepcke, 17, a high school senior from Lima, is the sole survivor of 92 passengers and crew. Strapped to her seat, she falls 3km into the rainforest. She and her mother, famed ornithologist Maria, were travelling to meet with her father, biologist HansWilhelm Koepcke, at their home at Panguana, a nature reserve they had founded near Pucallpa. Juliane travels in the jungle for 10 days before three forest workers find her.

1987 — MG Ramachandran, 70, leading Tamil film actor and Chief Minister of the Tamil Nadu state from 1977, dies in Madras (now Chennai).

1996 — Four people are killed and 67 injured in a pipe-bomb explosion in a busy shopping centre in Worcester, Western Cape. Four AWB members are convicted.