ON THIS DAY, APRIL 20
1453 Three Genoese galleys and a Byzantine blockade runner fight their way through an Ottoman blockading fleet a few weeks before the fall of Constantinople.
1611 First known performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, at the Globe Theatre, London.
1657 English Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet under heavy fire at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
1749 The first public worship of the Church of England in South Africa, also called the Anglican Church, is conducted in Cape Town.
1770 Captain James Cook lands in New South Wales.
1828 René Caillié becomes the second non-Muslim to enter (and the first to return from) Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing’s entry.
1862 First pasteurisation test completed by Frenchmen Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard.
1902 Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium chloride.
1918 Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) shoots down his 79th and 80th victims. They are his last.
1945 US troops capture Leipzig, Germany, only to later cede the city to the Soviet Union.
1945 Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface from his Führerbunker in Berlin to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1946 The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the UN.
1961 The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba is a disaster.
1968 SAA Pretoria, a Boeing 707, with 122 people on board, crashes just after take-off from Windhoek. Only five survive.
1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School in Colorado.
2010 The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and beginning an oil spill that would last six months.
2018 Arsène Wenger announces he will leave Arsenal after 22 years as manager.
2018 Commonwealth countries decide Prince Charles will succeed Queen Elizabeth as the next head of the Commonwealth.
2018 King Mswati III of Swaziland changes the name of country, the smallest in the southern hemisphere, to eSwatini, or “land of the Swati”. | The Historian