ON THIS DAY, APRIL 20

1453 Three Genoese galleys and a Byzantine blockade runner fight their way through an Ottoman blockading fleet to provide relief to the beleagured Constantinople.

1657 English Admiral Robert Blake destroys a Spanish silver fleet under heavy fire at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

1828 René Caillié becomes the second nonMuslim to enter (and return from) Timbuktu, following Major Gordon Laing’s entry. 1749 The first public worship of the Church of England in South Africa, also called the Anglican Church, is conducted in Cape Town. 1862 First pasteurization test completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard.

1889 Adolf Hitler is born in Braunau am Inn, Austria. As leader of Nazi Germany from

1933 to 1945, he waged a war of expansion in Europe, causing the deaths of 50 million persons through war and the Holocaust – the attempted extermination all European Jews. 1902 Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium chloride.

1918 Manfred (Red Baron) von Richthofen claims his 79th and 80th victims – 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 Berlin bunker 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. 1968 SAA Pretoria, a Boeing 707, with 122 people on board, crashes just after take off from Windhoek. Only five people survive. 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24, then commit suicide at Columbine High School in Colorado.

2010 The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and beginning a six-month oil spill. 2018 Arsène Wenger announces he will leave Arsenal after 22 years as manager.

2018 Britain’s Prince Charles is picked to succeed Queen Elizabeth as the next head of the Commonwealth.

2018 King Mswati III of Swaziland changes the name of the smallest country in the southern hemisphere, to eSwatini, or “land of the Swati”. | The Historian