ON THIS DAY, NOVEMBER 14

1532 King Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second of six wives, Anne Boleyn.

1666 Samuel Pepys reports on first blood transfusion (which takes place between dogs).

1770 Scottish explorer James Bruce discovers the source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana, in north-west Ethiopia.

1840 French painter Claude Monet is born in Paris. He pioneered the impressionist style in his landscapes, including the Haystacks,

Poplars, and Rouen Cathedral series.

1854 The Rev Francis Owen, 52, founder of a mission station in Zululand, secretary of Dingane and witness to the killing of Piet Retief and his men, dies in Alexandria, Egypt. 1883 Treasure Island, an adventure story of buccaneers and buried gold, by Robert Louis Stevenson is first published.

1885 SA’s first golf club, the Cape Golf

Club (later the Royal Cape Golf Club), is established.

1889 Reporter Nellie Bly sets out from New York to see if she can beat the record of Jules Verne’s imaginary hero Phileas Fogg, who circled the world in 80 days. She returns 72 days later to a tumultuous welcome.

1908 Albert Einstein presents his groundbreaking quantum theory of light.

1914 Field Marshall, Lord Roberts, 82, commander-in-chief of the British forces during the Anglo-Boer War dies of pneumonia at St Omer, France, while visiting Indian troops. He was one of the most successful military commanders of the 19th century.

1967 American physicist Theodore Maiman is given a patent for the world’s first laser.

1968 The Ciskei ‘homeland’ is established.

1989 Swapo wins the first national, democratic election in Namibia.

2018 Archaeologists announce the discovery of the Greek city of Tenea near Corinth, founded by captives from Trojan War.

2018 A large impact crater, 31km wide and 300m deep, bigger than Washington or Paris and caused by a 1km-wide meteorite, is identified by ice-penetrating radar 1km beneath Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. The impact, thought to have been as recent as 12 000 years ago, is believed to have caused global flooding and mass extinctions. | THE HISTORIAN