ON THIS DAY APRIL 5

456 St Patrick returns to Ireland as a missionary bishop.

1242 Russian forces rebuff an invasion by Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice at Lake Peipus (on the border with Estonia). The battle, fought largely on the frozen lake, was a significant defeat for the crusaders during the Northern Crusades, which were directed against pagans and eastern orthodox Christians rather than Muslims in the Holy Land.

1614 Romanticised Native American Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe.

1652 Table Mountain is sighted at 2.30pm by a crewman on the Drommedaris on which Jan van Riebeeck and his company were travelling.

1815 Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies has its first violent eruption after several centuries of dormancy – the largest ever witnessed. It goes on to cause a catastrophic global volcanic winter, with 1816 being “the year without a summer”.

1900 Combat General Georges-Henri Anne Marie Victor Comte de Villebois-Mareuil, a former commander in the French Foreign Legion, makes a valiant last stand against the British at Boshof in the Anglo-Boer War.

1902 In Glasgow, Scotland, the Ibrox disaster occurs after a grandstand collapses killing 25 and injuring 517 people. Sixty-nine years later, a similar disaster kills 66 people.

1923 Harvey Firestone’s Firestone Tire and Rubber Company starts producing inflatable tyres.

1942 The Japanese navy launches a carrierbased air attack on Colombo, Ceylon. The Royal Navy cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire are sunk, 86 South Africans survive attack on the HMS Cornwall.

1943 Chinese steward Poon Lim is found by fishermen on a raft off Brazil after surviving the torpedoing of the British ship SS Ben Lomond and being adrift 133 days.

1982 The aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and Hermes with escort vessels leave Portsmouth to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina, which had invaded them.

1992 Serbian troops begin besieging Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, which would become the longest siege in modern warfare (1 425 days)

1999 President Nelson Mandela earns worldwide praise for his role in persuading Libya to hand over two suspects accused of placing a bomb on a Pan Am aircraft which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.