ON THIS DAY, JUNE 9

AD 68 After quoting Homer’s Iliad, Roman emperor Nero commits suicide to evade a Senate-imposed death by flogging, leading to the civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors.

1667 The Raid on the Medway by the Dutch fleet begins, lasts five days and ends in the Royal Navy’s worst defeat.

1752 The French army surrenders to the British in Trichinopoly, India.

1862 Confederate General Stonewall Jackson concludes his successful Shenandoah Valley Campaign with victory in the Battle of Port Republic; his tactics during the campaign are now studied by militaries across the world.

1910 A passenger on the SS Arawatta throws a bottle with a note in it overboard somewhere between Cairns and Brisbane. It was found – almost to the day – 73 years later, on June 6, 1983, on Moreton Island

off Queensland. Most bottles set adrift are used, even up to quite recently, to study ocean currents. There have been some amazing paths followed by sea-bottle messages. Three that were dropped into the Beaufort Sea, above northern Alaska and north-western Canada, became frozen in sea ice. Five years later, melting Arctic ice had flushed the bottles all the way to northern Europe. Another circled Antarctica

one and a half times before it wound up on a beach in Tasmania.

1928 Charles Kingsford Smith completes the first trans-Pacific flight, in a Fokker Trimotor monoplane, called the Southern Cross.

1941 An ammunition plant in Belgrade explodes; killing 1 500 people.

1944 German troops hang 99 civilians from lampposts and balconies in Tulle, France, in reprisal for maquisards attacks in

preparation for D-Day.

1967 Israel captures the Golan Heights from Syria and reaches the Suez Canal.

1983 Zimbabwe win their first cricket ODI, improbably against Australia.

1999 Yugoslavia and Nato sign a peace treaty ending the Kosovo War.

2010 At least 40 people are killed in a suicide bombing at a wedding in, Kandahar, Afghanistan. | THE HISTORIAN