ON THIS DAY, MAY 18

1291 Acre is the last stronghold to fall and be destroyed by the Mamluks, ending the crusader presence in the Holy Land.

1596 Willem Barents, after whom the Barents Sea is named, sets sail for the Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya.

1774 Joachim van Plettenberg, for whom the town and bay is named, is sworn in as the governor of the Cape.

1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor of France, snatching the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII during the coronation ceremony, and then crowning himself.

1830 The lawn mower is invented.

1897 Dracula, by Bram Stoker, is published. 1912 India’s first film, Shree Pundalik, is released in Bombay (today’s Mumbai).

1934 The Academy Award statuette is first called an Oscar by a gossip columnist.

1944 The bloody Battle for Rome is won when Polish troops scale the heights of Monte Casino. It involved many South Africans. (The Benedictine monastery, said to have been the world’s most glorious, was obliterated by bombers three months earlier because an officer mistook the German word for abbot to mean battalion. A senior officer later saw the error, but it was too late, the planes were in the air. It has been called the greatest single aesthetic disaster of World War II.) 1948 Saudi Arabia joins the Arab invasion of the newly formed state of Israel.

1953 Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier.

1956 A 19-strong French patrol is found hacked to death in the mountains of Algeria.

1969 Apollo 10 – a dress-rehearsal for a moon landing two months later – is launched. It gets to within 16km of the moon.

1980 With the world’s press watching, Mount

St Helens erupts dramatically.

1986 In what Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda termed a ‘dastardly, cowardly action’, SA forces attack the capitals of Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

1990 A French TGV train clocks a rail world speed record of 515.3km/h.

2009 Sri Lanka’s rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam are finally defeated. | THE HISTORIAN