ON THIS DAY, APRIL 27

1192 Jerusalem’s King Conrad is assassinated, two days after his regency is confirmed. The deed is carried out by the Hashshashin, from whom we get the word ‘assassin’.

1639 Heroic clergyman William Mompesson is born. During the Great Plague of 1655, he led the population of the infected village of Eyam, north of London, to isolate themselves, preventing the spread of the disease.

Grateful outsiders left food and money at the village boundary. Of the settlement’s 350 inhabitants, 260 died from the plague.

1655 Jan van Riebeeck complains to his bosses that it’s bad idea to settle Burghers in Hout Bay, far from the fort at the Cape.

1789 Fletcher Christian leads a mutiny on the HMS Bounty and sets Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors adrift, but being a skilled navigator Bligh manages the incredible feat of sailing to safety to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, nearly 4 000 nautical miles away.

1869 Chinese and Irish labourers lay 16km of track in a day in a race to build a transcontinental US railway. The feat remains unmatched.

1881 Outlaw Billy the Kid kills two deputies while escaping from jail in Mesilla, New Mexico, with Sheriff Pat Garrett in hot pursuit.

1902 The one billionth minute since the start of January 1 Year Zero is at 10.40am.

1923 Wembley Stadium opens to host the FA Cup Final between Bolton and West Ham.

1944 German torpedo boats attack D-Day rehearsals off Devon, killing 946 troops.

1945 Benito Mussolini and his mistress are executed by a partisan firing squad.

1947 Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki crew set out from Peru to show that Peruvians could have settled Polynesia. 1973 A five-hour series of explosions rip through a bomb-laden train in Antelope, California, wiping it off the map.

1986 High levels of radiation from the Chernobyl disaster are detected in Sweden, leading the Soviets to own up.

2004 Live TV shows a very woolly Shrek, a New Zealand sheep, being finally shorn after avoiding the sheers for six years. The fleece weighed 27kg. | THE HISTORIAN