BACK IN THE DAY, APRIL 15

1242 Russian forces rebuff an invasion by Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice of

Lake Peipus. The battle was a significant crusader defeat in the Northern Crusades. 1614 The storied Native American Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe in what would become the United States.

1652 Table Mountain is sighted at 2.30pm by a crewman on the ship Drommedaris, on which Jan van Riebeeck and the first Dutch settlers to the Cape are voyaging to set up a refreshment station for passing ships.

1815 Mount Tambora in the Dutch East

Indies has its first violent eruption in several centuries. It causes a global volcanic winter. 1900 Combat-General Georges-Henri Anne Marie Victor Compte de Villebois-Mareuil, a former commander in the French Foreign Legion, makes a valiant last stand against the British at Boshof, in the Boer War, and is killed. 1902 In Glasgow, Scotland, the Ibrox disaster occurs when a grandstand collapses at the home of Rangers Football Club, killing 25 fans and injuring 517. Sixty-nine years later, a similar disaster at the same venue kills 66 people. 1923 Harvey Firestone’s Firestone Tire and Rubber Co starts making 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 south-west of the island, 86 South Africans on HMS Cornwall survive.

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

1982 The British aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and Hermes with escorts leave Portsmouth to retake the Falkland Islands.

1992 Serbian troops begin besieging Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, starting the longest siege in modern warfare (1 425 days, or 3.9 years).

1999 Nelson Mandela earns worldwide praise for persuading Libya to hand over two suspects in the bombing a Pan Am aircraft over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.

2012 A 77-year old pensioner’s suicide outside the Greek parliament prompts further protests in Athens over the country’s financial crisis.

| THE HISTORIAN