Today in history In 1900 seismologist Charles

On April 26, 1607, an expedition of colonists, including Capt. John Smith, went ashore at Cape Henry, Va., to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.

In 1785, American naturalist and artist John James Audubon was born in Haiti.

In 1822 landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was born in Hartford, Conn.

In 1865 Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded by federal troops on a farm near Bowling Green, Va. (He later was found dying in a barn, the victim of either a suicide or a shooting.)

In 1894 Rudolf Hess, who would become Adolf Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party, was born in Alexandria, Egypt. Richter, who devised the earthquake-measuring scale that bears his name, was born in Hamilton, Ohio.

In 1937 planes from Nazi Germany raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

In 1938 rock musician Duane Eddy was born in Corning, N.Y.

In 1945 Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.

In 1964 the African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.

In 1968 the United States exploded a 1-megaton nuclear device called “Boxcar” beneath the Nevada desert.

In 1970 the Broadway musical “Company” opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York.

In 1984 bandleader William “Count” Basie died in Hollywood; he was 79.

In 1986 the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. (An explosion and fire killed at least 31 people and sent radioactivity into the atmosphere.)