1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and 18 sailors are set adrift and the rebel crew returns to Tahiti briefly and then sets sail for Pitcairn Island.
1862 – American Civil War: Admiral David Farragut captures New Orleans, Louisiana. The Feds have been taking care of the place ever since…
1945 – Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance movement who became exceedingly brave once the Allies were on the peninsula and the Germans were on the run.
1947 – Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. I’ve read and re-read this story. It’s a classic tale of men against the sea.
1952 – Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Commander of NATO. He’s headed for the Presidency of the United States.
1969 – Charles de Gaulle resigns as President of France. This is akin to a fish losing its bicycle as the general who single-handledly won France back from Germany takes his well-deserved retirement.
1996 – In Tasmania, Australia, Martin Bryant goes on a shooting spree, killing 35 people and seriously injuring 21 more, resulting in draconian Australian gun laws that disarm the law-abiding. Crazy people, however, remain crazy, and criminals remain criminals.
When Bligh was cast adrift in the longboat after the mutiny, he had sufficient navigational equipment and knowledge to plot and sail from the area where the mutiny occurred some several thousand sea miles to the Dutch East Indies – not by any means the nearest port, but the one where he had the best chance of getting a ship back to London. And while on the way there, he and his 18 men in the longboat conducted significant cartiography, developing marine charts that are the basis for those still in use today – 250 years later. Bligh was a martinet, but he also was one damn fine sailor.
And the mutineers that went to Pitcairn Island were unmolested because they had the only correct charts of the island’s location. The current Admiralty charts listed Pitcairn nearly 100 mi9les from its actual location. The Mutineers that returned to Tahiti were captured by the RMS Pandora, and placed in a temporary brig on her decks – ‘Pandora’s Box’ where several of them were trapped and drowned when Pandora hit the Great Barrier Reef.