ON THIS DAY

NOVEMBER 27

602 Western Roman Emperor Maurice is forced to watch his six sons being executed before he is beheaded. This sparks a 26-year war with Sassanid Persia which leaves both empires vulnerable to a Muslim invasion.

1493 Christopher Columbus returns to La Navidad colony, finding it destroyed. What had happened was that Columbus left some of his crew at La Navidad and returned to Spain. He mistakenly thought that his men would not threaten the natives, whom he believed to be friendly, but local chieftain Caonabo led an attack on the fort in 1493, defeating all the Spaniards who remained. Caonabo’s wife Anacaona would later explain that, incensed at the treatment of the natives by the Spanish, she had motivated Caonabo to reclaim the village. The assault on La Navidad left 39 Spaniards dead.

1701 Anders Celsius is born in Sweden. He goes on to invent the commonly used centigrade temperature scale.

1798 An eloquent speaker and writer later in life, Andries Pretorius, the Voortrekker leader after whom Pretoria is named, is born near Graaff-reniet. Highly regarded by both the British and Black leaders, when Pretorius died in the Magaliesberg in July 1853, many of them visited him to pay their respects.

1807 The Portuguese Royal Family and its court of nearly 15 000 people flee Lisbon for their colony of Brazil to escape invading Napoleonic troops

1820 Renowned SA Painter Thomas Baines is born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England.

1853 Wild West lawman Bat Masterson (real first names: Bartholemew William Barclay) is born in Henryville, Quebec. He was also a gambler, saloonkeeper, and later became a celebrated news writer in New York.

1895 In Paris, Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize. He did so after reading a premature obituary which condemned him for arms sales profiteering. 1942 The French navy scuttles the ships of its fleet in Toulon to keep them from Nazi hands. 1944 A Royal Air Force ammunition dump explosion in Staffordshire kills 70 people.

1960 Patrice Lumumba, the independence leader who served as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, flees Leopoldville. Following his execution in 1961, he was widely seen as a martyr for the wider pan-african movement. Over the years, inquiries have shed light on the events surrounding Lumumba’s death and, in particular, on the roles played by Belgium and the United States. In 2002, Belgium formally apologised for its role in the execution and in 2022, a gold-capped tooth, all that remained of his body, was repatriated by Belgium.

1967 French President Charles de Gaulle says ‘Non!’ to British entry to the European Common Market for the second time.

1970 Pope Paul VI is wounded in the chest during in the Philippines by a dagger-wielding Bolivian painter disguised as a priest

1987 A man in Somerset, England, makes headlines when it becomes known that he has survived 7 suicide attempts after he broke up with his girlfriend. Distraught, he threw himself, at different times, at four cars and a truck, tried to strangle himself and jumped out of a window. One of the car drivers suffered a heart attack, and two policemen were injured while trying to restrain jilted lover.

1989 A Boeing 727 explodes in mid-air over Colombia, killing 110 people. Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel claims responsibility.

2014 Australian Test cricketer Phillip Hughes, 25, dies two days after being struck on the head by a bouncer during a Sheffield Shield match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

2017 A North Korean ‘ghost ship’ washes up on a Japanese beach with 8 skeletons on board – the fourth such vessel in a month. ‘Ghost ships’ are thought to be a consequence of North Korea’s attempts to satisfy hunger by demanding huge quotas of seafood. That forces fishermen to take ageing vessels with no safety equipment far out to sea.

2018 Convicted US murderer Samuel Little is connected to 90 more murders of women. | THE HISTORIAN