66 The fifth recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The reference is from the Talmud to “a star which appears once in seventy years that makes the captains of the ships err.”
1500 Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot in Brazil. He had earlier sailed with Columbus to the West Indies. However, Spain made no claim to the area, leaving it to the Portuguese by treaty.
1788 Today is Australia Day, commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson, New South Wales. To see ‘Babakiueria’ is to understand much.
1808 Governor William Bligh was overthrown in the “Rum Rebellion.” It had little or nothing to do with rum though there was plenty of it about. In my early antipodean days I read H. V. Evatt, ‘Rum Rebellion: A Study of the Overthrow of Governor Bligh by John MacArthur and The New South Wales Corps (1943), which found all the parties at fault. There was plenty of that to go around, too.
1918 Herbert Hoover, US Food Administrator, called for “wheatless” and “meatless” days for the war effort. We were mightily impressed by Herbert Everywhere when we visited his presidential library in Iowa, which includes his boyhood home as shown below. Hoover is discussed on several posts on this blog. He was a whirlwind and a humanitarian who admired Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.
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