1606 Arnhem Land, History: Seaman Willem Jansz of the Dutch East India Company landed near Weipa in the far north of Queensland to take on water. He is the first recorded European visitor to the mainland of Australia, though he thought it was continuous with New Guinea, as it once was.
1616 Rome, Religion: Pope ordered Galileo Galilei to deny helio-centrism, or else.
1919 Washington, D.C., Politics: Congress legislated to establish the Grand Canyon National Park. The original bill had been introduced in 1882. Using the executive powers of the Presidency in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt had made the Grand Canyon a game reserve. He did the same in 1908 when he had made it a National Monument under the protection of the Federal Government. But legislation to make it a Park was repeatedly defeated in 1883, 1886, 1905, 1907, 1910, and 1911. Even today there are rumours of minerals and oil in them there canyons.
1949 Fort Worth, Technology: A B-50 Superfortress took off in the first continuous round-the-world flight with a crew of fourteen. In 94 hours it travelled 23,452 miles. It was re-fueled four times in the air by B-29 tankers in carefully planned rendezvouses, and returned to Fort Worth on 2 March. The flight tested equipment, crew endurance, planning, flight fuelling, and weather conditions. This was a Cold War exercise. It is pictured below landing back in Fort Worth.
1984 New Haven, Literature: Robert Penn Warren became the first United States poet laureate. He had moved to New England in a self-imposed exile from the South where his support for racial integration had made him a pariah. I heard him read his poetry twenty years earlier, and felt privileged for it.
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