On this day, April 5
St Patrick returns to the ‘Emerald Isle’, the first of the Ibrox soccer stadium disasters, the legend of Pocahotas begins, Mount Tambora blows its top, the longest siege in modern history and President Nelson Mandela garners international praise
456 Saint Patrick returns to Ireland as a missionary bishop.
1242 Russian forces rebuff an invasion by Teutonic Knights in the Battle on the Ice of Lake Peipus. The battle, fought largely on the frozen lake, was a significant defeat for the crusaders during the Northern Crusades, which were directed against pagans and Eastern Orthodox Christians.
1614 The storied Native American Pocahontas marries English colonist John Rolfe in what would become the United States.
1652 Table Mountain is sighted at 2.30pm by a crewman on the ship Drommedaris, on which Jan van Riebeeck and the first Dutch settlers to the Cape are voyaging to set up a refreshment station for passing ships.
1815 Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), has its first violent eruption after several centuries of dormancy – the largest ever witnessed. It causes a catastrophic global volcanic winter, with 1816 being 'the year without a summer’.
1900 Combat-General Georges-Henri Anne Marie Victor Compte de Villebois-Mareuil, a former commander in the French Foreign Legion, makes a valiant last stand against the British at Boshof, in the Boer War, and is killed.
1902 In Glasgow, Scotland, the Ibrox disaster occurs when a grandstand collapses at the home of Rangers Football Club, killing 25 fans and injuring 517. Sixty-nine years later, a similar disaster at the same venue kills 66 people.
1923 Harvey Firestone’s Firestone Tire and Rubber Co starts making inflatable tyres.
1942 The Japanese navy launches a carrier-based air attack on Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Royal Navy cruisers HMS Cornwall and HMS Dorsetshire are sunk south-west of the island, 86 South Africans on HMS Cornwall survive.
1943 Chinese steward Poon Lim is found by fishermen on a raft off Brazil after surviving the torpedoing of the British ship SS Benlomond and being adrift in the Atlantic for 133 days.
1982 The aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and Hermes with escort vessels leave Portsmouth, England, to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina.
1992 Serbian troops begin besieging Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, starting the longest siege in modern warfare (1 425 days, or 3.9 years)
1999 President Nelson Mandela earns worldwide praise for his role in persuading Libya to hand over two suspects accused of placing a bomb on a Pan Am aircraft which exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.
2012 A 77-year old pensioner’s suicide outside the Greek parliament prompts further protests in Athens over the country’s financial crisis.
2020 British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is admitted to hospital suffering from Covid-19
2021 Italy scraps its 1914 film censorship law that could ban films on moral and religious grounds
2021 Tropical Cyclone Seroja causes floods and landslides in south-east Indonesia and East Timor, killing at least 113 people.
