Wolraad Woltemade’s heroics end in tragedy on Cape shoreline; Zulu warriors kill the last of Napoleon’s line; and disgraced Proteas captain’s plane hits a mountain.
4 000BC Approximate date of domestication of the horse on the Eurasian steppes, Ukraine.
1215 What is today Beijing is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan.
1495 The first record of Scotch whisky appears. Friar John Cor is the distiller.
1773 The Jonge Thomas, a Dutch East Indiaman, is wrecked in a gale near Salt River mouth in Table Bay. In a selfess series of actions, Wolraad Woltemade, who is passing by, stops to help and makes seven trips to the wrecked ship, saving 14 people. On his eighth trip, he and his horse drown when panicked seamen pull them under.
1824 Lord Charles Somerset, governor of the Cape, is linked to Dr James Barry (who was a woman) in a scurrilous placard in the Heerengracht, Cape Town.
1845 A homing pigeon makes the 11 000km trip from Namibia to London in 55 days.
1879 The Prince Imperial of France, 22, the last of France’s Bonaparte dynasty, is killed Zulu warriors during the Anglo-Zulu War.
1908 John Krohn begins to walk the perimeter of the US, which takes him 357 days.
1948 Engenas Barnabas Lekganyane, leader of the Zion Christian Church, is laid to rest in Moria, Limpopo.
1962 Former Nazi and SS officer Adolf Eichmann is executed in Israel for war crimes.
1965 A coal mine explosion in Fukuoka, Japan, kills 236 people.
1999 Bloomberg reports that June 1 is the anniversary of text messages.
2001 Crown Prince Dipendra of Nepal shoots and kills several members of his family, including his father and mother.
2001 Nkosi Johnson, an HIV-positive schoolboy and well-known activist, dies.
2002 Disgraced former Proteas captain Hansie Cronje is killed when the light plane he is in crashes into a mountain near George.
2009 An Air France flight 447 flies through a thunder cloud rather than around it, the crew lose control of the plane plunges, which into the Atlantic, killing all 229 on board.
2015 A cruise ship with 458 people capsizes on China’s Yangtze River. About 400 die.
2022 Turkey officially changes its name to Türkiye at the UN and internationally.