The John the Baptist of African colonialism, David Livingstone (above), became the first European to visit Victoria Falls today in 1855. He named the falls after Queen Victoria, but it already had two perfectly good names given by the peoples living close to it. For the Lozi people, the falls were Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘The Smoke that Thunders’, and for the Tonga people, they were Shungu Namutitima, ‘Boiling Water’. Livingstone’s visit is remembered at the falls with a statue that is depressingly inscribed: ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation’.
‘Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen to twenty yards.’ David Livingstone at Mosi-oa-Tunya
The world’s favourite singing nun took to the stage tonight in 1959, as The Sound of Music opened on Broadway. Maria tripped through the edelweiss and the von Trapp family sang for the Nazis for 1,443 performances.
An auto-da-fé (basically a religious trial) held outside Ávila in Spain, today in 1491, a Good Friday, ended with the execution of nine Jewish people by being burned at the stake. They were victims of the medieval conspiracy theory known as the blood libel, where Jews were believed to murder Christian children so their blood could be used in rituals. Despite the fact that there was no evidence of a local child missing or murdered, the ‘child’ was declared to be a saint, and the Holy Child of La Guardia is still celebrated in La Guardia, Toledo.
It is St Othmar’s Day, an 8th-century Benedictine abbot in what is now Switzerland. He was keen to provide for the poor and established a hospital and school. It is said that he took food out to the poor in a barrel that never got empty, no matter how much food was taken out of it.
The last Emperor of the Inca Empire. Atahualpa, was ambushed and seized today in 1532 by a small Spanish force led by the Conquistador Francisco Pizarro. In an overwhelming surprise attack using firearms, the Spanish captured the Emperor after massacring his retinue and his closest military commanders, and the shock of it produced terror in the Inca army, which outnumbered the Spanish force by about 45 to 1. Atahualpa was executed the following July, despite paying a ransom by filling a large room first with gold, and then two times over with silver, and his Empire became a rump state under Spanish rule.
Image: Wellcome Collection