Birthdays: English King Edward IV (1442), President James Monroe, Lionel Barrymore, Oskar Schindler, Carolyn Jones-aka Morticia Addams of the TV Addams Family, Ann Margret is 84, Jay Leno is 75, Saddam Hussein, Jean Redpath, Penelope Cruz is 51, Jessica Alba is 46, Godzilla is 71- see below.
1789- THE MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. The HMS Bounty had been sent around the world to bring back breadfruit samples to see if the plant could be a nutritional supplement for slave laborers in Jamaica and Bermuda. During the return voyage from Tahiti the crew led by first mate Fletcher Christian, set upon Captain William Bligh, and set him adrift in a rowboat to die. They then sailed with their Tahitian families to settle permanently on an island.
They choose Pitcairn Island because of its remoteness. Squabbles arose among the British and natives and their leader Fletcher Christian was killed while tending his sweet potatoes. Today many of the island’s inhabitants claim ancestry from the Bounty mutineers.
Captain Bligh got to safety after navigating his little longboat 3,600 nautical miles to East Timor with almost no food, an unparalleled feat of seamanship. He was cleared by an Admiralty board and served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars, although another ship mutinied on him.
Like many 'famous' incidents, this passed by its time with little or no notice. What made the Mutiny on the Bounty world famous was a best-selling novel written in the 1920's by two Americans, Charles Nordoff and James Norton Hall, who met when pilots in the World War I Lafayette Escadrille. Then it became a popular movie with Clark Gable. James Hall’s son, Conrad Hall, grew up to be a famous cinematographer in Hollywood, who won Academy Awards for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Road to Perdition.
1828- English monarchs kept a menagerie of exotic animals at the Tower of London. Most were gifts from foreign rulers. Lions, apes, giraffes, canaries, a polar bear and an elephant. By the XIX Century the crown allowed tourists to visit, and it became quite the attraction. When old soldier the Duke of Wellington became Constable of the Tower, he found all the animals and the tourists annoying. The Tower should be a military bastion, not a bloody tourist attraction!
This day all the animals were moved to a new spot in Regents Park, and the London Zoo was created.
1925- T.S. Elliot landed a job at Faber & Faber Publishing. His enabled the poet to quit his job as a bank teller at Lloyds and get serious about his literary career.
1937- Italy’s movie studio Cinecitta’ was dedicated.
1947- Thor Heyderthal set out on a balsa wood raft called Kon Tiki to prove ancient Peruvians could have used the ocean current to reach Polynesia.
1954- Happy 71th Birthday Godzilla! The original kaiju movie by Ichjiro Honda was inspired when a Japanese fishing boat was fatally exposed by radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test. He was also inspired by the Hollywood movies The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and King Kong. Godzilla is an Anglicized version of the Japanese Kohjira, which is a combination of Gorilla and Whale. The famous roar was done by rubbing a resin-covered glove down some bass fiddle strings. The film was later released in the U.S. with American actor Raymond Burr (actually, Canadian actor.) acting in inserted scenes. The intact Japanese version of the film was not seen in North America until 2004.
1961-At La Scala, when tenor Guiseppi Di Stefano took ill, a young schoolteacher from Modena took the lead role in the opera La Boheme. Lucciano Pavarotti debuted. Called King of the High C’s.
1996- Genndy Tartakowsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory premiered.
2019- The Marvel superhero movie Avengers Endgame earned $1.2 billion worldwide in its opening weekend. $350 million North America, and $850 million worldwide. A record shattering opening.
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