ON THIS DAY, JULY 29

1715 Ten Spanish treasure galleons sink off Florida during a hurricane.

1848 Ireland’s Tipperary Revolt during the Great Potato Famine – a nationalist uprising against British rule – is put down.

1907 Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who fought at Mafikeng, forms the Boy Scouts – which is active in South Africa – in England.

1907 The Orient, loaded with wheat, strands at East London. A beach is named after the wreck site.

1945 Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi,

Xhosa poet and prose writer, dies near King William’s Town. His first collection of poems, Imihobe nemiBongo (1927) included Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrica.

1949 Moscow ends the blockade of Allied West Berlin.

1954 The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings by South African-born author JRR Tolkien, is published.

1956 French marine diving pioneer and co-developer of the aqualung, Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso anchors in 7 500m of water – a world record.

1981 A worldwide television audience of more than 700 million people watch the wedding of Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. 1987 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and France’s President François Mitterrand agree to build a tunnel under the English Channel.

2013 €103 million of diamonds is stolen from the Carton Intercontinental Hotel, in Cannes, France.

2015 Wreckage from flight MH370 is found on the island of Reunion. The plane, which went missing in 2014 with 239 people on board, remains one of the most enduring and fascinating mysteries in aviation history, sparking a 3-year search that became the most costly in the history of aviation and one of the most complex.

2019 A riot leaves 16 prisoners decapitated in battle between rival factions at the Altamira prison, Para state, Brazil. Another 46 more died due to smoke inhalation. | THE HISTORIAN