In 1859 an American farmer shot a British pig rooting in his potato patch. Within weeks, hundreds of soldiers, a fleet of warships, and 2,000 sailors faced off on a foggy little island – and the only casualty was the pig.
Toronto is YYZ, Vancouver is YVR, Ottawa is YOW – almost every Canadian airport code begins with Y. The reason is older than the airplane itself, buried in the two-letter Morse codes of a vanished railway telegraph network.
In 1629 the pride of the Dutch East India Company struck a reef off Western Australia. What happened to the survivors on those waterless islands was not a tragedy of the sea but of men – one of the darkest mutinies and massacres in history.
In 1859 a ruined San Francisco businessman walked into a newspaper office and declared himself Emperor of the United States. For twenty-one years a whole city played along – and when he died, tens of thousands came to mourn their emperor.
In the freezing early hours of an Australian winter morning in 1944, more than a thousand Japanese prisoners rushed the fences of a POW camp armed with baseball bats and sharpened cutlery. It became the largest prison break of the Second World War.
In the final week of World War II, a handful of American GIs, a band of anti-Nazi German soldiers, and a castle full of France’s imprisoned elite made a stand together against the Waffen-SS. It is remembered as the strangest battle of the war — and the only time Americans and Germans are known to have fought as allies.
One harvest day in 12th-century Suffolk, the reapers found two children standing by an old wolf pit. Their skin was green, their clothes were strange, and they spoke a language no one had ever heard. This is the enduring medieval mystery of the Green Children of Woolpit.
When the First World War broke out, the world’s most famous scientist did not retreat to her laboratory. Marie Curie taught herself to drive, built a fleet of X-ray trucks, and took them to the front — where they helped image more than a million wounded men.
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end of Halifax simply ceased to exist — nearly 2,000 dead in the largest man-made explosion the world had yet known.
Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it was rammed, on the Titanic when it hit the iceberg, and on the Britannic when it struck a mine and sank in the Aegean. Three times the sea tried to take her. Three times she walked away — the quiet stewardess history nearly forgot.
