Torca Island was an inhabited phantom island said to be located in the Indian Ocean, possibly in the East Indies. It purportedly vanished when a volcano erupted on June 4, 1693. The survivors escaped to a nearby island called Amboy (also called Amboyan, present-day Ambon Island) on 18 July 1693. [1] The villagers attempted to flee in canoes or by swimming, but many people died attempting to do this.
Alexander Selkirk was a Scottish privateer and Royal Navy officer who spent four years and four months as a castaway (1704–1709) after being marooned by his captain, initially at his request, on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific Ocean. He survived that ordeal, but succumbed to tropical illness years later while serving aboard HMS Weymouth off West Africa.
The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe, originating in the works of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The term was coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name Cthulhu derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928.
Captain James Cook was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to Australia in particular. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Pope Urban V, born Guillaume de Grimoard, was the head of the Catholic Church from 28 September 1362 until his death in 1370 and was also a member of the Order of Saint Benedict. He was the only Avignon pope to be beatified.
The Guadalcanal campaign, also known as the Battle of Guadalcanal and codenamed Operation Watchtower by American forces, was a military campaign fought between 7 August 1942 and 9 February 1943 on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theater of World War II. It was the first major land offensive by Allied forces against the Empire of Japan.
The Kalinago, also known as the Island Caribs or simply Caribs, are an indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. They may have been related to the Mainland Caribs (Kalina) of South America, but they spoke an unrelated language known as Island Carib. They also spoke a pidgin language associated with the Mainland Caribs.
The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719. Just as in its significantly more popular predecessor, Robinson Crusoe (1719), the first edition credits the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author. It was published under the considerably longer original title: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round three Parts of the Globe. Although intended to be the last Crusoe tale, the novel is followed by a non-fiction book involving Crusoe by Defoe entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick World (1720).
Mehmed IV also known as Mehmed the Hunter was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1648 to 1687. He came to the throne at the age of six after his father was overthrown in a coup. Mehmed went on to become the second longest reigning sultan in Ottoman history after Suleiman the Magnificent. While the initial and final years of his reign were characterized by military defeat and political instability, during his middle years he oversaw the revival of the empire's fortunes associated with the Köprülü era. Mehmed IV was known by contemporaries as a particularly pious ruler, and was referred to as gazi, or "holy warrior" for his role in the many conquests carried out during his long reign.
The British West Indies (BWI) were the British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago. Other territories include Bermuda, and the former British Honduras. Before the decolonisation period in the later 1950s and 1960s the term was used to include all British colonies in the region as part of the British Empire. Following the independence of most of the territories from the United Kingdom, the term Commonwealth Caribbean is now used.
The Battle of Landen or Neerwinden took place on 29 July 1693, during the Nine Years' War. It was fought around the village of Neerwinden in the Spanish Netherlands, now part of the municipality of Landen, Belgium.
Patrick Sarsfield, 1st Earl of Lucan, Irish: Pádraig Sáirseál, circa 1655 to 21 August 1693, was an Irish soldier, and leading figure in the Jacobite army during the 1689 to 1691 Williamite War in Ireland.
Thomas Rymer was an English poet, critic, antiquary and historian. His lasting contribution was to compile and publish 16 volumes of the first edition of Foedera, a work in 20 volumes conveying agreements between The Crown of England and foreign powers since 1101. He held the office of English Historiographer Royal from 1692 to 1714. He is credited with coining the phrase "poetic justice" in The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd (1678).
The Magic Goes Away is a fantasy short story written by Larry Niven in 1976, and later expanded to a novella of the same name which was published in 1978. While these works were not the first in the "Magic Universe" or "Warlock" series, they marked a turning point after the 1973 oil crisis and Niven's subsequent transformation of the series into an allegory for a modern-day energy crisis. The setting was later used as a backdrop for the Golden Road series of novels The Burning City and Burning Tower, co-written with Jerry Pournelle, and the novel The Seascape Tattoo co-written with Steven Barnes.
The Curonian colonization of the Americas was performed by the Duchy of Courland, which was the second-smallest state to colonise the Americas, after the Knights of Malta. It had a colony on the island of Tobago from 1654 to 1659 and intermittently from 1660 to 1689.
François Leguat was a French explorer and naturalist. He was one of a small group of male French Protestant refugees who in 1691 settled on the then uninhabited island of Rodrigues in the western Indian Ocean. The colonists became discontented with their life on the island and after a stay of two years managed to escape to Mauritius in a small boat. Leguat arrived back in Europe in June 1698 and wrote a book recounting his adventures which was published in 1708. In his book Leguat describes several species of birds and tortoises that were endemic to Rodrigues but are now extinct.
Iyasu I, throne name Adyam Sagad, also known as Iyasu the Great, was Emperor of Ethiopia from 19 July 1682 until his death in 1706, and a member of the Solomonic dynasty. He was the son of Yohannes I and Empress Sabla Wangel.
Vargas Island Provincial Park is a provincial park in British Columbia, Canada, comprising the west side of the island of the same name, which is located west of Meares Island and northwest of the resort community of Tofino in the Clayoquot Sound region of the West Coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The park was created as part of the Clayoquot Land-Use Decision on July 13, 1995 and contains 5,805 hectares, 1,543 hectares of it being upland and 4,262 hectares being foreshore. Also located on Vargas Island, on its north side, is Epper Passage Provincial Park.
St Gluvias is a settlement in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The village is now a suburb on the northern edge of Penryn which is two miles (3.2 km) northwest of Falmouth. Until 1 April 2021 there was civil parish was called St Gluvias which doesn't include the suburb but it was renamed to Ponsanooth.
The Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Paul, commonly known as St Paul's Cathedral or the Mdina Cathedral, is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Mdina, Malta, dedicated to St. Paul the Apostle. The cathedral was founded in the 12th century, and according to tradition it stands on the site of where Roman governor Publius met St. Paul following his shipwreck on Malta. The original cathedral was severely damaged in the 1693 Sicily earthquake, so it was dismantled and rebuilt in the Baroque style to a design of the Maltese architect Lorenzo Gafà between 1696 and 1705. The cathedral is regarded as Gafà's masterpiece.
Before the Acts of Union 1707, the barons of the shire of Selkirk elected commissioners to represent them in the unicameral Parliament of Scotland and in the Convention of the Estates.