The comte de Lapérouse and his two…
April 1786 CE
He arrives on April 9, 1786, at Easter Island, anchoring at Hanga Roa.
He makes a detailed map of the bay, including his anchorage points, as well as a more generalized map of the island, plus some illustrations.
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Delarov, while serving the Panov brothers’ company, has used the harbor on Unga Island as a base of operations, causing the harbor to be known for many years as Delarov Harbor or Greko-Delarovskoe, because Delarov is Greek.
Delarov and two other captains make exploratory forays from 1781 to 1786 from Unga Island into Prince William Sound.
Hanna's backers, encouraged by this financial success, sponsor a second voyage in 1786.
Leaving Macao in May, he again reaches Nootka in August.
He had been preceded by an expedition from Bombay led by James Strange, and as a result he is able to purchase only fifty skins.
Sailing north, Hanna discovers and names a number of inlets and islands on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
He makes a chart of those parts he visits and bestows the name of his patrons on several places, such as Cox’s Island, Lane’s Bay, Fitzhugh Sound, Lance’s Islands and MacIntosh’s Inlet.
Seeing land to the north, which is probably the islands off the continent or even Kunghit Island, the southernmost of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Irishman James Hanna names it Nova Hibernia, complete with a St. Patrick’s Bay.
These names, except Fitzhugh Sound, Cox Island and Lance’s Island (now spelt, in the Spanish way Lanz Island), will be ignored by later cartographers.
He then moves south to Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.
Clayoquot Sound is the home of the powerful chief Wickaninnish, who is one of the dominant figures in the maritime fur trade at the end of the eighteenth century.
The population of the large, island-filled bay probably numbers over four thousand at the time of Hanna’s visit.
The village of Opitsat on Meares Island, opposite the present-day settlement of Tofino, is considered the largest native settlement on the entire North West Coast.
Hanna continues his explorations and, at Ahousat on Vargas Island, visits Chief Cleaskinah, who will subsequently be known as "Captain Hanna" as a consequence of an exchange of names in accordance with local custom.
His success in trading for pelts is limited, and before he is able to make a planned third voyage to America Hanna will die, shortly after his arrival in Macao, in early 1787.
Merchant ships of the King George's Sound Company, under command of the maritime fur traders Nathaniel Portlock and Captain George Dixon, anchor in the harbor of Kealakekua Bay in 1786, but avoid coming ashore, as they had been on Cook's third voyage, during which he had met his demise.
A conversation between the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1780 had led Jacobi to a protracted study of Baruch Spinoza's works.
Lessing had avowed that he knew no philosophy, in the true sense of that word, save Spinozism.
Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinozas (1st ed. 1785, 2nd ed. 1789) expresses sharply and clearly his strenuous objection to a dogmatic system in philosophy, and draws upon him the vigorous enmity of the Berlin group, led by Moses Mendelssohn.
Jacobi claims that Spinoza's doctrine is pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance.
This, for Jacobi, is the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it will finally end in absolute atheism.
Mendelssohn disagrees with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism.
The entire issue becomes a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at this time, which Immanuel Kant rejects, as he thinks that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality will lead to antinomies in thought.
Jacobi is ridiculed for trying to reintroduce into philosophy the antiquated notion of unreasoning belief, is denounced as an enemy of reason, as a pietist, and as a Jesuit in disguise, and is especially attacked for his use of the ambiguous term Glaube (German: "belief, faith").
Many influential intellectuals and progressive politicians count themselves as members of the Illuminati during the period in which it is legally allowed to operate, including Ferdinand of Brunswick and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack, who is number two in the operation and is found with much of the group's documentation when his home is searched.
The Illuminati's members pledge obedience to their superiors, and are divided into three main classes, each with several degrees.
The order has branches in most countries of the European continent; it reportedly gains around two thousand members during the ten-year span from 1776 to 1786.
The organization has its attraction for such literary men as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, and even for the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar.
Weishaupt has modeled his group to some extent on Freemasonry, and many Illuminati chapters draw membership from existing Masonic lodges.
Internal rupture and panic over succession precedes its downfall, which is effected by the Secular Edict made by the Bavarian government in 1785.
A group of notables had elected his brother, Qais bin Ahmad, as Imam around the end of 1785.
This revolt soon collapses.
One of his sons is later held prisoner in Fort Al Jalali for a period by the governor of Muscat.
Another son, Hamad bin Said, comes to negotiate with the governor.
Hamad and his followers manage to gain control of forts al-Jalali and al-Mirani, and thus of Muscat; this happens in 1786.
One by one, the other fortresses in Oman submit to Hamad, until Said no longer has any temporal power.
Hamad takes the title of Sheikh and establishes his court in Muscat.
Said bin Ahmad remains in Rustaq and retains the title of Imam, but this is purely a symbolic religious title that carries no power.
This climb, initiated by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, who gives a reward for the successful ascent, traditionally marks the start of modern mountaineering.
Philipe Buonarroti, born in Pisa to a family of local nobility, had studied jurisprudence at the University of Pivora, where he founded what was seen by the authorities of Grand Duke Peter Leopold as a subversive paper, the Gazetta Universale.
Though under constant surveillance by the authorities, the outbreak of the French Revolution had encouraged him to support the revolution.
He had traveled to Corsica to spread the revolutionary message with the Giornale Patriottico di Corsica, the first Italian language paper to openly support the French Revolution.
In Corsica, Buonarroti has joined the Jacobin Club, and become a friend of the Bonapartes.
French authorities confiscate Buonarroti's library of Masonic and subversive books in 1786.
The social and ecclesiastical reforms in the spirit of the Enlightenment which had been undertaken by Emperor Joseph II and his minister Kaunitz in Austria touches the supremacy of Rome so nearly that in the hope of staying them Pope Pius VI adopts the exceptional course of visiting Vienna in person.
He had left Rome on February 27, 1782 and, though magnificently received by the Emperor, his mission proved a fiasco; he is, however, able a few years later to curb those German archbishops who, in 1786 at the Congress of Ems, had shown a tendency towards independence.