Hearne and his complement of thirty-eight civilians…
August 1782 CE
Hearne and his complement of thirty-eight civilians are confronted on August 8, 1782, by a French force under the comte de La Pérouse, composed of three ships, including one of seventy-four guns, and two hundred and ninety soldiers.
As a veteran, Hearne recognizes hopeless odds and surrenders without a shot.
Hearne and some of the other prisoners are allowed to sail back to England from Hudson Strait in a small sloop.
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Daikokuya Kōdayū, born in Wakamatsu, Ise Province (Suzuka, Mie, Japan), had been adopted by a merchant, Daikokuya in Shiroko, Ise (also in Suzuka, Mie).
As the captain of the ship, Shinsho-maru, Kōdayū sets sail for Yedo in 1782, but the ship is caught in a storm around Enshū (Western Shizuoka).
Adrift seven months, one man dies.
Just afterwards, the remaining fifteen sailors find and land on the island of Amchitka, the southernmost of the Rat Islands group at the western end of the Aleutian islands chain, where Russians and Aleut people live.
Russian trappers and traders have established settlements on the islands, exploiting the indigenous people, whose population on the island of Amchitka is quickly falling.
According to a later account by Kōdayū, the islanders receive necessities and supplies such as tobacco, ironware, horse- and ox-skins, and cotton in return for hunting otters or seals.
The furs brought by indigenous people are divided into thirds between the Russian Empire, Moscow furrier Vassily Yakovlevich Zhigarev, and Zhigarev's Russian employees.
The castaways are taken care of by Russian employees of Zhigarev and hunt with indigenous people.
Hawaiian ruler Kalaniʻōpuʻu dies in 1782 and his oldest son Kiwalaʻo officially inherits the kingdom, but his nephew Kamehameha I has an important military post, guardian of the god Kūkaʻilimoku.
A younger son, Keōua Kuahuʻula, is not happy about this and provokes Kamehameha.
The forces meet just south of Kealakekua Bay at the battle of Mokuʻōhai.
Kamehameha wins control of the west and north sides of the island, but Keōua escapes.
It will take over a decade for Kamehameha to consolidate his control.
King Taksin visits harsh punishment upon officials reported to be abusive or oppressive, torturing and executing high officials.
A faction led by Phraya San finally seizes the capital and forces the king to step down, although Taksin requests to be allowed to become a monk.
General Chao Phraya Chakri is away fighting in Cambodia when the coup occurs, but he quickly returns to the Thai capital on being informed of the coup.
Arriving at the capital, the General extinguishes the coup through arrests, investigations and punishments, restoring peace in the capital.
General Chao Phraya Chakri decides to put the deposed Taksin to death, according to the Royal Thai Chronicles, which state that, while being taken to the executing venue, Taksin asks for an audience with the General but is turned down.
Taksin is beheaded in front of Wichai Prasit fortress on Wednesday, April 10, 1782, and his body is buried at Wat Bang Yi Ruea Tai.
General Chao Phraya Chakri then seizes control of the capital and declares himself king, together with establishing the House of Chakri.
The Official Annamese Chronicles states that General Chao Phraya Chakri ordered Taksin to be executed at Wat Chaeng by being sealed in a velvet sack; he was then beaten to death with a scented sandalwood club.
One account claims that Taksin was secretly sent to a palace located in the remote mountains of Nakhon Si Thammarat where he lived until 1825, and that a substitute was beaten to death in his place.
King Taksin’s ashes and that of his wife are located at Wat Intharam (located in Thonburi).
They have been placed in two lotus bud-shaped stupas that stand before the old hall.
Another contradicting view of the events is that General Chakri actually wanted to be King and had accused King Taksin of being Chinese.
The later history was aimed at legitimizing the new monarch, Phraya Chakri or Rama I of Rattanakosin.
According to Nidhi Eoseewong, a prominent Thai historian, writer, and political commentator, Taksin could be seen as the originator of the new style of leader, promoting the 'decentralized' kingdom and a new generation of the nobles of Chinese merchant origin, his major helpers in the wars.
On the other hand, Phraya Chakri and his supporters were of the 'old' generation of the Ayutthaya nobles, discontent with the changes.
This theory, however, overlooks the fact that Chao Phraya Chakri was himself of partly Chinese origin as well as being married to one of Taksin's daughters.
No previous conflicts between them were mentioned in histories.
Reports on the conflicts between the king and the Chinese merchants were seen as having been caused by the control of the price of rice in the time of famine.
Chao Phraya Chakri had had Taksin's son summoned to Cambodia and executed, however, prior to the general's return to Thonburi.
Phraya Chakri was, in fact, the highest noble in the kingdom, charging the state affairs as the Chancellor, and therefore had the greatest potential to be the new leader.
Yet another view of the events is that Thailand owed China for millions of baht, and King Taksin, in order to cancel the agreement between China and Thailand, decided to become ordained and pretend to die in an execution.
Several historians have suggested that the tale of Taksin’s 'insanity' may have been reconstructed as an excuse for his overthrow.
The letters of a French priest who was in Thonburi at the time, however, support the accounts of the monarch's peculiar behavior.
Thus the terms 'insanity' or 'madness' possibly were the contemporary definition describing the monarch's actions.
When he ascends to the throne in 1782, he takes the name Ramathibodi, just like the founder of the Ayutthaya Kingdom.
His full title is much longer (Phra Borommarachathirat Ramathibodi Sisin Borommaha Chakkraphat Rachathibodin etc.), intended to demonstrate his universal claim to power like of earlier Siamese kings.
A Lak Mueang (city pillar) is erected on Rattanakosin Island, located on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River, by order of King Rama I, an act considered the founding of the capital city of Bangkok.
Variously translated as the Complete Library in Four Sections, Imperial Collection of Four, Emperor's Four Treasuries, Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature, or Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, it is the largest collection of books in Chinese history.
The editorial board includes three hundred and sixty-one scholars, with Ji Yun and Lu Xixiong as chief editors.
They had begun compilation in 1773 and complete it in 1782.
The editors have collected and annotated over ten thousand manuscripts from the imperial collections and other libraries, destroyed some three thousand titles, or works, that are considered to be anti-Manchu, and selected three thousand four hundred and sixty-one titles, or works, for inclusion into the Siku Quanshu.
They are bound in 36,381 volumes with more than seventy-nine thousand chapters comprising about two point three million pages, and approximately eight hundred million Chinese characters.
Scribes have copied every word by hand, and according to Wilkinson (2000: 274), "The copyists (of whom there were 3,826) were not paid in cash but rewarded with official posts after they had transcribed a given number of words within a set time."
Four copies for the emperor are placed in specially constructed libraries in the Forbidden City, Old Summer Palace, Shenyang, and Wenjin Chamber, Chengde.
Three additional copies for the public are deposited in Siku Quanshu libraries in Hangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Yangzhou.
All seven libraries also receive copies of the 1725 imperial encyclopedia Gujin tushu jicheng.
A new element (now known to be tellurium) is discovered alloyed with gold in 1782 by Franz Joseph Müller von Reichenstein, an Austrian mining inspector in Transylvania.
Mineralogists name it aurum paradoxicum or aurum problematicum.
Joseph II had started issuing edicts when Maria Theresa died—over six thousand in all, plus eleven thousand new laws designed to regulate and reorder every aspect of the empire.
The spirit of Josephinism is benevolent and paternal.
He intends to make his people happy, but strictly in accordance with his own criteria.
Joseph sets about building a rationalized, centralized, and uniform government for his diverse lands, a hierarchy under himself as supreme autocrat.
The personnel of government are expected to be imbued with the same dedicated spirit of service to the state that he himself has.
Recruiting is done without favor for class or ethnic origins, and promotion is solely by merit.
To further uniformity, the emperor has made German the compulsory language of official business throughout the Empire, which affects especially the Kingdom of Hungary.
The Hungarian assembly is stripped of its prerogatives, and not even called together.
The busy Joseph inspires a complete reform of the legal system, abolishes brutal punishments and the death penalty in most instances, and imposes the principle of complete equality of treatment for all offenders.
He ends censorship of the press and theater.
In 1781–82 he extends full legal freedom to serfs.
Rentals paid by peasants are to be regulated by officials of the crown and taxes are levied upon all income derived from land.
The landlords, finding their economic position threatened, will eventually reverse the policy.
Indeed, in Hungary and Transylvania, the resistance of the magnates is such that Joseph has to content himself for a while with halfway measures.
Of the five million Hungarians, forty thousand are nobles, of whom four thousand are magnates who own and rule the land; most of the remainder are serfs legally tied to particular estates.
Riyadh finally succumbs in 1782 to the steady pressure of the new movement known as Wahhabism.
The Spanish regain control of the island of Menorca on January 5, 1782, after a long siege of St. Philip's Castle in Port Mahon.
Fox immediately proposes a separate peace on favorable conditions to the Dutch government.
Unfortunately for the Dutch they have just bound themselves closer to France by agreeing to act "in concert" with France in naval actions and therefore a separate peace is no longer an option.
A real military alliance with France is, however, still blocked by the stadtholder, despite the fact that many in the Republic favor it.
The war, as far as it goes, is fought in three main theaters.
Britain blockades Dutch ports in Europe, and embarks on expeditions to seize Dutch colonial properties throughout the world.
These are almost entirely successful; only an attempt to capture the Dutch castle at Elmina on the Africa's Gold Coast (modern Ghana) fails.
While many Dutch territories in the West Indies are taken by the British, some, like Curaçao, are not attacked due to their defensive strength.