The Duke of Cumberland had arrived in…

Cakraningrat IV, the ruler of Madura, wishing to free the eastern coast of Java from Mataram influence, had had stopped paying tribute to the VOC in 1744.

The Dutch, after a failed attempt to negotiate, had attacked Madura in 1745 and ousted Cakraningrat, who is banished to the Cape in 1746.

Mataram, having lost much of its lands by the middle of the eighteenth century, by 1743 consisted only of areas around Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Kedu and Bagelen.

Mataram's ruler, Pakubuwana II, had moved his court to Surakarta in 1745, but he is far from secure on his throne.

Raden Mas Said, Pangeran Sambernyawa (meaning "Soul Reaper"), son of banished Arya Mangkunegara, and several other princes of the royal blood still foment rebellion.

Pakubuwana II declares that anyone who can suppress the rebellion in Sukawati, areas around present day Sragen, will be rewarded with three thousand households.

Pangeran Mangkubumi, Pakuwana II’s brother, takes the challenge and defeated Mas Said in 1746, but when he claims his prize, his old enemy, patih Pringgalaya, advises the king against it.

In the middle of this problem, VOC’s Governor General, Baron van Imhoff, pays a visit to the kraton, the first one to do so during the entire history of relations between Mataram and VOC, to confirm the de facto Dutch possession of coastal and several interior regions.

Pakubuwana II hesitantly accepts the cession in lieu of twenty thousand real per year.

Mangkubumi is dissatisfied with his brother’s decision to yield to van Imhoff’s insistence, which has been made without consulting the other members of royal family and great nobles.

Van Imhoff has neither the  experience nor the tact to understand the delicate situation in Mataram and he rebukes Mangkubumi as “too ambitious” before the whole court when Mangkubumi claims the three thousand households.

This shameful treatment from a foreigner who had wrested the most prosperous lands of Mataram from his weak brother leads him to leadhis followers into rebellion in May 1746, this time with the help of Mas Said.

The Lipovans, so called Old Believers, had emigrated from Russia earlier in the eighteenth century, as dissenters from the main Russian Orthodox Church under the reforms of Patriarch Nikon in 1652.

They have settled along the Prut River in Moldavia and in the Danube Delta.

Vylkove, the last settlement on the bank of the Danube before the Black Sea, is located in the Ukrainian part of the Danube Delta at utmost southwestern Ukraine.

Founded in 1746 and assigned the status of "town", it is also known as "The Ukrainian Venice" thanks to a number of channels excavated inside its territory—the reason why boating is the most common method of transport.

The town's location inside the Danube Delta marshlands makes grain growing almost impossible, thus making fishery in the Danube, delta lakes and in the Black Sea the main occupation of the local people.

In addition, the city is famous for its viticulture and cultivation of strawberries on the islands in the river delta.

The Persians secure peace with the Turks in 1746; although Persia's boundaries are unchanged and Baghdad remains Ottoman, Nader Shah has wisely dropped his demand for Ja'fari recognition.

The British have become alarmed by Dupleix’s ambition, but the danger to their settlements and power is partly averted by the bitter mutual jealousy which exists between Dupleix and Bertrand François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, French governor of the Isle of Bourbon (today's La Réunion).

An unofficial war later called the First Carnatic War takes place in 1746 between the British East India Company and the French Compagnie des Indes when, after the British initially capture a few French ships, the French call for backup from as far afield as Mauritius, and on September 21 1746, capture the British city of Madras.

Among the prisoners of war is Robert Clive.

Dupleix opposes the restoration of the town to the British, thus violating the treaty signed by La Bourdonnais.

Charles Batteux advances for the first time the idea of "les beaux arts": "the "fine arts".

Born in Alland'Huy-et-Sausseuil, Ardennes, Batteux had studied theology at Reims and in 1739 had come to Paris, and after teaching in the colleges of Lisieux and Navarre, had been appointed to the chair of Greek and Roman philosophy in the Collège de France.

His 1746 treatise Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe is an attempt to find a unity among existing theories of beauty and taste on "a single principle", and its views will soon be widely accepted, not only in France but throughout Europe.

Books had been regarded with something approaching veneration in the a hundred years earlier, but by the mid-eighteenth century this is no longer the case.

The rise of literacy among the general public, combined with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, means that for the first time, books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers are widely available to the general public at a reasonable cost.

Such an explosion of the printed word demands a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling for those words.

This could be achieved by means of an authoritative dictionary of the English language.

Over the previous hundred and fifty years more than twenty dictionaries have been published in England, the oldest of these being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

The problem with these dictionaries is that they tend to be little more than poorly organized and poorly researched glossaries of "hard words": words that were technical, foreign, obscure or antiquated, but no dictionary has comprehensively documented the English lexicon.

In 1746, a consortium of London's most successful printers, including Robert Dowdsley and Thomas Longham—none can afford to undertake it alone—sets out to satisfy and capitalize on this need by the ever increasing reading and writing public.

The consortium contracts Samuel Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of fifteen hundred guineas guineas (fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds), equivalent to about two hundred and twenty thousand pounds in in 2017.

Johnson claims he can finish the work in three years, but it will take nearly nine years to complete it.

Peru has been the location for many large and damaging earthquakes since historical records began, most of which triggered devastating tsunamis.

The country lies above the convergent boundary where the Nazca Plate is subducting beneath the South American Plate at a rate of sixty-one millimeters per year.

The southern segment of the Peruvian part of this plate boundary is affected by the presence of the Nazca aseismic ridge, on the downgoing plate.

It also marks a major change in the subduction geometry between 'flat-slab' subduction to the northwest and normally dipping subduction to the southeast.

The ridge appears to act as a barrier to rupture propagation, reducing the potential earthquake magnitude.

The 1746 earthquake is interpreted to be a megathrust event that ruptured the whole of the northern segment of the plate interface within this zone.

The earthquake, with an estimated magnitude of 8.6–8.8 on the moment magnitude scale, is the largest to strike central Peru in recorded history, and the second largest of all time, after the 1868 Arica Earthquake in the south of the country.

The earthquake completely destroys the city of Lima in three to four minutes, also destroying Callao and everything else along the central Peruvian coast from Chancay in the north to Cañete in the south.

In Lima, all offices and all seventy-four churches are either damaged or destroyed leaving just twenty-five of the original three thousand houses standing.

Only eleven hundred and forty-one out of the population of sixty thousand die in Lima from the earthquake shaking, despite the amount of damage.

This is attributed to the intensity of the shaking increasing as the earthquake went on, giving the inhabitants the chance to escape.

The total number of casualties, including those from the tsunami, is almost six thousand, although some chroniclers give higher figures for Lima, partly due to the inclusion of the effects of subsequent epidemics.

Significant damage from the earthquake affects an area of about forty-four thousand square kilometers and it is felt up to seven hundred and fifty kilometers  away.

The estimated rupture length is three hundred and fifty kilometers.

There are at least two hundred aftershocks observed in the first twenty-four hours after the main shock, out of a total of seventeen hundred recorded in the following one hundred and twelve  days, although they cause no further casualties or significant damage.

The earthquake triggers a tsunami, which reaches the coast half an hour following the shock, causing great damage at all Peruvian ports.

Callao is worst affected, with a twenty-four-meter runup, and five kilometer inundation that destroys all twenty-three vessels in its harbor.

Callao's walls are destroyed and the city is inundated, killing most of the five thousand to six thousand inhabitants, leaving less than two hundred survivors.

Those that try to escape inland are overtaken by the wave.

Eyewitness accounts indicate two waves, the first of which was up to eighty feet (twenty-four meters) high.

Four of the boats are carried across the ruined port and thrown up to nearly a mile inland, including the warships Fermín and San Antonio.

The port city of Pisco is destroyed, despite having been rebuilt further inland after the devastating tsunami that accompanied the 1687 Peru earthquake.

The tsunami is also noticed at Acapulco, Mexico. (Other particularly devastating tsunamis have occurred in Peru in 1586, 1604, and 1868.)