Sir Francis Drake April 19

On April 19 1587 Sir Francis Drake, in a pre-emptive strike, ‘singed the King of Spain’s beard’ by sailing a fleet into Cadiz, one of Spain’s main ports, occupying the town for three days, destroying 31 enemy ships as well as a large quantity of stores and capturing 6 ships. This audacious attack delayed the sailing of the Spanish Armada by a year and earned Drake the astonishingly original Spanish epithet ‘El Draque’ (Dragon). 183 years later, on 19 April 1770 Captain James Cook bumped his ship Endeavour into the east cost of Australia. The site of Cook’s first landing was at Kurnell on Botany Bay, which was given its name by Sir Joseph Banks, the famous naturalist and ‘grandstander’, who was also on board. Banks introduced an amazed world to the name "kangaroo", from the aboriginal Guugu-Yimidhirr word gangaroo, which, history tells us, means ‘big grey furry hopping thing that never has a blocked nose and throws a good punch’. On the subject of sailing naturalists, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory is named Darwin to commemorate the 1839 visit there of the man who proved, in his book ‘The Origin of Species’, that a gangaroo is unlikely to be descended from either a male duck or a dragon. Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882.