May 10 in History

In 1775, during the American Radical War, a small Colonial militia led by Ethan Allen and Colonel Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga. This victory provided the Continental Army with much-needed artillery and boosted morale, marking a crucial early success in the fight for independence.

The Han astronomers didn't call it a sunspot. They recorded a black vapor within the sun—specific enough to measure its position, detailed enough to date: 28 BCE, during Emperor Cheng's reign. While Rome was still attributing solar phenomena to angry gods, these Chinese observers were methodically tracking what they saw through silk or jade filters, writing it down without theological panic. Their records would give modern scientists a 2,000-year dataset on solar activity cycles. They thought they were cataloging omens. They were actually doing astrophysics.

Columbus sailed past two small Caribbean islands and couldn't stop talking about the turtles. Thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands crawling across beaches, swimming so thick in the shallows his ships had to navigate carefully. He called the islands Las Tortugas—"The Turtles." The name didn't stick. By 1530, English sailors were calling them the Cayman Islands instead, after the local word for crocodile. But those green sea turtles? Ships provisioned there for the next three centuries, sailors filling their holds with live meat. The last major nesting colony disappeared by 1800.

The invasion fleet sent to capture Hispaniola got its ass handed to it by Spanish militia. Penn and Venables, humiliated and desperate, pivoted to a backup target nobody in London had asked for: Jamaica. Spain had maybe 1,500 colonists there, mostly cattle ranchers. England took it in days. But here's the thing—the Spanish enslaved Africans fled to the mountains and formed free Maroon communities that would resist British control for over a century. What started as a consolation prize became the crown jewel of Britain's sugar empire. And cost them more blood fighting freed people than Spanish soldiers.

The dying king chose the wrong man to keep his throne warm. Narai, fading fast in 1688, appointed General Phetracha as regent to protect his adopted heir. Three months later, Phetracha had the French advisors expelled, the heir executed, and himself crowned. The Ayutthaya Kingdom's thirty-three-year experiment with Western influence ended in a single summer. And for the next 150 years, Siam sealed itself off so completely that Europeans called it the Forbidden Kingdom. Trust a general with temporary power, get a permanent dynasty instead.

Admiral Fyodor Apraksin split his fleet. One half hit Katajanokka, the other Hietalahti—a pincer move on Helsinki that the Swedes didn't see coming because they thought Russia couldn't field a proper navy at all. Peter the Great had built his Baltic fleet from nothing in just twelve years. And now here it was, landing troops on two beaches simultaneously while Swedish defenders scrambled between positions. The Battle of Helsinki lasted three days. When it ended, Russia controlled Finland's coast and Sweden's two-hundred-year dominance of the Baltic was effectively over. Sometimes a navy matters more than an army.

"Wilkes and Liberty" got scrawled on walls across London when the government locked up John Wilkes for calling King George III a liar in print. Issue Number 45 of The North Briton had accused the king of deceiving Parliament. Crowds stormed the streets demanding his release. Forty-five became a rallying cry—chalked on doors, shouted in taverns, worn as badges. The authorities arrested one troublesome journalist. They accidentally created the first modern free speech martyr in Britain. And a number that meant freedom to anyone who could count.

A single article cost London dozens of lives. When printer John Wilkes called George III's 1763 speech "the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery," he landed in prison five years later. His supporters didn't take it well. May 10, 1768: rioters stormed the King's Bench Prison in Southwark, demanding his release. Troops fired into the crowd. At least seven dead, maybe more. The massacre had a name within hours—the St George's Fields Massacre. And Wilkes? He won his parliamentary seat from his cell, making the government look exactly as tyrannical as he'd claimed.