Commanding a fleet bound for India, Cabral was blown far off course across the Atlantic and spotted a mountain the Portuguese named Monte Pascoal. Landing days later, his expedition became the first recorded European contact with the territory that would become Brazil, which Portugal claimed under the Treaty of Tordesillas.

After months of tension during a breadfruit-collecting voyage, mutineers under Fletcher Christian seized control of the Bounty near Tofua. Bligh and eighteen loyal crew were set adrift in an open launch; Bligh navigated it over 3,600 nautical miles to Timor, a feat of seamanship, while the mutineers eventually settled on remote Pitcairn Island.

Born into a poor peasant family, Saddam Hussein rose through the Ba'ath Party's ranks to become Iraq's president in 1979, ruling with a mixture of state-building ambition and brutal repression. His decisions to invade Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 shaped decades of Middle Eastern conflict, culminating in his overthrow by a US-led invasion in 2003.

Communist partisans caught Mussolini disguised in a German greatcoat as he tried to slip into Switzerland with retreating German troops. After a brief detention in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra, they executed him along with his mistress Clara Petacci. His body was later hauled to Milan and hung upside down in a public square, where crowds spat on and beat it.

During a test run on the Yamanashi Maglev Test Line, the Central Japan Railway Company's magnetically levitated L0 Series train hit 603 kilometers per hour, breaking the previous record it had set days earlier. The technology, using superconducting magnets to lift and propel the train, is intended for the future Chuo Shinkansen line linking Tokyo and Osaka.