1698
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Contents: political eventshuman rights, social justice commerce energy science religion literature crime architecture, real estate environment agriculture food and drink population |
Russia's palace household troops (the strelitzi) rebel in June while Peter I is traveling in western Europe. Their aim is to restore Sophia Alekseevna to the throne, but Peter rushes home and crushes the uprising with help from his chief military counselor Patrick Gordon. He imposes a tax on beards September 5.
A Treaty of Partition signed by the European powers October 11 attempts to deal with the question of the Spanish succession. Spain's Carlos II is childless, and the Spanish house of Hapsburg is doomed (see 1700).
Discourses Concerning Government by the late English republican leader Algernon Sidney will be influential in encouraging liberal provisions in various constitutions (see 1683).
New France's governor Louis de Buade, comte de Palluau et de Frontenac, dies at Quebec November 28 at age 76, having encouraged fruitful explorations to the west and repelled British and Iroquois attacks on his colonial province.
Covetous Yoruba cavalrymen from neighboring Oyo invade West Africa's rich Dahomey state, which has gained her wealth by supplying slave traders (see 1685). They will control the country until the 1730s despite harassment from guerrillas loyal to the Dahomey king Akaba (see 1708).
Arab forces expel the Portuguese from Africa's East Coast.
Parliament opens the slave trade to English merchants, who will in some cases carry on a triangular trade from New England to Africa to the Caribbean Islands to New England. The merchant vessels will carry New England rum to African slavers, African slaves on "the middle passage" to the West Indies, and West Indian sugar and molasses to New England for the rum distilleries. Molasses (the word comes from the Latin melaceus, meaning honeylike) is the brown syrup that remains after the sucrose in raw sugar cane has been crystallized in the manufacture of refined sugar, whose consumption has soared through the popularity of cocoa, coffee, and tea.
The first ships of the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies sail from Leith July 26 with 1,200 pioneers who include William Paterson and his wife and child (see 1695). Arriving November 4 at Darien, having lost only 15 men en route, they call the country New Caledonia, and choose a well-defended spot with a good harbor midway between the Spanish strongholds Porto Bello and Cartagena, but lack of provisions, sickness, and anarchy will soon reduce the settlers to misery (see 1699).
The London Stock Exchange as its beginnings in a bourse that by some accounts is the world's first true stock exchange (see 1801; Bremen bourse, 1682).
English engineer Thomas Savery, 48, pioneers the steam engine with a crude steam-powered "miner's friend" to pump water out of coal mines (see Newcomen, 1705; Watt, 1765).
"On Nature Itself" ("De Ipsa Natura") by Gottfried W. Leibniz explains the internal activity of nature in terms of the philosopher-mathematician's own theory of dynamics.
Physician-mathematician-physicist Erasmus Bartholin dies at Copenhagen November 4 at age 73, having discovered the optical phenomenon of double refraction.
New York's Trinity Church holds its first religious services March 13. Its Church of England status gives the institution a quasi-public character, and it has been built at the head of Wall Street, on the east side of Broadway, with contributions from virtually every prosperous citizen, including Catholics, Jews (who are listed on a separate page), and Captain William Kidd. The city has given the church permission to claim stranded whales for conversion into oil and whalebone.
The Brattle Street Church congregation is organized at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by local businessman Thomas Brattle, now 40, who has been treasurer of Harvard College since 1693 and has become uncomfortable with the strictly Puritan liturgy of Boston churches. Services employ Bible readings without commentary, the Lord's Prayer is said, and the departure from orthodoxy arouses the wrath of conservatives who include Harvard's president Increase Mather and his son Cotton.
Nonfiction: "A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage" by clergyman Jeremy Collier, 48, censures William Congreve, Thomas D'Urfey, John Dryden, John Vanbrugh, and William Wycherley for indecency and undermining public morality by showing sympathy for vice in their works. His pamphlet ignites a war of words that will continue until Collier's death in 1726.
Captain William Kidd seizes the Armenian merchantman AuedaghMerchant in the Indian Ocean January 30 and divides her rich cargo among his crewmen (see 1697). He has balked at attacking pirate ships as being too dangerous and, instead, has turned to piracy himself, going on to take other prizes. News of his criminality reaches India's aged Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who threatens the East India Company; its officers communicate with London, where the Admiralty declares Kidd a pirate and dispatches a fleet to apprehend him. Scuttling his leaky, 34-ton galley Adventure off Madagascar, Kidd sails in the Auedagh Merchant for the West Indies, where he will find that he has been proclaimed a pirate (see 1700).
Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart lays out the Place Vendôme at Paris with a statue of Louis XIV in the center (see 1810).
London's Whitehall Palace burns down except for the Banqueting Hall built by Inigo Jones in 1622.
The Russian czar Peter introduces sunflowers on his return from the West; they will be the leading source of oilseeds in Russia and eastern Europe (see 1510).
Benedictine cellar master Dom Pierre Perignon, 60, perfects sparkling champagne at the French Abbey d'Hautvilliers. He is not the inventor of sparkling champagne (it has been evolving for years), but he properly identifies the dominant characteristics of wines from various sites in the valley (and in the hills to the north and south), blends them to achieve consistent and well-balanced results, and uses corked bottles of strong English glass. Cellar master since 1668, Dom Perignon employs a cork bottle stopper after much experimentation with other woods, and he uses a risky method that involves starting a secondary fermentation in the tightly corked bottle, trapping the carbon dioxide in solution and hoping that its total volume will not explode the bottle. Having no other place to go, the carbon dioxide enters the wine, as Dom Perignon discovers when he opens a bottle and the cork "pops." The novelty of a sparkling wine soon captivates the court, and Dom Perignon will continue as cellarmaster until 1715 (see 1724; Moët and Chandon, 1743).
Two-thirds of the New York colony's population remains on Long Island and near the mouth of the Hudson; the Iroquois and other hostile tribes block expansion to the north and west.
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