1741
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Sir Robert Walpole uses the phrase "balance of power" in a speech he delivers in the House of Commons February 13, giving expression to the principle that has long guided British foreign policy.
Prussia's Frederick II gains a victory April 10 at Mollwitz (his 22,000 men outnumber Austria's 18,000) and later joins a secret alliance against Austria signed at Nymphenburg in May by France, Bavaria, and Spain, who are soon joined by Saxony (see 1740). An allied French-Bavarian army invades Austria and Bohemia and seizes Prague with Saxon help after 30,000 Austrian defenders have died of typhus. Frederick conquers Silesia and goes on to capture Brieg, Neisse, Glatz, and Olmutz before British diplomats mediate between Prussia and Austria (see 1742).
A Russian commission finds the regent Count Biron guilty of treason April 11 and sentences him to death by quartering (see 1740). The sentence is commuted to banishment for life to Siberia, and the count's vast property is confiscated, including diamonds worth £600,000. The French ambassador plots to destroy the Austrian influence dominant at St. Petersburg, playing on fears of the late Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth Petrovna, now 31, that she will be confined to a convent for life. Sweden uses French mediators to make a secret agreement with the Russian princess Elizabeth Petrovna, who promises to return the Baltic territories that Sweden lost 20 years ago under terms of the Treaty of Nystad in exchange for Swedish support in her efforts to gain power. She tells Finns that Finland will become a separate state under Russian suzerainty. Sweden declares war on Russia in July, announcing that Swedes will withdraw only when Elizabeth Petrovna becomes the Russian empress. Russian forces defeat the Swedes at Vilmanstrand in August, but the Swedes advance on St. Petersburg (see 1742). The French ambassador supplies Elizabeth Petrovna with money, and she drives with her supporters to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards the night of December 6 (November 25 Old Style), arouses their sympathies with a stirring speech, and leads the guards to the Winter Palace for a coup d'état. She seizes the new regent Anna Leopoldovna and her children, including the infant czar Ivan VI, banishes Anna and her husband to Siberia along with her foreign minister Andrei Ivanovich Osterman and other advisers, deposes the czar, has him imprisoned, and ascends the imperial throne to begin a reign that will continue until her death early in 1762.
Admiral Vernon leads a 100-ship, 27,000-man Royal Navy armada against the Spanish fortress San Felipe at Cartagena in the ongoing War of Jenkin's Ear but abandons a siege after 2 months of dodging Spanish lead and slapping mosquitoes that carry malaria and yellow fever (see 1739). The British retire to Jamaica after disease and battle wounds have reduced a force of 8,000 landed ashore near Cartagena to only 3,500 effectives. Admiral Vernon decorates colonial captain Lawrence Washington of Virginia for having led three gallant charges against the walls of San Felipe. Washington returns to the Potomac River plantation he calls Green Mountain and renames it Mount Vernon (see 1751).
Commodore George Anson, 44, Royal Navy, arrives on the southwest coast of South America May 8 after a 7-month voyage from England during which he has come through the Straits of Magellan, been driven back by ferocious storms to the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn, but lost three of his six ill-equipped, poorly manned ships. First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Charles Wager, 75, and Admiral Sir John Norris have promoted Anson's expedition, which was intended to capture Spanish treasure galleons in the Pacific, but Anson has had to supplement the crews of his flagship, the 60-gun H.M.S. Centurion, and his other ships with aged pensioners from the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, marines, and soldiers. Anson has hoped to replenish his stores on Juan Fernandez Island, but not being able to determine his longitude he narrowly misses the island, does not sight it until June 21, and is unable to land until July 23, by which time he has lost nearly two-thirds of his men to the elements, scurvy, or tropical disease. By the time of departure in September, only 214 of the original 521-man Centurion complement remain alive (including 15 of her 122 marines and pensioners), only 82 of H.M.S. Gloucester's original 396; and only 39 of H.M.S. Tryal's original 96. Redistributing those who have survived, Anson raids Spanish mining settlements on the Chilean coast, recruits more seamen, and takes some Spanish ships as prizes (see 1742).
A fire at New York March 18 destroys the provincial governor's house, barracks, and a chapel. More fires break out later in March and in early April. New Yorkers charge a "conspiracy" of Spanish blacks with having started the fires. Blacks are seized at random, even some who have helped to put out fires, and the council meets April 11 to discuss the situation (see 1712). The city's population of 10,000 includes 2,000 slaves, some of whom have been called "Spanish Negroes" since they arrived at New York aboard a Spanish ship that had been captured by a British warship in West Indian waters and sold as slaves. Fears are raised that the Spaniards, who last year attacked Florida, intend to attack New York. Roman Catholic priests are inciting slaves to burn the town on orders from Spain, say the rumormongers; other fantastic stories are told, and the city's German-born mayor John Cruger (whose fortune was derived in part from slave trading) ruthlessly suppresses the uprising. Two slaves are hanged May 11 on a little island in the Collect despite the lack of any real evidence against them. Two more blacks are burnt alive, six are hanged June 7, more hangings and burnings ensue, and three white "conspirators" are hanged June 12. The racist and anti-papist paranoia subsides after the last hanging, but by August 29 fully 154 blacks have been jailed, 18 hanged, 14 burnt alive, and 71 banished to the West Indies; 24 whites have been imprisoned, and four of them have been hanged.
Russian pioneers in Siberia set out for North America in small boats from Kamchatka (see 1579). They have no navigational instruments but do have Danish navigator Vitus Bering, now 61, who will die of scurvy on the return voyage (see 1728).
New York's journeymen bakers go out on strike for higher pay and better working conditions. Obliged to start before dawn and work in hot basements, they are among the most ill-used workers in the colonial food industry.
Salem sea captain Richard Derby receives instructions from the owners of his schooner Volante to avoid the British Navigation Act of 1660 and subsequent acts by sailing under Dutch colors on his voyage to the Caribbean and to be prepared to bribe customs officials: "If you should fall so low as Statia [the Dutch island of St. Eustatius, see politics, 1635], and any Frenchman should make you a good offer with good security, or by making your vessel a Dutch bottom, or by any other means practicable in order to your getting among ye Frenchmen, embrace it . . . Also secure a permit so as for you to trade there next voyage, which you may undoubtedly do through your factor or by a little greasing some others."
Essai de cosmologie by P. L. M. de Maupertuis suggests a survival of the fittest concept: "Could not one say that since, in the accidental combination of Nature's productions, only those could survive which found themselves provided with certain appropriate relationships, it is no wonder that these relationships are present in all the species that actually exist? These species which we see today are only the smallest part of those which a blind destiny produced." But few people read Maupertuis (see Darwin, 1840).
An epidemic of exanthematous typhus kills 30,000 in France.
A typhus epidemic in Sweden comes on the heels of a poor harvest and takes a heavy toll.
A yellow fever epidemic at Cádiz kills 10,000.
The Monophysite Coptic bishop Athanasius converts to Roman Catholicism, bringing the Eastern Catholic Church of the Alexandrian rite into communion with Rome (Monophysites acknowledge only one nature in the person of Jesus Christ). Two succeeding bishops will not follow the example of Athanasius for lack of a bishop to perform the ceremony in Egypt and lack of transportation to Europe (see 1895).
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Calvinist clergyman Jonathan Edwards, 38, of Northampton in the Massachusetts Bay colony graphically depicts the terrors of damnation. The sermon by the Connecticut-born Edwards at Enfield is published in pamphlet form and draws opposition from Boston clergyman Charles Chauncy, 36, and other rationalists, but the mystic Edwards begins what will be called a Great Awakening that will be marked by conversions and revivals throughout the colonies, with Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and a variety of small, Bible-centered groups coming into existence, many of them professing allegiance to Baptist teachings (see 1743).
Fiction: Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus appears in a new edition of works by poet Alexander Pope, now 53. Written for the most part as early as 1713 or 1714, largely by the late mathematician-physician John Arbuthnot (with contributions by Jonathan Swift, the late John Gay, and other members of London's Scriblerus Club), it is full of pretentious jargon by a fictitious literary hack and amounts to a satirical sendup of pedantry.
Painting: Autumn by François Boucher; The Enraged Musician by William Hogarth.
Composer Antonio Vivaldi dies in poverty at Vienna July 28 at age 63, having written 46 concerti grossi (and more than 500 concerti of various kinds), more than 70 violin sonatas, and 30 operas. His opera L'oracolo in Messenia will have its premiere next year.
Opera: Artaserse 12/26 at Milan's Teatro Regio Ducal, with music by German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, 27.
Ode: "Rule, Britannia" by Thomas Arne, lyrics from the libretto of Alfred: A Masque by Scottish poet David Mallet, 36, and James Thomson, now 41, presented last year.
Some 70 fishing vessels put out from Gloucester in the Massachusetts Bay colony, 60 from Marblehead.
South Carolina colonist Elizabeth Lucas, 19, introduces indigo cultivation. The daughter of a British colonel who was stationed in the West Indies before being called off to fight the Spaniards, Eliza has been managing her father's three South Carolina rice plantations since she was 16, taking care of her sick mother and younger sister Polly as well. Wappoo, the largest of the three properties, contains 600 acres and has 20 slaves. Worms and frosts will keep her from harvesting a decent indigo crop until 1744, but she will then find a ready market in Britain for the blue dye derived from it (see 1744).
New England exports apples to the West Indies, where they cannot grow but are much in demand for their cool, refreshing qualities (see 1759).
The Boston Weekly News-Journal for October 29 reports that a shipload of Irish immigrants has arrived "so reduc'd as to eat up their Tallow, Candles, etc. and for some Time had fed upon the Flesh of the humane Bodies deceas'd." Ships are often ill-provisioned for the ocean voyage because of owners' greed or mismanagement.
China's population reaches 140 million (more than 220 million by some accounts), up from 100 million in 1660. The emperor Qianlong restores the baojia (paochia) system of local registration that will make population figures more reliable from now until 1851.
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