Spain has long held that all foreign sailors in the Pacific Ocean are to be treated as enemies.

Spanish claims of sovereignty, especially on the west coasts of the Americas, date back centuries.

One of the first serious threats to the Spanish claim comes from the extension of Russian fur trading activity from Siberia to Alaska during the middle and later parts of the eighteenth century.

Reports about the Krenitsyn-Levashev voyage, meant to be kept secret, spread through Europe and cause alarm in Spain.

The Spanish government, already concerned about Russian activity in Alaska, decides to colonize Alta California and sends exploratory voyages to Alaska to assess the threat and strengthen Spanish claims of sovereignty on coast north of Mexico.

James Cook has continued to explore the Antarctic, heading south into the summer sea ice, icebergs and fog until he reached 67°31′ South before hauling north again for fourteen hundred miles (twenty-two hundred kilometers).

The third crossing of the Antarctic Circle, on January 26, 1774, is the precursor to the most southerly penetration, reaching latitude 71°10′ South at longitude 106°54′ West on January 30 when they can go no further because of the solid sea ice.

On this occasion, Cook writes:

    I who had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go, was not sorry in meeting with this interruption...

The vessel is then launched north to complete a huge parabola in the Pacific Ocean, reaching latitudes just below the Equator, then New Guinea.

He will land at the Friendly Islands, Easter Island, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and Vanuatu before returning to Queen Charlotte Sound in New Zealand.

Mount Papandayan, a complex stratovolcano located in Garut Regency, to the southeast of the city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia, is about fifteen kilometers to the southwest of the town of Garut.

At the summit, there are four large craters that contain active fumarole fields.

An eruption in 1772 causes the northeast flank to collapse producing a catastrophic debris avalanche that destroys forty villages and kills nearly three thousand people.

The eruption truncates the volcano into a broad shape with two peaks and a flat area one point one kilometers wide with Alun-Alun crater in the middle, making the mountain appear as a twin volcano; one of the peaks is called Papandayan and the other Mount Puntang.

Hsinbyushin of Burma has never abandoned his plan to force Siam to its knees, and as soon as he had been informed of the foundation of Thonburi as King Taksin's capital in late 1767, he had commanded the Governor of Tavoy to subjugate Taksin.

The Burmese army had advanced to the district of Bangkung in the province of Samut Songkram to the west of the new capital, but was routed by the Thai king himself.

However, when the Chinese troops invaded, Hsinbyushin had decided to call most of his troops back to resist the Chinese.

After the conclusion of peace with China, the Burmese king sends another small army of five thousand to attack Siam in 1774, but it is completely surrounded by the Thais at Bangkeo in Ratchaburi and eventually starvation compels the Burmese to capitulate to Taksin.

Catherine’s troops, after initial defeats, eventually shatter Pugachev’s rebel army.

Pugachev is betrayed, captured by the tsarist forces, and brought to Moscow in an iron cage; he will be beheaded in January 1775.

Scheele, the discoverer of oxygen, obtains a greenish-yellowish gas from hydrochloric acid and powdered black manganese dioxide in 1774, but fails to recognize it as an element.

Called oxymuriatic acid, now known to be chlorine, it is considered an oxygen-containing compound.

Digestion of bones with nitric or sulfuric acid forms phosphoric acid, from which Scheele distills phosphorus by heating with charcoal.

Scheele and Torbern Olaf Bergman recognize manganese as an element while working with the mineral pyrolusite; Scheele's associate Gahn isolates the pure metal later in 1774.

The element's name, which Guyton de Morveau will propose in 1787, derives from Latin magnes, magnet, because of earlier confusion with magnetic ores.

Scheele finds that the mineral called heavy spar or barys—Greek for heavy—contains a new earth, which becomes known as baryta.

From this base, now known to be the oxide of barium, he prepares some crystals of barium sulfate, which he sends to Gahn.

Gahn finds a month later that the mineral barite is also composed of barium sulfate.

Narayanrao (August 10, 1755 – August 30, 1773) had become Peshwa of the Maratha Empire after the death of his brother Madhavrao Peshwa in 1772.

Madhavrao had been a minor when appointed Peshwa.

Raghunathrao, appointed as the regent to the young Peshwa, had soon fallen out of favor with Madhavrao and even tried to conspire against him by joining the Nizam of Hyderabad against the Peshwa.

The alliance had been defeated at Ghodegaon, and Raghunathrao had been placed under house arrest.

After Madhavrao I's death, Raghunathrao had been released from house arrest.

He then became the regent of Madhavrao's younger brother Narayanrao.

Together with his wife Anandibai, he has his nephew Narayanrao murdered by his palace guards in August 1773.

Narayanrao's widow, Gangabai, had given birth to a posthumous son, who was legal heir to the throne.

The newborn infant is named 'Sawai' Madhavrao (Sawai means "One and a Quarter").

Twelve Maratha chiefs, led by Nana Phadnavis, direct an effort to name the infant as the new Peshwa and rule under him as regents.

Raghunathrao had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the justice Ram Shastri Prabhune but the sentence has never been carried out.

At Kasegaon near Pandharpur the first battle between the Baarbhai and Raghobadada takes place in 1774.

Casanova, having at last succeeded in obtaining his pardon from the authorities of the Republic, returns to Venice in 1774, where he exercises the honorable office of secret agent of the State Inquisitors—that is, he becomes a spy.

The Inquisitors of Venice are a magistracy that, were it to be deemed by the three in the highest interests of the state, could even condemn a doge to death.

Scottish botanist Daniel Rutherford, and ...

...Joseph Priestley, working independently around the same time Scheele is investigating air, recognize those of its components now known to be oxygen and nitrogen.

Priestley, who independently discovers fire air in 1774 by the thermal decomposition of mercury dioxide, publishes his findings in the same year, three years before Scheele publishes.