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.

Catherine II shuts down satiric journals in Russia in 1774.

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.

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 ...