Moskvitin's expedition had sailed downstream before reaching the Pacific in mid-September.

Moskvitin's Cossacks build a winter camp on the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk at the Ulya River and learn from the indigenous population of the proximity of the Amur River.

They apparently sail to the mouth of the Amur River in April 1640 and spot the Shantar Islands on their way back.

A devastating epidemic in 1640 affects most of China’s densely settled areas, sparing only the provinces of Guangdong and ...

...Sichuan.

The Royal Academy of Turku, the first university in Finland, and the only university in present-day Finland to be established when it was still a part of Sweden, is founded in 1640 by Queen Christina of Sweden at the proposal of Count Per Brahe on base of Turku Cathedral School.

It is the Swedish Empire's third university following Uppsala University, founded in 1477, and the Academia Gustaviana (now the University of Tartu in Estonia), founded in 1632.

Gooyer had been instructed to develop the commercial potential of Mauritius, but he has done nothing of the sort, so he is recalled.

His successor is Adriaan van der Stel who begins the development in earnest, developing the export of Ebony bark.

For the purpose, Van der Stel brings one hundred and five enslaved Malagasys to the island.

Within the first week, about sixty slaves are able to run away into the forests; only about twenty of them are eventually recaptured.

The architect of the Palais-Cardinal, Jacques Lemercier, had also received a commission to build a château and a surrounding town in Indre-et-Loire; the project has culminated in the construction of the Château Richelieu and the town of Richelieu.

To the château, Richelieu has added one of the largest art collections in Europe and the largest collection of ancient Roman sculpture in France.

(The heavily resurfaced and restored Richelieu Bacchus will continue to be admired by neoclassical artists.)

Among his three hundred paintings by moderns, most notably, he owns Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, The Family of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, the two famous Bacchanales of Nicolas Poussin, as well as paintings by Veronese and Titian, and Diana at the Bath by Rubens, for which he is so glad to pay the artist's heirs three thousand écus, that he makes a gift to Rubens' widow of a diamond-encrusted watch.

His marble portrait bust by Bernini is not considered a good likeness and has been banished to a passageway.

The New Haven colonists have expanded into additional towns (called plantations): Milford and ...

...Guilford in 1639, ...

...Stamford and ...

...Southold across Long Island Sound to the south on the North Fork of Long Island in 1640 forming the original component of the confederation which calls itself "The United Colonies of New England."