April 28 Birthday
On April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian led a mutiny aboard HMS Bounty, seizing the ship from Captain William Bligh. The mutiny was triggered by Bligh's harsh discipline and by the crew's reluctance to leave the idyllic island of Tahiti, where they had spent six months collecting breadfruit plants. Bligh and eighteen loyal crew were set adrift in a twenty-three-foot launch with provisions for a week. Bligh navigated the open boat 3,618 miles to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, in forty-seven days — one of the greatest feats of navigation in history. He arrived with one man dead from a native attack and the rest emaciated. The mutineers settled on Pitcairn Island, which was uncharted and unpopulated. They burned the Bounty and tried to build a community. Within ten years, all the men were dead from murder, disease, and alcohol. The descendants of the Tahitian women and the mutineers still live on Pitcairn, population fifty. Benito Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans on April 28, 1945, while attempting to flee to Switzerland disguised as a German soldier. He was shot alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung upside down from the roof of an Esso gas station. The crowd that gathered spat on and beat the corpses. Mussolini had been Italy's dictator for twenty-three years. He created modern fascism — the term itself is Italian — and inspired Hitler and Franco. His alliance with Hitler brought Italy into a war it was not prepared for, and the Italian campaign destroyed the country. "Fascism" as an ideology has been discredited since 1945, though the tactics — rallies, mass movements, scapegoating — recur. In 1967, Muhammad Ali refused induction into the US Army. He had been classified 1-Y (not qualified for service) in 1964 but was reclassified 1-A in 1966 as the Army lowered its standards. Ali cited his religious beliefs and his opposition to the Vietnam War. He said: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." He was stripped of his heavyweight title, convicted of draft evasion, fined $10,000, and sentenced to five years in prison. He was free on appeal but could not box for three and a half years — the peak years of his career. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction unanimously in 1971. He lost three and a half years of his career for a principle. Harper Lee, born this day in 1926, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold over 40 million copies. She never published another novel for fifty-five years, until Go Set a Watchman in 2015 — a draft of Mockingbird that was published amid controversy about whether Lee, then eighty-nine and in declining health, had consented. She was Truman Capote's childhood friend and helped him research In Cold Blood. People born on April 28 fall under the zodiac sign of Taurus. The birthstone is Diamond and the birth flower is Daisy. Historical events on April 28 include 1789: Mutiny on the Bounty — Fletcher Christian seizes ship from Captain Bligh, 1945: Benito Mussolini executed by partisans and hung upside down, 1967: Muhammad Ali refuses induction into US Army, stripped of title. Famous people born on April 28 include James Monroe (1758), Harper Lee (1926), Jay Leno (1950).