Weekly History Quiz No.288

Leading a fleet that departed in 1740, the journey took 4 years, and only one ship completed the whole journey. This included the infamous shipwreck and mutiny of HMS Wager.

John Constable was a painter in the Romantic tradition from Suffolk, England. He is best known for revolutionising landscape painting.

The present-day mosque was originally built by the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik around 700 CE. Upon its capture by the Crusaders in 1099 the mosque was used as the headquarters of the religious order of the Knights Templar. It was captured by Saladin in 1187, restored as a Mosque and remained in use ever since.

Choudhry Rahmat Ali first came up with the name 'Pakistan' in 1933, using it in his pamphlet which became known as the 'Pakistan Declaration'. It was an acronym for the Muslim-majority areas of northwestern India: Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. The name was also derived from the Persian word 'pāk,' meaning 'pure,' and '-stan,' meaning 'land'.

Leningrad was besieged by Axis forces for 872 days, but never captured. The siege was the most destructive in history and possibly the most deadly, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths.

Founded in 1841, Thomas Cook was a pioneering British travel company that arranged transport, tours and holidays worldwide. Their first tour was by train, they rapidly expanded to sea travel in the mid 1800s, and air travel in the 1950s.

The Sumerians developed cuneiform in Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE, making it the world’s first written script.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the European powers came together at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to reorganize the political map of Europe and develop a system of conflict resolution aiming at preserving peace and balance of power. This was known as the Congress System or the Vienna System and saw dispute resolution adopted by the major conservative powers of Europe to maintain their power, oppose revolutionary movements, weaken the forces of nationalism, and uphold the balance of power.

In 1721 an expedition led by missionary Hans Egede was sent to Greenland, not knowing whether the Norse civilization that was established in the 900s remained there. It remains a Danish colony, although now with self-rule.

Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. In 1860, she laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, and is now part of King’s College London.