September 27 in History

Twenty-seven gold medals for one shipwreck. When the American merchant ship Ellen Southard broke apart in a Liverpool storm, lifeboat crews pulled her sailors from the water at enormous personal risk. Congress, deeply moved, awarded each rescuer a gold Lifesaving Medal — the most ever granted for a single event. The medals were struck in the United States and shipped to England. Britain had its own honors system. But America insisted on saying thank you anyway.

Spain executed five political prisoners by firing squad -- three ETA members and two members of the Radical Antifascist and Patriotic Front -- in the final act of judicial killing under the Franco regime. International outrage over the executions prompted fifteen European governments to recall their ambassadors, and within two months Franco was dead, clearing the path for Spain's transition to democracy.

The Treaty of Melno ended something unusual: a border dispute between the Teutonic Knights and Lithuania that had been running, in one form or another, for over a century. The 1422 agreement fixed a frontier line that — remarkably — held almost unchanged for 500 years. Wars, empires, and partitions swept through the region repeatedly. That particular border survived them all, finally erased only by the upheaval of World War II.

He was elected Pope on September 15, 1590, and never actually got to run the Church. Pope Urban VII contracted malaria — almost certainly from the mosquitoes in the Roman marshes — and died just 13 days later, before he was even formally consecrated. He never celebrated a single papal Mass. He did manage to issue one notable act: a prohibition on smoking inside churches, making him history's first anti-tobacco legislator. The shortest papacy ever produced the world's first indoor smoking ban.

Twenty-one years. That's how long Venice held the fortress of Candia — modern-day Heraklion in Crete — against an Ottoman siege that began in 1648. It's the longest siege in recorded history. The Venetians resupplied the fortress by sea for two decades while the Ottomans dug trenches and detonated mines beneath the walls. When commander Francesco Morosini finally surrendered in 1669, he negotiated to leave with full honors and his artillery. Venice lost Crete. But they walked out with their cannons.

Agustín de Iturbide leads the Army of the Three Guarantees into Mexico City, compelling Spain to recognize Mexican sovereignty just twenty-four hours later. This military triumph ends three centuries of colonial rule and establishes an independent nation that would soon grapple with its own fragile unity.

The paddle steamer SS Arctic sinks off Newfoundland after colliding with the smaller SS Vesta, killing over 212 souls. Only 88 survivors escape the icy waters, while a dozen Vesta passengers die when their lifeboat crashes into the sinking giant. This tragedy forces maritime regulators to mandate stricter collision avoidance rules and compulsory lifeboat capacity for all transatlantic liners.

The SS Arctic went down in 1854 after colliding with a smaller French vessel in fog — and the reason 300 people died comes down to one brutal fact: the crew got in the lifeboats first. Passengers, including women and children, were left scrambling. Some clung to makeshift rafts. The captain survived; most of his passengers didn't. The disaster triggered the first serious public debate about maritime safety laws in the Atlantic, laying groundwork for lifeboat regulations that ships like the Titanic would still, famously, ignore.