Pour yourself something warm. May 2 is a date with sweep – stretching from the death of one of the Renaissance’s great geniuses to one of the most dramatic counter-terrorism operations in history, with a remarkable Australian story in between.
2011 — The end of the longest manhunt in modern history
On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, was killed by United States Navy SEALs in Pakistan. He had been the subject of a nearly decade-long international manhunt. The operation — conducted in the early hours of the morning at a compound in Abbottabad — lasted 38 minutes. President Barack Obama announced the news to the world just before midnight Washington time. In New York, crowds gathered spontaneously outside the White House and at Ground Zero, the site where the Twin Towers had stood. Bin Laden’s death did not end terrorism. It did not restore what had been destroyed. But it closed a chapter in the most consequential decade of the early twenty-first century, and for the thousands of families who had lost someone on September 11, it was the closest thing to justice the world could offer.
1829 — A city is founded on the Swan River
On May 2, 1829, the city of Fremantle, Western Australia, was founded as Captain Charles Fremantle hoisted the Union Jack. Fremantle had sailed from England on HMS Challenger and arrived on the southwest coast of Australia to formally claim the territory for the British Crown — just ahead of a feared French expedition that was also heading south. The Swan River Colony that followed became Western Australia, and Fremantle became the port through which that state breathed — the gateway for generations of migrants, the harbour where the America’s Cup was defended in 1987, and one of the most distinctive and beloved cities in the country. It still has the Union Jack in its flag, and a pub on every corner that will tell you about it at length.
1519 — The end of a mind unlike any other
Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67, in the Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, France, where he had spent his final years as the guest of King Francis I of France. He left behind the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, detailed anatomical drawings of the human body that would not be surpassed for centuries, designs for flying machines, solar power, a calculator, and an armoured vehicle — in the fifteenth century. He was simultaneously a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer and botanist. He also left behind, scattered across his extraordinary notebooks, one of the most quietly devastating sentences in the history of human ambition: “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
If Leonardo da Vinci thought his work wasn’t good enough, the rest of us are probably fine.
Also on this day…
In 1933, the Loch Ness Monster was reportedly first sighted by a couple driving on the road near Loch Ness in Scotland. The sighting was reported in the local newspaper, triggering one of the most enduring and thoroughly investigated myths in modern history. The monster has never been found. The loch, however, is genuinely beautiful.
Some days connect the Renaissance to the twenty-first century in ways that make you marvel at the distance we have travelled and the things we still haven’t resolved. May 2 is one of them.
Come back tomorrow for another spin through the calendar.