South America Timeline of Events

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South America

South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest...

Timeline of Events

1520

11.1.1520

The Strait of Magellan, the passage immediately south of mainland South America, connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, is first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan during his global circumnavigation voyage.

11.28.1520

After navigating through the South American strait, three ships under the command of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan reach the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Europeans to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

1810

9.8.1810

The ''Tonquin'' sets sail from New York Harbor with 33 employees of John Jacob Astor's newly created Pacific Fur Company on board. After a six-month journey around the tip of South America, the ship arrives at the mouth of the Columbia River and Astor's men establish the fur-trading town of Astoria, Oregon.

1813

5.23.1813

South American independence leader Simón Bolívar enters Mérida, leading the invasion of Venezuela, and is proclaimed ''El Libertador'' ("The Liberator").

1820

11.20.1820

An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the ''Essex'' (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman Melville's 1851 novel ''Moby-Dick'' is in part inspired by this story).

1851

5.21.1851

Slavery is abolished in Colombia, South America.

1947

8.7.1947

Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, Convert 7000 journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.

2002

7.20.2002

South America: A fire in a discotheque in Lima, Peru kills over twenty-five.