Joeys Daily Dose of History - 10 October 1774

Captain James Cook became the first European to discover Norfolk Island, about 1400km East of the Australian mainland on the New South Wales North Coast, on his second voyage to the South Pacific on HMS Resolution. He named the island after Mary Howard, Duchess of Norfolk. Cook reported of tall, straight trees (Norfolk pines) and flax-like plants, which the British Navy was keen to exploit for ships' masts and sails and therefore ordered Governor Arthur Phillip, Captain of the First Fleet to New South Wales in 1788, to colonise Norfolk Island before the French could take it. The island served as a penal colony for re-offending convicts from New South Wales until 1814 and again from 1825 until 1855.
150 years later Charles Edmund DuMaresq Clavell was born in Sydney on this day (1924). The son of a British officer stationed here in Australia at the time, he was a British (and later American) citizen and rose to worldwide fame under the name James Clavell, as the author of the bestsellers "King Rat", "Shogun" and "Tai Pan".

Elsewhere on the globe, 10 October is remembered as the birthday of Guiseppe Verdi (1813, Le Roncole/Italy), Van Halen's David Lee Roth (1954, Bloomington/Indiana) and Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp (1961, Islington/London).
Russian actor Yuliy Borisovich Bryner, better known as Yul Brynner died in New York City (1985) and General Custer's funeral was held at West Point, NY (1877).
Liz Taylor married for the 6th time, secretly re-marrying Richard Burton in Botswana (1975).
The Battle of Tours near Poitiers/France stopped the northward thrust by Moorish forces, whose leader, the Governor of Cordoba, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, was killed during the battle with the Franks under Charles Martel (738). John Wesley Hyatt patented the billiard ball (1865), Sun Yat-sen's revolutionaries managed to overthrow the Manchu dynasty in China (1911), the Munich Agreement ceded Czechoslovakia's Sudentenland to Nazi Germany (1938) and Emperor Hirohito of Japan opened the 18th Olympic Games in Tokyo (1964), where Sydney girl Dawn Fraser would later win the 100m freestyle swimming gold medal for the third time in a row.