Events January–March January 3 Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont. The first issue of Berlingske, Denmark's oldest continually operating newspaper, is published. January 21 – The Teatro Filarmonico, the main opera theater in Verona, Italy, is destroyed by fire. It is rebuilt in 1754. February – The second part of John Cleland's erotic novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) is published in London. The author is released from debtors' prison in March. February 28 – Henry Fielding's comic novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling is published in London. Also this year, Fielding becomes magistrate at Bow Street, and first enlists the help of the Bow Street Runners, an early police force (eight men at first). March 6 – A "corpse riot" breaks out in Glasgow after a body disappears from a churchyard in the Gorbals district. Suspicion falls on anatomy students at the Glasgow Infirmary "had raised a dead body from the grave and carried it to the college" for dissection.Peter N. Moore, Archibald Simpson's Unpeaceable Kingdom: The Ordeal of Evangelicalism in the Colonial South (Lexington Books, 2018) p40 The city guard intervenes after a mob of protesters begins breaking windows at random buildings, but groups of citizens begin to make regular patrols of church graveyardsHenry L. Fulton, Dr. John Moore, 1729–1802: A Life in Medicine, Travel, and Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) p54 March 17 – At London's Covent Garden, composer George Frideric Handel conducts the first performance of his new oratorio, Solomon. More than 250 years later, an instrumental from Solomon, "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba"; will be featured in the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony.All Music Guide to Classical Music: The Definitive Guide to Classical Music, ed. by Chris Woodstra, et al. (Hal Leonard Corporation, 2013) p556
April–June April 14 – British Royal Navy ship HMS Namur is wrecked in a storm near Fort St. David, India, with the loss of 520 lives. April 27 – The first official performance of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks in London finishes early, due to the outbreak of fire. The piece had been composed by Handel to commemorate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. May 19 – King George II of Great Britain grants the Ohio Company (312½ square miles or 810 km2) of land north of the Ohio River, encompassing most of the modern U.S. state of Ohio and part of West Virginia. The grant is conditioned on the Company being able to attract 100 European families every year, for seven years, to move to the area occupied by Indian tribes, and to build a fort to protect themJohn R. Spears and A. H. Clark, A History of the Mississippi Valley: From Its Discovery to the End of Foreign Domination (A. S. Clark, 1903) p123 June 4 – A fire in Glasgow leaves 200 families homeless."Fires, Great", in The Insurance Cyclopeadia: Being an Historical Treasury of Events and Circumstances Connected with the Origin and Progress of Insurance, Cornelius Walford, ed. (C. and E. Layton, 1876) p51 June 6 – The Conspiracy of the Slaves, which was to have taken place on June 29, is revealed in Malta.
July–September July 9 – The British naval fort at Halifax is founded on mainland Nova Scotia as a defense against the New France Fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, less than away. August 2 – Irish-born trader George Croghan, unaware of the recent British grant of land in the Ohio River valley to the Ohio Company, purchases 200,000 acres of much of the same land from the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, dealing directly with "the three most important Iroquois chiefs resident in that area, in return for an immense quantity of Indian goods." The deal takes place at the Iroquois capital of Onondaga, near present-day Syracuse, New York.Nicholas B. Wainwright, George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat (University of North Carolina Press, 1959) p28 August 3 The Battle of Ambur is fought in south India as the Second Carnatic War begins between the French-supported troops of Chanda Sahib of the Mughal Empire and the British-supported defenders of the Arcot State, led by its 77-year old Nawab, Anwaruddin Khan. After marching outside of the walls of Arcot to confront Chanda Sahib and Joseph Dupleix's 4,000 troops, Anwaruddin Khan's numerically superior force is routed and he is killed in the battle.Spencer C. Tucker, ed., A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East (ABC-CLIO, 2009) p756 French explorer Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville, commissioned by New France to explore the Ohio Territory claimed by both France and Britain, buries the first of six engraved lead markers claiming the land for King Louis XV.Terry A. Barnhart, American Antiquities: Revisiting the Origins of American Archaeology (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) The first plate is buried on the banks of the Allegheny River, near a rock with petroglyphs, in what is now Venango County, Pennsylvania. August 7 – Mary Musgrove Bosomworth, a woman of mixed British and Creek Indian ancestry, presents herself as Coosaponakeesa, Queen of the Creek Indians and marches with 200 Creek Indians into the town of Savannah, Georgia. During her confrontation with British colonial authorities, she and her husband Thomas Bosomworth demand payment of "nearly twenty-five thousand dollars" in compensation for property taken from the Creek Indians, before the British authorities determine that she doesn't have the authority to speak for the tribe.Sara Hines Martin, Georgia's Remarkable Women: Daughters, Wives, Sisters, and Mothers Who Shaped History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) p15 August 15 – Four Russian sailors— Aleksei Inkov, Khrisanf Inkov, Stepan Sharapov and Fedor Verigin— are rescued after having been marooned on the Arctic Ocean island of Edgeøya for more than six years. They are the only survivors of a crew of 14 whose koch had been blown off course in May 1743 and then broken up by ice.David Roberts, Four Against the Arctic: Shipwrecked for Six Years at the Top of the World (Simon and Schuster, 2005) p10 The four are returned home on September 28. August 19 – At a ceremony in San Antonio, Texas (then a part of the New Spain province of Nuevo Santander), four Apache chiefs and Spanish colonial officials and missionaries literally "bury the hatchet", placing weapons of war into a pit and covering it as a symbol that the Apaches and the Spaniards will fight no further war against each other.Joseph Luther, Camp Verde: Texas Frontier Defense (Arcadia Publishing, 2012) September 5 – A delegation of 33 members of the Catawba Indian nation and 73 from the Cherokee nation arrive in Charleston, South Carolina, to discuss a peace treaty with South Carolina's provincial governor, James Glen.Michelle LeMaster, Brothers Born of One Mother: British–Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast (University of Virginia Press, 2012) September 12 – The first recorded game of baseball is played, by Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Kingston upon Thames in England.Whitehall Evening Post 1749-09-19. September 23 – Grand Chief Jean-Baptiste Cope, of the Miꞌkmaq Indian nation in Canada, declares war against the British Empire"The Covenant Chain", by Elsie Charles Basque, in Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) p37 after the building of the fort at Halifax, Nova Scotia and begins hostilities by taking 20 British hostages at Canso."'Black with Canoes'. Aboriginal Resistance and the Canoe", by David McNab, et al., in Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. by George Raudzens (Brill Academic Publishers, 2003) p261 September 28 – Three Russian survivors of the shipwreck on Edgeøya return to their homeland after more than six years, as the ship Nikolai i Andrei brings them to the port of Arkhangelsk. A fourth survivor, Fedor Veriginare, died of scurvy during the six-week voyage home.
October–December October 2 – Edward Cornwallis, the British Governor of Nova Scotia, commands his militia and local citizens "to annoy, distress, take or destroy the Savage commonly called Micmac, wherever they are found" and promises a reward of ten guineas (21 British shillings) for every Mi'kmaq scalp brought in. October 4 – What is later described as "the least examined yet most influential"Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp167-168 of clerical reforms, by the Spanish Bourbon monarchs of the 18th century, begins when King Ferdinand VI approves a royal cédula, removing control of the Roman Catholic parishes of Latin America from religious orders. Henceforward, jurisdiction over parishioners in the archdioceses of Lima, Mexico City and Bogotá is with the secular clergy. October 16 – At Falmouth, a part of the British Province of Massachusetts Bay that would later be the site of Portland, Maine, a peace treaty is signed between representatives of Massachusetts Bay and 19 sagamores and tribal chiefs of the Wabanaki Confederacy (encompassing the Penobscot, Kennebec, Odanak and Wôlinak tribes of the Abenaki Indians), temporarily settling territorial disputes in Maine during King George's War.Michael Dekker, French & Indian Wars in Maine (Arcadia Publishing, 2015) p95 October 19 – Two months after Pierre Céloron begins his inspection of the Ohio territory on behalf of France, Christopher Gist starts his survey of the lands along the right bank of the Ohio River on behalf of the British grant to the Ohio Company.J. M. Toner, annotations to Journal of My Journey Over the Mountains, by George Washington, while Surveying for Lord Thomas Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, in the Northern Neck of Virginia, beyond the Blue Ridge, in 1747-8 (Joel Munsell's Sons, 1892) p64. November 9 – Battle of Penfui on Timor: A large Topass army is defeated by a numerically inferior Dutch East India Company. November 12 – In response to the increasing number of starving people moving into Paris from rural parts of France, King Louis XV issues an ordinance that "all the beggars and vagabonds who shall be found either in the streets of Paris, or in churches or church doorways, or in the countryside around Paris, of whatever age or sex, shall be arrested and conducted into prisons, to stay there as long as shall be necessary.""Child Abduction Panic", in Outbreak!: The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, ed. by Hilary Evans and Robert E. Bartholomew (Anomalist Books, LLC, 2009) pp83-84Christine Pevitt Algrant, Madame de Pompadour: Mistress of France (Grove Press, 2003) p95 November 24 – The Province of South Carolina House of Assembly votes to free African-American slave Caesar Norman, and to grant him a lifetime pension of 100 British pounds per year, in return for Caesar's agreement to share the secret of his antidote for poisonous snake venom. Caesar then makes public his herbal cure of juice from Plantago major (the common plantain) and Marrubium vulgare (horehound), combined with "a leaf of good tobacco moistened with rum".Robert A. Voeks, The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 2018) pp113-114