Today in history—April 5

1588: English philosopher Thomas (Leviathan) Hobbes is born at Malmesbury, Wiltshire.

1614: Nineteen-year-old Pocahontas, daughter of Virginia’s most powerful chief, marries Englishman John Rolfe, the man who will start the tobacco-growing business there.

1621: With a cargo of lumber, furs, and fish, the Mayflower sets out on its return voyage to England. Within three years she will be sold for scrap for £128.

1758: Seth Wyman, whose son Levi will later suffer an accident at sea and get care from Daniel Mills, is born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.

1791: George Washington exercises the first presidential veto in U.S. history, refusing to sign a bill providing a formula for apportioning Representatives on the ground that it was unfavorable to the South.

1816: Samuel Freeman Miller is born at Richmond, Kentucky.  He will become one of the few U.S. Supreme Court justices to also have an M.D., and will write the opinion in The Slaughterhouse Cases.

1916: Actor (Eldred) Gregory Peck is born at La Jolla, California. His “Atticus Finch” in To Kill a Mockingbird will be named the top film hero of all time by the American Film Institute.

1930: Indian lawyer Mohandas Gandhi leads one of the great free trade marches in history, as thousands of Indians arrive at the seashore to collect their own salt in violation of British law.

1976: Pilot, playboy, film-maker, inventor, and industrialist Howard Hughes dies on a en route from Mexico to Texas.

1997: Beat poet (Irwin) Allen Ginsburg, whose career, among other things, proved that you can’t write good poetry on drugs, dies at New York City.

1998: The longest suspension bridge in the world, the $3.8 billion Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge connecting the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku, opens to traffic.