January 23 – (January 12 Old Style) The Conventicle Act (Konventikelplakatet) is adopted in Sweden, outlawing all non-Lutheran religious meetings outside of church services.
March 2 – In London, a night watchman finds a severed head by the River Thames; it is later recognized to be that of the husband of Catherine Hayes. She and an accomplice are later executed.[2]
March 10 – China's Emperor Yongzheng issues a special edict instructing his "Vice Minister of Punishments" Huang Bing to interrogate Qin Daoran, who provides the evidence that Yongzheng's brothers Yintang, Yin-ssu and Yin-ti, had conspired to overthrow the Emperor.[3]
March 29 – The first large shipment of slaves is brought to New Orleans as the slave ship L'Aurore arrives with 290 black Africans captured in Gambia.[4] During the 90-day voyage from Gorée in Senegal, 60 of the slaves had died.
March 30 – After King Haffon of the West AfricanKingdom of Whydah (now in Benin) allows Portuguese traders to build Fort São João Batista in the capital at Savi, mercenaries of the Dutch West India Company make a failed attempt to destroy the fort by "throwing two flaming spears over the walls". By 1726, traders from Britain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal are all competing to establish trade with Whydah, which supplies other West Africans to be used as slaves.
June 11 – Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, is dismissed from being the Prime Minister of France and Jean Pâris de Monmartel is removed from his position as Guard of the Royal Treasury by King Louis XV. The King selects his former tutor, André-Hercule de Fleury to replace the Duke of Bourbon as his Chief Minister. Fleury and the Duke of Bourbon had clashed with each other in their services as adviser to the King, and Fleury's departure from the court in protest and led to his recall and the firing of the Duke[clarification needed].
September 6 – An explosion kills all but seven of the 700 passengers and crew on the Portuguese Navy galleon HMFMS Santa Rosa as its cargo of gunpowder blows up. Historians speculate that of the 693 people on the ship, those who weren't killed by the explosion drowned or were killed by sharks as the ship went down off of the coast of Recife.
^Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto; Villaroel Carmona, Rafael; Lepe Orellana, Jaime; Fuente-Alba Poblete, J. Miguel; Fuenzalida Helms, Eduardo (1997). Historia militar de Chile (in Spanish) (3rd ed.). Biblioteca Militar. p. 88.
^Bentley, G. E. Jr. (March 2009). "Blake's Murderesses: Visionary Heads of Wickedness". Huntington Library Quarterly. 72 (1). University of California Press: 69–105. doi:10.1525/hlq.2009.72.1.69. JSTOR10.1525/hlq.2009.72.1.69. At Catherine's urging, "Billings went into the room with a hatchet, with which he struck Hayes so violently that he fractured his skull" but did not kill him. Wood, "taking the hatchet out of Billings's hand, gave the poor man two more blows, which effectually dispatched him." They were then faced with the problem of how to dispose of the body.
^Frank Ching, Ancestors: The Story of China Told Through the Lives of an Extraordinary Family (Ebury Publishing, 2011) p257
^Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (LSU Press, 1992)
^Henri Troyat, Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power (Algora Publishing, 2007) p23
^Atlas of Isoseismal Maps of Italian Earthquakes, ed. by D. Postpieschi (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1986)
