These are just some of the events that happened on November 21st.

1551, Papal legate Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits returned from their epoch-making two-year journey to Japan, the first missionaries to attempt baptism in this eastern country.

1695, Henry Purcell, English composer and organist who wrote sonatas, songs, anthems and music for the stage, died.

1789, North Carolina becomes the 12th U.S. state.

1791, French navigator Etienne Marchand arrived in China after a record Pacific crossing of 60 days.

1904, a typhoon off Mindanao, in the Philippines, rendered 30,000 people destitute and homeless.

1906, in Glasgow, Scotland, a man died when 200,000 gallons of hot whisky burst out of vats.

1913, Tokugawa Keiki, the last of the Japanese shoguns who controlled the country from 1603 to 1867, died.

1916, Emperor Franz Josef, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire since 1848, died.

1934, American composer Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes opened in New York.

1953, the Piltdown Man skull, discovered in Sussex, England in 1912 and believed to be the missing link in the evolutionary scale, was finally revealed to be a hoax.

1964, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge across New York harbor was opened, at the time the longest single-span bridge in the world.

1974, IRA bombs were detonated in two Birmingham, England pubs, killing 20 people and injuring 187 others.

1985, the so-called "fireside summit" between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Sovie President Mikhail Gorbachev ended.

1986, the government launched the biggest ever health campaign in Britain, a GBP20 million campaign using the slogan "AIDS - Don't Die of Ignorance".

1987, Actors Demi Moore and Bruce Willis married. They divorced in 2000 after three kids together.

1988, British photographer and actress Koo Stark won damages against the Daily Mirror tabloid over allegations she frolicked in the sea with Joan Collins' former Swedish husband Peter Holm.

1999, eccentric English actor Quentin Crisp, died of natural causes in Manchester, aged 90.

2002, NATO invites Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia to become members.