The War of Jenkins' Ear

The Forgotten War for North and South America and the World that Made It: 1665-1742

Robert Gaudi

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781643138206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Filled with unforgettable characters and martime adventure, the incredible story of a forgotten war that shaped the fate of the United States—and the entire Western Hemisphere. In the early 18th century, the British and Spanish Empires were fighting for economic supremacy in the Americas. Tensions between the two powers were high, andwars blossomed like violent flowers for nearly a hundred years, from the War of Spanish Succession (sometimes known as Queen Anne's War in the Americas), culminating in the War of Jenkins' Ear.This war would lay the ground work for the French and Indian War and, eventually, the War of the American Revolution. The War of Jenkins' Ear was aworld warin the truest sense, engaging the major European powers on battlefields ranging from Europe to the Americas to the Asian subcontinent.Yet the conflict that would eventually become known as the War of Jenkins' Ear—a moniker coined by the 19th century historian Robert Carlyle more than a century later—is barely known to us today. Yetit resulted in the invasion of Georgia and even involved members of George Washington's own family. It would cost fifty-thousand lives, millions in treasure, and over six hundred ships.With vivid prose, Robert Gaudi takes the readerfrom the brackish waters of the Chesapeake Bayto the rocky shores of Tierra del Fuego. We travelaround the Cape of Good Hopeand across the Pacific to the Philippines and the Cantonese coast, with stops in Cartagena, Panama, and beyond. Yet even thoughit happened decades before American independence, The War of Jenkins' Ear reveals that this wastrulyan American war; a hard-fought, costly struggle that determined the fate of the Americas, and in which, for the first time, American armies participated.In this definitive work of history—the only single comprehensive volume on the subject— T he War of Jenkins' Ear explores the war that establed thefutureof two entire continents.

Sir Robert Walpole

ONE The Incident

1.

On the morning of April 9, 1731, the British trading brig Rebecca, under the command of a tough, choleric Welshman by the name of Robert Jenkins, found herself becalmed in the dangerous waters off the Cuban coast, near Havana. She was London bound, out of Jamaica, carrying a load of sugar for the teas and cakes of England. From dawn, for hours, no wind stirred the Rebecca’s square-rigged sails; her spankers and booms hung slack in the hot, bright air as the sun rose.

April makes decent sailing weather in the Caribbean, hot and dry, comfortably removed from hurricane season, though occasionally afflicted with periods of deadly calm. The perilousness of the Rebecca’s situation in the Florida Straits that morning came not from wind or wave or underwater obstruction, but from far more sinister man-made dangers: a long series of uncomfortable treaties between successive British monarchs (Queen Anne, George I and II) and Felipe V of Spain, fixing the spoils of war and the parameters of trade between the two countries.

These included the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht which brought the devastating War of Spanish Succession to an unsatisfactory conclusion; subsidiary treaties of December 14, 1715 and May 26, 1716, attempting to clarify certain vague clauses in the Treaty of Utrecht regarding British trading rights with Spanish colonies; the Treaty of London of 1718, establishing the Quadruple Alliance of Great Britain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic against Spain; the Treaty of the Hague of February, 1720, which ended the misbegotten war resulting from that alliance; the Treaty of Madrid of June 1721 and the 1729 Treaty of Seville, officially ending the brief Anglo-Spanish War of the preceding two years.

All this diplomatic paperwork, engineered by royal negotiators in Madrid, London, and elsewhere had in the end created an impossible situation for Jenkins and his crew. According to “refinements” stipulated in the Treaty of Seville, any British merchant ship sailing near Spanish possessions in the West Indies might be stopped and searched for contraband trade goods or the proceeds from such, by the Spanish guarda costa (coast guard) at any time. Says historian Philip Woodfine:

Once a ship had put in close to Spanish colonial coasts, it came under suspicion of being an illegal trader to settlements there, and became liable to investigation by the guarda costas who were commissioned to search and, where necessary, to seize vessels carrying contraband cargo. Ship and crew in such cases were conveyed to a nearby colonial port, where an enquiry, and often seizure, followed. It was enough to have aboard the smallest quantity of Spanish Colonial produce, or the Spanish coin of 8 Reales, the “pieces of eight,” which were the common currency of the whole Caribbean.

This much abused right of search-and-seizure had been negotiated and renegotiated between Spain and Great Britain as a part of the Asiento de Negros. This infamous contract, a monopoly granted by Spain to Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht, allowed the latter exclusive right to trade a fixed number of African slaves each year and a limited amount of manufactured goods to Spanish colonies in the Americas. On paper, the devil’s bargain worked for both parties; in practice, the only way to turn a profit at Asiento trade was to turn smuggler.

The guarda costa’s fleet of fast, armed sloops had been commissioned by the Spanish government to interdict the smuggling everyone knew would inevitably arise—a mission that brought its own inevitable consequences. Guarda costa captains too often brutalized British crews and their captains and took whatever they wanted, including the ships in question, and occasionally the crews to use as convict labor, legal evidence of smuggling be damned. They generally acted, Temperley says, “as pirates toward the Englishmen, while posing as official vessels, very much the same way a clever thief robs a law-abiding citizen by impersonating a tax collector.”

2.

Now, Captain Robert Jenkins watched with growing apprehension from the Rebecca’s taffrail as an oared sloop approached from the direction of the Cuban coast, a low green line about ten miles to the starboard. The vessel drew closer; Jenkins recognized it for a guarda costa, and his heart filled with dread. He had good reason for this uneasiness: scores of British ships had been taken in these waters, their cargoes ransacked and looted, their crews roughly handled, their captains tortured. Jenkins would have been generally familiar with the litany of recent outrages cited by merchant traders in England and later brought to the attention of the king in a series of increasingly aggrieved petitions. Here is a list of just a few of the claims:

The British galleys Betty and Anne seized, taken to Spanish ports and sold at auction, their crews imprisoned in filthy, vermin infested cells; the brig Robert taken, her captain, an Englishman named Storey King tortured for three days (guarda costa bravos had, among other cruelties, fixed lighted matches between Captain King’s fingers and crushed his thumbs with gun-screws); the crew of the sloop Runslet taken, its crew abused with gun-screws in a similar manner, gun-screws apparently a popular form of torture on the Spanish Main that year; a captain named Thomas Weir, “maimed in both arms and confined to his berth” reportedly murdered by Spanish officials, along with eight of his men. And, most gruesomely, a Dutch captain’s hand had been chopped off, the severed appendage boiled then fed to him one finger at a time. The Dutchman finished by eating the whole hand as guarda costa ruffians no doubt loomed about snickering, cutlasses drawn. One hesitates to imagine what he thought of this ghastly meal.

A few years later, in the anxious months leading up to war in 1739, King George II would send an irate memorandum to His Most Catholic Majesty, Felipe V of Spain, citing fifty-two British ships attacked and seized, with damages claimed in the hundreds of thousands of pounds—a mere fraction, British merchants asserted, of actual damages.

The most detailed account of what happened next to Captain Jenkins and the Rebecca, comes from an American source, Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette in the issue of October 7, 1731, six months after the incident. The wealth of detail offered by Franklin suggests he spoke to an eyewitness, perhaps one of the seamen aboard Jenkins’s ship that fateful morning. A brief description of Jenkins’s ordeal in the Gentleman’s Magazine of June 1731, the captain’s own deposition, and tidbits gleaned from correspondence between Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State for the Southern Department and Benjamin Keene, British ambassador to the Spanish court, add descriptive flourishes—a bit of dialogue, a few conflicting details—to the dramatic scene Franklin presents.

3.

The guarda costa sloop, called either La Isabela or the San Antonio, depending on the source, drew closer across the glassy sea, her sixteen sweeps striking the water, rhythmic, inevitable. Presently, she came within hailing distance, but the sloop’s captain eschewed the hailing-horn and began the conversation with three cannon shots across Rebecca’s bow. He then identified himself as Juan de León Fandiño, a notorious guarda costa privateer (or misidentified himself as the pseudonymous Juan Francisco, according to Franklin’s account). Whatever his name and whatever the name of his ship (let’s call him Fandiño of La Isabela, the generally accepted identity of both captain and vessel), he called for a delegation to bring the Rebecca’s sailing orders and cargo manifest to him for inspection.

Jenkins lowered the ship’s boat and sent his first mate bearing only Rebecca’s clearances from the Governor of Jamaica, expecting “this document would give sufficient satisfaction, it being a Time of profound Peace with Spain.” But Fandiño was not convinced by the clearances. He seized the hapless mate as a hostage and returned the boat bearing a dozen armed men. He then lowered his own boat and followed with another dozen. Once aboard, no courtesies were exchanged. Instead, Fandiño and his contingent of “swarthies,” later described as “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians,” set about ransacking the ship.

“They broke open all the Hatches, Lockers and Chests,” looking for smuggled Spanish raw materials, generally “Logwood, Hides or Tallow, the Product of the Spanish settlements in America,” or quantities of Spanish money generated from the illegal sale of British manufactured goods to Spanish colonists. Jenkins initially welcomed the search of his ship. He understood that per treaty agreement, the guarda costa as “the King of Spain’s Officers… might do their duty, for there was nothing on board but which was the Growth and Produce of Jamaica,” a chief British colony in the West Indies.

Fandiño’s men spent the next two hours at their destructive task as Jenkins and his crew stood by helplessly. At last, finding nothing, Fandiño, in a rage, resorted to the terror tactics for which the guarda costa had become infamous in the West Indies. First, he lashed Jenkins to the foremast and forced the Welshman to watch as guarda costa ruffians brutally beat the Rebecca’s mulatto cabin boy in an effort to extract the location of any money hidden aboard. Perhaps it might be found in a secret compartment somewhere in the hold of the ship, as was often the case. But the cabin boy, knowing nothing, revealed nothing, and collapsed under the beating.

Though later commentators insist that Jenkins must have been a smuggler because everyone else was a smuggler in those days on the Spanish Main, no evidence has ever been found to support this claim. In fact, the known details of Jenkins’s career supports the opposite conclusion: he seems to have been an honest merchant captain, trusted by his employers and bearing nothing more than a load of Jamaican sugar for the London exchange.

Fandiño, however, remained certain the Rebecca concealed hidden treasure; his efforts to find it grew increasingly frenzied. He tied the bleeding, insensate cabin boy around Jenkins’s legs as dead weight, tightened a noose around the Welshman’s neck and tossed the other end of the rope over a spar. Jenkins, unlashed from the mast, was then “hoisted up the Foreyard, but the boy, being light, slipt through… to the Captain’s great ease.” Fandiño ordered Jenkins hoisted into the yards two more times, each time “to the point of Strangulation.” Each time he demanded Jenkins reveal the whereabouts of his treasure; each time the pugnacious Welshman asserted “that they might torture him to Death, but he could not make any other Answer.”

Fandiño then threatened to burn the Rebecca to the waterline along with the crew, who as English Protestants were all “obstinate Hereticks,” and thus good candidates for a Spanish Inquisition-style auto-da-fé. But even under threat of immolation, Jenkins still couldn’t reveal the whereabouts of a treasure he didn’t possess. Fandiño, mistaking innocence for stubbornness, left Jenkins gasping on the deck and conferred with his second-in-command, a man Franklin’s account identifies as Lieutenant Dorce. Perhaps some fresh torture might be devised?

Dorce, “who had just put the rope around [Jenkins’s] neck,” then searched the Welshman’s pocket, stealing a small amount of personal money he found there and also the silver buckles off Jenkins’s shoes. At a gesture from Fandiño, his men then hung Jenkins again, this time leaving him dangling in the foreyards “until he was quite strangled.” At the last possible moment, however, Fandiño ordered his men to release the rope. Jenkins dropped abruptly and with such force he bounced down the forward hatch, crashing onto the ship’s casks of fresh water stored below.

From here, they dragged a bruised and bleeding but still alive Jenkins by the rope around his neck back up through the hatch. For a long time, he lay motionless on the hot deck, beside the broken form of his cabin boy. The long day waned. The sun, now high overhead, dropped in the west over the blue water and the distant coast of New Spain. How much longer could Fandiño and his men tarry aboard the Rebecca, dealing with these ridiculous Englishmen? Maybe there was no treasure aboard this ship after all. Fandiño decided to give it one last try. He ordered Jenkins bound to the mast again and taking up a cutlass and pistol charged at him screaming “Confess or die!”

But the unfortunate Jenkins could not confess. The ship’s money included only what they had taken from his pockets and a small bag of coins—found in his cabin—reserved for operating expenses, consisting of “four Guineas, one Pistole and four Double Doubloons.” A reasonable sum, but not enough to justify the seizure and ransacking of a British ship and the torture of its captain and crew. The Gentleman’s Magazine picks up the narrative from here:

Fandiño, beside himself, “took hold of [Jenkins’s] left ear and with his cutlass slit it down, and another of the Spaniards [Lieutenant Dorce?] took hold of it and tore it off, but gave him the Piece of his ear again and made threats against the King, saying ‘the same will happen to him [King George II] if caught doing the same [i.e., smuggling].’ ” A statement rendered all the more absurd as Fandiño hadn’t been able to find any smuggled merchandise aboard the Rebecca. (An image out of classical mythology suggests itself here: Jenkins bound to the mast like Odysseus approaching the rock of the Sirens—but head bowed, blood pouring down the side of his face, the most consequential severed ear in history lying on the bloody deck at his feet.)

Determined to commit a final barbaric act, Fandiño—according to Franklin’s account—decided to scalp the much-insulted Jenkins; finding the Welshman’s head too closely shaved, he gave up on this idea as impracticable. With daylight fading, and the general appetite for torture nearly sated, Fandiño’s men contented themselves with beating the mate and boatswain “unmercifully.” They then stripped the Rebecca of everything portable, including bedding and the clothes of the crew, leaving them standing naked on the deck. From Captain Jenkins they additionally took a “Watch of Gold, Cloathes, Linnens & etc. on a moderate valuation of 112 pounds, sterling.” They also took a “tortoise shell box” and some old silverware.

Finally, Fandiño himself confiscated the Rebecca’s navigational equipment (maps, sextant, compass) and her store of candles—contraband, Fandiño asserted, made from Spanish tallow. More than an act of theft, a deadly act of sabotage designed to leave the Rebecca wallowing in darkness on unknown seas.

Later, in a letter of protest to the Spanish governor of Cuba, British Rear Admiral James Stewart, ranking naval officer at the Jamaica Station, cited the theft of the Rebecca’s navigational equipment as one of the most serious aspects of Fandiño’s crime, as it indicated his intention had been “that she should perish in her passage [across the Atlantic].”

At last, Fandiño and his ruffians returned to La Isabela and sailed off. Jenkins’ terrified and naked crew then quickly unbound their captain, brought him back to consciousness with rum and water and bandaged his bloody stump of ear. Immediately realizing the Rebecca’s predicament, a revived Jenkins set a course for the closest port, Havana, where he hoped to meet with another British ship from whom he “might procure sufficient necessities to enable him to proceed on his voyage”—and perhaps lodge an official complaint regarding the savage treatment he had received at the hands of the guarda costas. But Fandiño and La Isabela lurked just over the horizon. Coming alongside the British vessel once again, Fandiño called a warning to the mutilated Jenkins: make for open waters or this time he really would set the ship on fire!

So, “rather than have a second visit from them,” Franklin reports, “captain and crew of the Rebecca recommended themselves to the Mercy of the Seas.”

Crossing the Atlantic proved difficult. The crew made rudimentary garments out of sailcloth and sacking. Without candles, they burned oil and butter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Map of the Colony of Georgia A.D. 1735
• Title Page
• Maps
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue: At the Georgetown Flea
• Chapter One: The Incident
• Chapter Two: Deep Background
• Chapter Three: The Road to Jenkins’ Ear
• Chapter Four: Admiral Vernon
• Chapter Five: The Redoubtable Oglethorpe
• Chapter Six: Cartagena de Indias
• Chapter Seven: Disaster
• Chapter Eight: The Invasion of Georgia
• Chapter Nine: Santiago, Panama & Ruatan
• Chapter Ten: Around the World
• Epilogue: The End of the Story
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright