The War of Jenkin's Ear

Hanks life in Hell on Earth, a love story often seemed to be going off in all directions with seemingly little hope for better direction other then the misguided efforts of his caseworker on Erebus. This is pretty much the way research on the Internet works.

You go looking for one thing and you may or may not find it but you will find something and that will lead you to something else and something else and something else. Before you realize it, you’ve got a dozen pages open and you don’t even remember what you were originally searching for.

Recently, while bouncing around the Internet —and I do mean bouncing, I came across a war that to the best of my knowledge never made it into the history books. At least none of the ones I had read.

This war preceded the French and Indian War (1754-63) that was fought between the very organized and disciplined English and French forces and their respective allies, the unorganized, undisciplined, sneak up behind you and shoot you in the back Americans and Indians. It was called the “War of Jenkins’s Ear” (1739-1748) and fought between Spain and England, two naval powers of the day, both with heavy investments in the New World.

You might be asking yourself, “How did I miss that war?” You aren't alone.<

Unlike the decade-long war we recently completed in Iraq, there was very strong evidence leading up to the War of Jenkins’s Ear. There was none of that “There might be WMD’s” or “We strongly believe that there are WMD’s” or “There’s a very good outside chance that there are WMD’s somewhere and once we get inside there we should be able to find them with any luck—maybe.”

The grounds for getting into the War of Jenkins’s Ear began on a much firmer footing. In March of 1738, Robert Jenkins marched before the House of Parliament and threw his left ear on the table for all to see and declared that the Spanish pirate, Julio Leon Fandino, commander of the Spanish galleon, La Isabela, had boarded the British Brig Rebecca and cut the damn thing off.

A year and a half later—or about ten times longer then it took to debate the non-existent evidence that led to the Iraqi War—Britain declared war on Spain. Interestingly enough, just as Parliament did not rush off to war neither had Jenkins rushed off to Parliament when he had the chance. The assault on his ear had taken place on April 9, 1731, seven years earlier—272 years to the day before American soldiers cut down Saddam Hussein’s statue from its pedestal. Some days in history are just busier than others. For whatever reason, Jenkins had more or less sat on his ear for almost eight years before finally demanding justice.

This war was fought mainly on the open seas but a little fighting spilled over to colonial America, whose participation in the struggle came down to clashes between Britain’s army in Georgia led by Governor/General James Olgethorpe and the Spanish settlement in Florida.

Technically speaking, General Olgethorpe wasn’t a colonist but a British general and for the most part he wasn’t even a good general, but he was a good friend of John Adams and was sympathetic to the colonist’s cause—and besides, no one was speaking technically in those days. And if he hadn’t defeated the Spanish invasion of Georgia in 1742 after losing his own British invasion of Florida two years earlier—well things might have been a whole lot different. For starters, we’d have only twelve original colonies.

The world heard little more from Robert Jenkins after his eight years and fifteen minutes of fame as he pretty much dropped out of sight; and he continued to hear only half as much as he did before that fateful April day when he met the pirate, Fandino.