Short Stuff: War of Jenkins' Ear

In the 18th century, Spain and England fought each other in the colonies of Georgia and Florida, a war kicked off by an English sea captain who was mad his ear had been perhaps unfairly lopped off. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and there's Jerry, and this is short stuff,
so let's get to it. We're talking about a war.
Started buying ear go. My favorite thing is how you
try to keep us so on track and now I
try to throw us off. You really do, and you're
doing it now, and it's what I love it, all right.

(00:25):
The War of jenkins Ear, which there's a lot of
misnomers in this war because first of all, the War
of jenkins Ear was not called that until a hundred
and ten years later, is that right? Yeah? An essayist, uh,
what's his name, Thomas Carlyle dubbed dubbed it the War

(00:48):
of jenkins Ear dred and ten years later. And what
it really was was just a part of a larger war,
the War of Austrian secession, Yeah, succession, right, because it
was it was a question about who was going to
take over the throne. Yeah, but I don't want to
poopo it. Let's just go back and tell the story

(01:10):
because it is pretty good. It is. It's a good story.
That whole succeeding to the throne thing that was a
big deal in Europe in the eighteenth century and long
before the eighteenth century too, But by this time Europe
had basically formed a really intertwined set of economies and
set of governments, so that if if you were saying, like,

(01:33):
um a prince in Spain, you may end up being like,
running the show is the king of Austria at some
point because your father married an Austrian princess and you
have Austrian blood and there's no clear heir to the throne,
and so you are being called upon in Spain. Is like, yes,
I'm so glad we have somebody over there in Austria

(01:55):
because now Austria is gonna do right by us. And
when that didn't happened, and whether alliance is broken, and
when there was a conflict over who had the rightful
um claim on a throne, when when it came up
for grabs, that's when wars broke out. So you've got
like Spain, Austria, France, England, all of them are alternately

(02:18):
forming alliances, warring with each other and taking the throne
from one another, taking a seat on one another's throne,
which usually brought those two countries together. And that's what
happened in this case too. That kicked all of this off. Yeah,
this happened in Spain with King Charles the Second dying
no clear air. So obviously all of Europe basically is like, oh,

(02:40):
I want to be the king of Spain, uh, or
you know someone from our country, because that will really
help us out. So France and Austria got involved in
boss isn't hey we have a claim to the Spanish
throne and um France and Spain basically, uh, they all
started plotting. All these countries started plotting with one another,

(03:03):
and the Emperor of Austria and the King of France
I think while Charles the Second was still alive, divided
up Spanish territory of Italy between them. Charles got upset
willed his throne to a French prince, and then France
was like, wait a minute, Austria, did we really have
a deal right, because I don't remember that. All I

(03:26):
know is that we're next in line in Spain. Austria
got mad. That started the War of Spanish Succession, and
that is important to this not because it was the
ward Jenkins ear, but it just sort of set the
stage and that Spain and England, even though France and
Austria were fighting. They were sort of involved on the

(03:46):
fringe and just ticked each other off basically right exactly.
So there's already hostilities and this was not helping things
in the colonies, especially in Georgia and Florida where France
and Spain who were hostile to one another. As the
results of this War of Spanish Succession, Um, we're butted
upright against one another, and there was a lot of

(04:09):
border skirmishes. Um. I think by the time rolled around
and the hostilities really came to a head. Uh, Georgia
had only been formed as an English colony like six
years before, so it was real tentative and tenuous, and
that with the Spanish really had a respectable navy that

(04:30):
could take out a coastal town if it wanted to,
and so Georgia was in a really vulnerable position. So. UM,
one of the things from that War of Spanish Spanish
Succession that it addressed the Treaty of You Trecked that
came out of it, said okay, Spain, you you in England,
we haven't forgotten about you guys. We need to make

(04:51):
trade amongst you much more smooth and legal and maybe
that will keep some of the skirmishes from from happening.
And so the English were allowed, for i think the
first time, to actually trade with Spain from Georgia to Florida,
which seems like it would be a good move, but
it ultimately led to disaster. Yeah, and what you know,

(05:12):
there were a lot of things at stake here, but
we shouldn't whitewash this and leave out that what England
was really doing here and all these all the battling
was trying to improve their their trade capabilities in the Caribbean,
not just with stuff, but with human beings and slaves.

(05:33):
Oh yeah, yeah, true. So it was very very ugly
what was going on. And in the Treaty of Utrecht, uh,
they they set all these guidelines. Um, England had all
these ambitions in that area, and Spain though says, all right,
you know what, though, we're going to act as the
I guess sort of the the coast guard and the

(05:54):
cops um of the high seas. And if we think
that you're smuggling something you shouldn't be smuggling, we're gonna
board your ship. And maybe we should take a break
here and finish the story right after this okay, chuck.

(06:27):
So the Spanish Armada, the Spanish navy is acting as
the coast guard because technically the English traders are allowed
into trade, but they're they're supposed to be like their
cargo is supposed to pay taxes, tariffs, duties, all this stuff.
The problem is is that the English were um rampant

(06:50):
uh smugglers, and it was way easier to say like, oh, hey,
you in Florida, you need scissors and yarn and I
want some of your silver. So I'm just gonna sneak
some of those things past the Spanish coast guard in
the hopes that they won't find it and then we
can trade. And that's what the Spaniards called contraband. And

(07:10):
so the Spanish was well aware that this was going on,
so they would board ships routinely um and search them.
And on I believe April April nine, they happened to
board a ship in particular called the Rebecca that was
captained by a guy named Robert Jenkins. Yeah, and this
was one of those Spanish patrol boats. It was called Isabella,

(07:33):
and they said we're coming aboard and we're gonna check
out what you got here. There was a bit of
a um. Well, they found them out they were smuggling
things that they shouldn't have had after they expected the
manifest in the cargo, and there was punishment levied one
Juan de Leon Fandino, who uh was the Spanish captain

(07:55):
tried to send a message straight to the king and
said with his sword you like that, he said, with
his sword, off with your ear and cut off Captain
jenkins ear. And Captain Jenkins ostensibly picked it up, put
it in his pocket, and later pickled it. He did

(08:15):
pickle it, and he carried it around with him for
like seven years, and finally one day, I don't know how,
but he managed to get into the House of Commons
and said, look at this, look at what the Spanish
captain did to my ear, um, just for trying to
be like a respectable businessman smuggling a little contraband into Florida.

(08:37):
And he said that if the King of England were
here and in violation of law, he would have done
it to the King of England too, And Parliament said,
that is it. We are declaring war on Spain Georgia.
Go get him. Yeah, he was actually called in to testify,
so okay, um, he was an important, um, important witness

(09:01):
I guess to the activities down there. Maybe that's why
they called him in. The one bad part about that
story is supposedly there is no evidence that he actually
presented his ear, and people think that it may have
just been sort of gussied up through history and telling
him this tale. But he did testify, we know that.
But it certainly makes for a great story that he

(09:22):
actually held his ear up and said, look at this
pickled ear. I'm hoping that at the very least they
inspected to make sure he was missing an ear. Yeah,
it would be so um obviously, I think we should say, like,
no one ever started a war over somebody's ear being

(09:42):
lopped off. That just became shorthand. Again, the tensions between
England and Spain and the tensions between their their colonial
presence was already simmering. Uh. There have been a lot
of overland skirmishes between Georgia and Florida, and this was
This is pointed to historically as the thing that that

(10:03):
the straw that broke the camel's back. I guess. Yeah.
And the sort of the um anticlimax of this story
is the War of Jenkins. Ear was not much of
a war um. Like we said, it was sort of
part of smaller wars that they just gave a name
to ten years later. But there wasn't much that got
accomplished during the War of Jenkins. Ear Over that that

(10:26):
few years that they had these battles, well, a couple
of things did come out of it. One there was
something called the Battle of Bloody Marsh. So you're thinking, like,
oh man, a lot of people died. Now it was
called Bloody Marsh already that just happened to be where
the battle was was staged on St. Simon's Island and Georgia.
But in that battle, like five thousand Spanish troops sailed

(10:47):
to Georgia and landed and came came into Georgia and
were repelled by the Georgian colonial defense people, the Georgia
defensive line exactly. They pushed him back, pushed him back
way back, right, and that was huge for them because

(11:07):
up to this point, remember the Spanish were like like
inconceivably powerful, and Georgia said, oh wait, we actually can
defeat them. So that was one big thing. And then
it also solidified George's position safely as an English colony.
That it was like, hey, man, we're here to stay.
You stayed down in Florida, we'll stay up here in Georgia.

(11:28):
We're an English colony, you're a Spanish colony. Don't mess
with us anymore. So those two things did kind of
come out of it. Actually. Yeah, and Oglethorpe he mounted
his own campaign to invade St. Augustine and did okay there,
but eventually retreated and even left his armaments and weapons
and stuff. Uh so there, I mean, there were some

(11:48):
major battles, but I think in the end, the War
of jenkins Ear is just sort of, um, a bit
of a historical footnote in a lot of ways. Yeah.
Historically it got absorbed in the larger King George's War,
which was a part of the War of Austrian Succession,
I think, right exactly. So it was a war within
a war within a war. It was like inception in

(12:09):
colonial America. And Ellen Page will be here in just
a minute to fully explain it over and over. Right,
thank you for listening to our attempt at explaining the
War of jenkins Ear. Uh, we'll see you next time
on short stuff.