A sailor has an ear cut off (and possibly pickled)

Countless are the atrocities committed in wartime. It is a much rarer occurrence, however, for a relatively minor act of barbarity to galvanise a nation into declaring war. And yet that is precisely what occurred in the case of the curiously named War of Jenkins’ Ear, a conflict that lasted almost a decade. During that time it merged seamlessly with the War of the Austrian Succession and was notable for the two firsts it created in military history, both of which paved the way for yet more anguish and suffering to be heaped upon future generations.

The incident that helped spark this off cannot have seemed like a minor act of barbarity to the man on whom it was inflicted. Robert Jenkins, the Welshman whose ear was to become famous, captained a brig called Rebecca which, in the spring of 1731, was cruising the Caribbean, where he was engaged in a little light smuggling. Under the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, Spain had granted Britain a 30-year asiento – the right to supply the Spanish colonies of the New World with a limitless number of slaves and up to 500 tonnes of produce per annum. Naturally, the temptation to get around the latter quota proved too much for some, and undeclared goods often found their way to the colonists. Accordingly, as a concession to Spain in the 1729 Treaty of Seville, Britain afforded the Spanish the right to waylay British ships to ensure that they were trading within the restrictions laid down by the asiento.

So it came to pass that on 9 April 1731, Juan de León Fandiño, the captain of a Spanish patrol vessel called La Isabela, spotted the two-masted squared-rigged Rebecca and decided to find out what she was up to. La Isabela was brought up alongside the brig and Fandiño and other officers boarded her. What happened next was to have repercussions that would resonate down the centuries. According to reports, Jenkins was accused by the Spaniards of smuggling and was tied to a mast, at which point Fandiño (or possibly an officer named Dorce) drew out a cutlass and hacked at Jenkins’ left ear. Another member of the boarding party stepped forward and tore off the dangling appendage. Fandiño is then reputed to have proclaimed something along the lines of: ‘Go! And tell your king that I will do the same to him if he dares to do what you have done.’ The coast guards then assaulted the crew, plundered the ship and set it adrift without navigational instruments, an act that might well have sent them to their doom. Two months later, however, the Rebecca had struggled back across the Atlantic to England.

According to an official statement made by the ship’s uni-auricular captain, the sundered organ was handed back to him immediately after its amputation. In March 1738, Jenkins is reputed to have been hawking the offending article around Parliament, in pickled form. If the tale is to be believed, he had been ordered to appear at the House of Commons so that members of parliament could hear with their own ears how Jenkins came to be parted from one of his. When questioned as to his reaction at the time of the outrage, the captain is said to have avowed, with a sententiousness he must have felt the occasion demanded, ‘I commended my soul to God and my cause to my country.’

A full eight years after the event, this humiliation suffered by one of George II’s subjects was – somewhat conveniently – deemed tantamount to an attack on Britain herself and ample cause to embark on yet another war with Spain.

Of course, there were many other reasons why British politicians and their king were keen for hostilities to break out again. For one thing, there was the matter of rival imperial conquests in North America. It was also in British interest to increase trade with the colonies on the continent and it was a cause of frustration that the Spanish restricted such activities. Nevertheless, however unlikely it may seem, the ear became a lightning rod for British anger at supposed Spanish aggression and wrongdoings. Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole found himself hemmed in on all sides by those clamouring for the restoration of British pride, which was something the hawks claimed could only be achieved through military conflict. Somewhat reluctantly he bowed to the pressure and, in 1739, Britain and Spain were once again at war.

The fighting was concentrated in the Caribbean – principally attacks on ports in North America, Venezuela, Panama and New Granada (now part of Colombia) – with the two sides squaring up to one another rather inconclusively. Three years later, back in Europe, the War of the Austrian Succession broke out. This was a messy dispute that began with Prussia and Austria quarrelling over ownership of Silesia but widened as other European powers had inevitably piled in on either side. There was a good possibility that France might cement her own position as the pre-eminent power in Europe and there were even well-grounded fears in Britain that a Franco-Spanish invasion was imminent. The British, who were not keen that any of this should come to pass, had taken the side of Austria. Thus, the War of Jenkins’ Ear became subsumed into this broader conflict that was being fought much closer to home. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (one of whose negotiators was the Earl of Sandwich, see A nobleman doesn’t have the time for a formal dinner) brought the latter to a conclusion in 1748. By extension, this ended the War of Jenkins’ Ear as well, though operations in the Americas had largely fizzled out a few years beforehand anyway.

Another curious thing about this particular conflict is that its name was only coined a century or so after the event. The essayist Thomas Carlyle first used the term in 1858 in his History of Friedrich II of Prussia. Perhaps he had an eye on fixing this particular dispute – which had simply been known as one of the Anglo-Spanish wars – firmly in the mind of his readers. He had good reason to do so because there is a dazzling array of Anglo-Spanish wars given the name ‘The Anglo-Spanish War’ and differentiated merely by the dates of their occurrence. It is apt to confuse at the best of times and so at least Carlyle managed to pull one from the mire and make it memorable.

Despite the fact that the War of Jenkins’ Ear proved to be little more than a disjointed series of indecisive military actions and an excuse for ‘privateers’ (that is, state-sponsored pirates) on both sides to prey on each other’s shipping, the conflict did have long-lasting repercussions. It set a precedent in that it involved a regiment formed of American colonists being incorporated into the British Army and then packed off to fight somewhere other than North America. This would become yet one more grievance to add to the pile of American resentments regarding British rule.

Secondly, it drove Spain and France into an alliance that would last nearly a century and contribute to Britain’s loss of its North American colonies in 1783.

Finally, as the historian Harold Temperley argued, the war had been the first that Britain had conducted in which ‘the trade interest absolutely predominated, in which the war was waged solely for balance of trade rather than for balance of power’. Over 250 years later, the accusation is repeatedly made that Prime Minister Tony Blair led Britain into the second Iraq War for economic not moral reasons. Certainly, it’s difficult to believe that quite so much enthusiasm for ‘regime change’ would have been generated had Iraq been a major producer of kale rather than oil. Perhaps, in a hundred years’ time, some historian will call the invasion of Iraq ‘The War of the Sexed-Up Dossier’ and it will stick.

As for the two players in the drama that helped bring about the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Juan de León Fandiño was captured with his ship in 1742 and sent under guard to Portsmouth. Meanwhile Robert Jenkins went back to sea as captain of a ship in the East India Company, an organisation that was about to make its own devastating mark on history (see Robert Clive reaches for an unreliable pistol).