Short Stuff: War of Jenkins' Ear

and ten years later, is that right? Yeah? An essayist, uh, what's his name, Thomas Carlyle dubbed dubbed it the War 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.