Triumph and disaster in the War of Jenkins’ Ear

It all began in 1731 when Robert Jenkins, the captain of the Rebecca, had his ear sliced off by Juan de León Fandiño of the Spanish patrol boat La Isabela. Storming the British brig in the Caribbean, Fandiño accused Jenkins of smuggling sugar from Spanish colonies. He would cut King George’s ear off too, Fandiño threatened, were he to be caught stealing from Spain. Testifying before parliament in 1738, Jenkins produced the severed ear (pickled in a jar), which is why the nine years of fighting that followed became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

In retaliation, the British sent a squadron of five men-of-war and a scouting sloop under the leadership of Captain George Anson, whose orders were to cross the Atlantic and go round Cape Horn, ‘taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying’ enemy ships. In a secret mission, they were also to destroy a Spanish galleon – ‘the prize of all the oceans’ – loaded with Peruvian silver.

Cape Horn, at the southernmost tip of the Americas, marks the edge of the Drake Passage, the most hellish strait on Earth; but the 2,000 sailors, rounded up by press gangs or drafted from Newgate and the Chelsea Hospital for veteran soldiers, were lured by the promise of a share in the loot. For the most part, the seamen were not able-bodied but old and infirm, rheumatic, deaf, blind, lame, ‘full of the pox’, ‘the itch’ and the ‘King’s Evil’. Only a third survived the voyage.

On 18 September 1740, the convoy made its way down the Channel. The flagship, the Centurion, several decks deep with two rows of cannons on each side, was a gleaming cathedral of 17 sails with a figurehead of a bright red, 16ft wooden lion. The runt of the squadron was the Wager, an ugly, tubby East Indiaman built for cargo but rekitted as a man-of-war.