Sometimes called "King George's War" or a prelude to it (since in the New World those two wars were not distinctly separate), the strangely named "War of Jenkins' Ear" had an improbable and superficial origin, and an unusually tragic ending. In 1731, a Spanish coast guard sloop off Havana boarded the English privateer Robert Jenkins of the Rebecca as he made his his way from Jamaica to London from Jamaica. The Spanish found no evidence of privateering, but repeatedly tortured Jenkins and a Lieutenant Dorce finally sliced off his ear with his cutlass and told him to take it to King George as a token of what they had in mind for the king. Seven years later Jenkins was invited by a certain party of warmongers to display his pickled ear to Parliament, thereby inflaming British and American colonial opinion against the Spain. The government of Hugh Walpole duly but reluctantly declared war. The press and later historians could not resist naming the war for its theatrical beginning.

      The context was fifty years of simmering colonial boundary disputes, growing competition for trade in the New World, and Britain's sense that Spain was vulnerable. By the Treaty of Utecht in 1713, Britain was allowed to participate in slave traffic with the Spanish colonies, but the Spanish fleet interfered with this activity. After a short war in 1727-29 the Treaty of Seville in 1729 granted Spain the right to search any ship in its waters, but they enforced it capriciously in order to entrap the British. Britain was aroused by repeated tales of mistreatment of its seamen such as Jenkins. Spain in turn sought satisfaction for its claims of depradations by the British on its shipping, illegal British logging on the Honduras coast, and British encroachment on the Georgia-Florida border.

      The Georgia colony had been established in 1733 as a military buffer between Spain and the vaguely defined colonies of the Carolinas, and the new colony infringed significantly on Spanish territorial claims. In 1735 the Spanish had launched a surprise attack on Savannah, and Governor Oglethorpe decided as a precaution to build a series of defensive forts and raise his own regiment. After securing his western flank from the French by treaties with friendly Indian tribes, Georgia was in a position to threaten Spanish Florida.

      Upon declaration of war, Britain invited the American colonies to supply troops, and the colonial quotas were formed into a four-battalion regiment which was sent to the West Indies to link up with a British force (including six regiments of marines raised for the purpose) for a major attack on the Spanish Main. (This was the first foreign war for the colonies that were later to become the United States of America.) The British aim was nothing less than the overthrow Spanish hegemony in the West Indies and control of its colonial trade.

     The original British invasions in Florida and on the Spanish Main either underestimated Spanish resistance or lacked the strength to seize territory. A Spanish counter-attack in Georgia was also repulsed. The subsequent British expeditions ended in disaster, with most of the proposed actions called off due to the ravages of yellow fever and other diseases. Six hundred men of the British expeditionary force died before reaching the first action at Cartagena. The war sputtered out in 1742-43 for lack of troops to continue. Of the 3,300-man American expeditionary force, about 300 were still combat effective. The British, despite reinforcements, fared little better: nine in ten men died, and only a very small percentage in combat. There were no territorial gains on either side.

     Meanwhile war had started in 1740 on the European continent over the Austrian succession, and Britain found itself in 1743 in a continued larger war with Spain and France in defence of Austria. The Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748 resolved the Anglo-Spanish dispute over Georgia.

• A view of the Town and Castle of St. Augustine and the English Camp before it, June 20, 1740 (Carl Vinson Institute)
• The Struggle for Florida and Construction of Castillo de San Marcos, 1565-1821, by Jennifer D. Brown.

• The Battle at Bloody Marsh (Teaching Globally)
• A Map of the Islands of St. Simons and Jekyll, 1740 (Carl Vinson Institute)
• Map of St. Simons Island, 1741 (Carl Vinson Institute)
• Battle of Bloody Marsh (This Day in Georgia History)
• The Battle of Bloody Marsh, by Richard R. Pettys, Jr.
• 250 Years Later: Bloody Marsh Revisited, by Gordon R. Elwell.

• Admiral Vernon & Porto Bello, by Bruce C. Ruiz Jr.
• Port Bello, by Bruce C. Ruiz Jr.
• Porto Bello 1739, by Charles Harrison Wallace.

• Castillo de San Lorenzo, by Bruce C. Ruiz Jr.

• Vernon en Cartegena, 1741 Nuevos datos sobre su derrota, por Gustavo Vargas Martínez
• Cartagena de Indias: historiografía de sus fortificaciones, por Rodolfo Segovia Salas.
• The Battle of Cartagena: Admiral Vernon to his wife (Hillsdale College Documents in Military History)
• La Invencible inglesa en Cartagena de Indias (Marzo de 1741), por Marco A. Gandarillas

• Note: no British medals were awarded.

• Fort Frederica National Monument, Georgia (US National Parks Service)
• Fort Frederica Historic Plaque (Carl Vinson Institute)
• Fort King George Historic Site (Georgia State Parks)
• Castillo De San Marcos National Monument, Florida (US National Parks Service)
• Battle of Bloody Marsh Monument, Georgia (Carl Vinson Institute)

• War of Jenkins Ear, by John Pike (GlobalSecurity.org)
• War of Jenkins' Ear (FAS Military Analysis Network)
• War of Jenkins' Ear (USA History)
• The War of Jenkins's Ear, by Rick Brainard.
• Der Englisch-Spanische Krieg 1739-1748, by Marcus A. König (Kriege der Neuzeit)
• War of Jenkins's Ear (Simonides)
• The Dawn of Oglethorpe's Georgia, by John Worth.
• Military Artifacts of Spanish Florida: 1650-1821: An Internet Museum, by John T. Powell.
• Robert Jenkins (1911 Encyclopedia)
• Chronology
  • Jahreschronik 1730-1769, by Bernd Marek (Chronologische Kriegsgeschichte)