The "War of Jenkin's Ear" (1739-48) was fought between Great Britain and Spain. In Spain the war was called "Guerra de Asiento". The war was named for Robert Jenkins, a British merchant ship captain, and alleged smuggler, whose ear was cut off by a Spanish naval captain named Julio Léon Fandino.

Since it Christopher Columbus began to colonize the New World on Spain's behalf in the 1490s, the Spain's rulers imposed strict mercantilist restrictions on its American colonies. Colonists were only allowed to trade with imperially-approved merchants. The town of Seville, Spain, enjoyed a royal monopoly on New World trade. All goods sold to or from the Spanish-American colonies had to go through Seville, and were heavily taxed.

As one could imagine, officially-approved imports were expensive and scarce in the Spanish-American colonies. Many Spanish colonists in the Americas resorted to smuggling. They bought cheaper goods sold illegally by unapproved foreign merchants, and sold their own products to the foreign smugglers at higher prices than those offered by the imperial monopolies.

By the 18th century the growth of Great Britain's worldwide commercial influence made British smugglers the major illegal trading partners of Spanish-Americans colonists. In the early 18th century Great Britain and Spain fought a series of wars. After the last of these conflicts, Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty. Among the terms of this treaty was a clause that allowed Spanish naval ships to search British merchant ships in order to prevent smuggling. It was under this clause that the captain of the Spanish patrol ship "La Isabela" seized Jenkins' and cut off his ear.

The Jenkins' case wasn't unique. Spanish patrols stopped many British merchant ships suspected of smuggling. Many British citizens and suspected smugglers complained about mistreatment by Spanish officials. But the Jenkins' incident was, perhaps, the most memorable of these incidents. Jenkins and other British merchant seamen were called to testify before British Parliament, and the mistreatment of British citizens by Spain became a justification for the war in 1839. Of course, there were also underlying political conflicts between the two nations that led to the war, but Jenkins' and similar cases became the nationalistic pretext for the war in Britain.

It was during the war that Britain launched an attack on the Spanish South American city of Cartagena in 1741. Today Cartagena, along with Barranquilla, is one of he major cities on Colombia's Caribbean Sea coast. In the 18th century, however, Cartagena was an important port in the Spanish colony of New Granada.

This document, which dates from the beginning of the British expedition against Cartagena in March 1741, is a British reconnaissance report on the Spanish defences of the city. The British reported that the Spanish defences around the city were weak. They were confident that they would be able to land their troops near to the town without danger, and that the Spanish cannons would be easily destroyed.

In fact, the Spanish defences at Cartagena were fairly weak, and the British naval and army invasion force was a powerful one. The British were confident of victory at first, as this report shows. But, in the end, they were defeated by an unanticipated enemy- yellow fever, a tropical virus spread by the Anopheles aegypti mosquito. Yellow fever decimated the British army, forcing them to withdraw from Cartagena, and leaving the city in Spanish hands. Yellow fever played a similarly important role in other wars in the Greater Caribbean region, most notably during the Haitian Revolution, when yellow fever epidemics decimated British and French invasion forces.

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