Robert Gaudi - The War of Jenkins Ear - The Forgotten Struggle for North and South America - 1739-1742

Author of African Kaiser

Robert Gaudi

The War of Jenkins Ear

The Forgotten Struggle for North and South America

17391742

THE WAR OF JENKINS EAR

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2021 by Robert Gaudi

First Pegasus Books cloth edition November 2021

Interior design by Sheryl P. Kober

Jacket design: Brock Book Design Co., Charles Brock

Cover image: Alamy, Capture of Porto Bello by Admiral Edward Vernon on 22 November 1739.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-64313-819-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-820-6

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

For D.H.W. in gratitude for his many kindnesses.

And for my children, with love.

Historians are dependent on their sources. Had I more time and ability, I should have made this book a novel, for there are so many things the sources do not tell. There are heroisms unrecorded, great moments of beauty and courage that have left no trace, unknowable human experiences that would teach wisdom and understanding The historian can never construct a record of events. All he can do is construct a record of records.

J.H. POWELL, BRING OUT YOUR DEAD, 1949

Our Merchants and ears a strange bother have made, with Losses sustained in their ships and their trade; But now they may laugh and quite banish their fears, Nor mourn for lost Liberty, riches and ears.

ENGLISH STREET BALLAD, C. 1739. (Written upon declaration of war against Spain.)

The medal gleamed in the dealers glass case. A tarnished disc, perhaps brass, about the size of an old half-dollar coin, resting incongruously beside pocket watches, silver cigarette cases, and an array of collectible spoons. Sun baked the asphalt; a hot wind blew from the direction of Wisconsin Avenue. A sweaty, heat-struck crowd shuffled between the booths. A few women carried sunbrellas; one man wore a sort of French Foreign Legion hat, the neck kerchief fluttering. This made a kind of sense; Washington, DC, in August is as hot as the Sahara, only with humidity.

The medal was crudely done, cartoonish even, and in dealer-speak had some age on it, maybe a couple of hundred years.

The dealer, a large, shaggy man wearing a Hawaiian shirt stepped over, eager for a sale.

Thats a commemorative piece, he said. British. Got some age on it.

Thats what I was thinking, I said. But what does it commemorate?

Here

Without being asked, he opened the case, placed the medal on a velvet pad and handed me a magnifying glass.

The medal was encased in a clear plastic sleeve. It depicted an eighteenth-century gentleman, periwigged and wearing a tricorn hat, accepting a sword from a kneeling man dressed like a clown. In the kneelers other hand a conical fez-like hat; above his head the words DON BLASS , with the N backward. Over his shoulder, a sailing ship that looked like it had been rendered by a child. Through the magnifying glass, I could just make out the inscription around the circumference, worn to a sheen by the years but not illegible: THE PRIDE OF SPAIN HUMBLED BY ADM. VERNON . The obverse showed the battlements of a fortified port city defended by cannon and watched over by a church with a tall spire. Four men-of-war stood at anchor in the wavy lines meant to indicate the waters of a bay beneath the city walls. Another inscription here read VERNON CONQUERED CATAGENA with the date APRIL 1 1741 .

All this rang a very faint bell. I am a writer of historical narrative, but my era of specialization begins about a hundred years after the date on the medal and ends with the surrender of von Lettow-Vorbeck in the jungles of East Africa in 1919, the subject of my last book.

Whats your price on this? I said at last.

Six hundred, the dealer said. Its a rare piece.

I dropped the medal to the velvet pad as if my fingers had just been burned.

A little rich for my blood, I said.

Look it up online, the dealer countered. Search Admiral Vernon Medals, check out the prices. Trust me, theyre a thing.

I stepped away, but something stopped me. I hesitated. Do you mind? Then I pulled out my phone and snapped a few pictures of the medal, both front and back.

The dealer said hed be here at the flea market in the same spot every Sunday for the rest of the month and that he had a little room to negotiate on the price. Id do some research and get back to him, I saidbut I didnt. I went to Nags Head to the beach the next weekend and the weekend after that it rained the tropical torrents we get here in late summer and the Georgetown Flea Market was reduced to a few sodden booths, their awnings dripping in the rain, and the dealer with the medal wasnt one of them.

Months passed. I forgot about the odd little medal, about Admiral Vernon and the kneeling Don Blass. Then, one afternoon, going through the photos on my phone, deleting selfies and shots of the delicious pho at Rice Paper and the crab Benedict brunch at BlackSalt, I came across the photos of the medal and settled myself at my computer and searched Admiral Vernon Medals and sat back, astonished at what I found:

There wasnt just one Admiral Vernon medal but at least a thousand different varieties, so many that they constituted an entire subcategory in the field of numismatics. Scholarly tomes had been written on the subject going back to 1835, with Leander McCormick-Goodharts authoritative study taking up a whole issue of Stacks Numismatic Review in 1945. McCormick-Goodhart, perhaps the most ambitious collector of these medals had amassed over ten thousand examples of nearly a thousand different types before his death in 1965. The most recent addition to what I suppose must be called Admiral Vernon Medal Studies came out less than a decade ago: Medallic Portraits of Admiral Vernon, cowritten by a pair of dedicated numismatists, John Adams and Fernando Chao, and published by Kolbe and Fanning Numismatic Books of Gahanna, Ohio. A first edition hardcover is available from Amazon for the exalted price of $149.85, shipping not included.