The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

In 1713, the British South Sea Company had received from Spain what was known as an asiento—a license to sell nearly five thousand African people a year as slaves in Spain’s Latin American colonies. Because of this abhorrent new agreement, English merchants were able to use their ships to smuggle such goods as sugar and wool. As the Spanish increasingly retaliated by seizing vessels that sold forbidden goods, British merchants and their political allies began searching for a pretext to rally the public for war to expand Britain’s colonial holdings and monopolies on trade. And “the fable of Jenkins’s ear,” as Edmund Burke later dubbed it, provided a righteous sheen to their scheme. (The historian David Olusoga had noted that the unseemly aspects of the war’s origin have largely been “expunged from the mainstream narrative of British history.”)

The war of Jenkin's Ear