In 1731, a Spanish coast guard cut off an English sea captain's ear. Seven years later, Britain went to war over it. They named the war after the ear, more than a century after it ended.

His name was Robert Jenkins. He captained a small smuggling brig called the Rebecca, running West Indian trade through the Caribbean. On April the 9th, 1731, off the coast of Havana, the Spanish coast guard ship Isabela came alongside, and her captain, Juan de Fandiño, came aboard. Fandiño accused Jenkins of contraband. He tied him to the mast. He drew a cutlass. He slit Jenkins's left ear from his head. And he handed it back with a message: take it to King George.

Jenkins did one better. He pickled it in alcohol and kept it in a glass jar. For seven years, the story sat dormant. Spain was a sometime ally.

Then in 1738, the war faction in Parliament needed a reason to break with Spain and seize her Caribbean trade. They needed a scandal. They produced the ear. According to legend, Jenkins himself appeared before the House of Commons, pulled the pickled ear from the jar, and read out his testimony. Historians now doubt he was ever in the chamber. But the ear was, and public outrage did the rest.

Prime Minister Robert Walpole opposed the war. He was overruled. As the church bells of London rang out the declaration in October 1739, Walpole turned to a colleague and said, quote: 'They now ring their bells. They will soon be wringing their hands.'

He was right. The first major British operation was the siege of Cartagena de Indias in 1741. Admiral Edward Vernon brought 186 ships and 27,000 men. He lost the siege. He lost over ten thousand of those men. Most of them died of yellow fever before they ever fired a shot.

The war then merged into the larger War of Austrian Succession. It dragged on until 1748. The pickled ear simply vanished from history. And nobody alive at the time ever called it the War of Jenkins's Ear. The historian Thomas Carlyle invented that name in 1858. The men who died in it never knew what it was about.

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