War of Jenkins' Ear

The Battle of Cartagena de Indias was fought during the War of Jenkins' Ear, a conflict rooted in long-standing commercial tensions between Spain and Great Britain that played out primarily in the Caribbean. The British campaign aimed at seizing key Spanish colonial ports — among them Porto Bello and Chagres in Panama, Havana, and Cartagena de Indias in present-day Colombia — as a means of striking at Spanish maritime and commercial power in the region. At Cartagena de Indias, a British force of between 27,400 and 30,000 faced a Spanish garrison of 3,000 to 4,000 under Sebastián de Eslava and Blas de Lezo. The disparity in casualties — British losses of 9,500 to 11,500 against Spanish losses of approximately 1,200 — indicates a severe British reverse. That outcome, achieved by a force a fraction of the British size, checked the broader British effort to reduce Spanish colonial strongholds in the Caribbean and represented one of the costliest failures of the war for Great Britain.