Citation Needed - The Battle of Cartagena de Indias

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

The Battle of Cartagena de Indias (Spanish: Sitio de Cartagena de Indias, lit. 'Siege of Cartagena de Indias') took place during the 1739 to 1748 War of Jenkins' Ear between Spain and Great Britain. The result of long-standing commercial tensions, the war was primarily fought in the Caribbean; the British tried to capture key Spanish ports in the region, including Porto Bello and Chagres in Panama, Havana, and Cartagena de Indias in present-day Colombia.

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Heath and I'll be leading this naval expedition and I'm joined by four able-ish bodied semen, Noah, Cecil, Tom, and Eli. Ish! Two tails make them faster. It just feels weird how much we know about each other, Seaman.

It does. Oh, now you say that on air. You didn't have to fill out the questionnaire, Eli. You didn't have to. You didn't have to come on the questionnaire, Eli. That's not how we wanted you to fill it out at all, actually. Questionnaires are stuck together. It just said age.

Welcome, new listener all right You know what I'm gonna give you guys you like so much to try you what you said that they swear, but I Wearing your father and I fucking came all over my computer screen Neat. All right, no, let's get into it. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's what person place thing, concept phenomenon or event are we going to be

talking about today? Today we're going to be talking about the battle of Cartagena the Indias. All right. So what was that? It was a disastrous 1741 British effort to seize the South American city of Carjena from the Spanish. And why did you pick this battle? Because it was a battle that was already historically inept before the attacking forces got to the walls of the city and realized their ladders were 10 feet shorter than the walls. Whoops!

Okay, that's fantastic. Pivot. Pivot, pivot. All right, well, I assume you've got like half an episode worth of historical context to have the runtime start off. Give away all my secrets, why don't you? But yes, I do. So, okay, so this battle or siege really took place during the War of Jenkins' Ear.

Now we talked a little bit about this on episode 334, but the short version is that the British and the Spanish were warring over commercial supremacy in the Caribbean. It lasted a couple of years. And Jenkins' Ear isn't like an oddly named geographical feature or a bean shaped bay or something. It's a dude named Jenkins' Ear that got cut off by a Spanish Admiral and was later presented in a jar

before parliament as a pretense for war. Or actually, none of that probably ever happened, but they said it did. Anyway, the problem at its root was that the governments of the world at that time were governed by this antiquated concept called mercantilism that thought that the only way for one nation to be successful was at the expense of another, which in addition to being just fucking wrong, also leads to war over silly shit like a dude's made up severed ear. So it's a good thing we gave up on that shit, huh? Okay. We tried to get more than just the ear, but he's a twitchy motherfucker.

Yeah, he dropped to the ground. This is an 18th century Alec Jones screaming about ear lobalists. Yeah, stuck in the middle with you was playing the whole time. War is hell boys, but it's got a great soundtrack. So, a big part of the British strategy in this war involved taking control of various South American and Caribbean ports controlled by the Spanish, or trying to anyway, and among the biggest was the walled city of Cartagena de Indias in present-day Colombia, but being among the biggest also made it one of the hardest to take and two previous naval efforts to do so

had failed in 1740. So in 1741 the Brits decided to do a combined naval and land attack, because why fail with only one branch of your military? Well boys, we tried to take the port city with only boats. We couldn't carry the boats into the town to secure the city. And we tried to attack that port city with only the infantry. And those brave boys met a watery fate. So now we're going to try and those brave boys met a watery fate. So now we're going to try tunneling under the sea. It's the only way.

Hold on a second. Wait a minute. So yeah, so they draw up their plans and they assign two guys to lead the expedition. The naval forces would be led in the overall operation would be led by an admiral named Lord Cathcart and the army forces would be commanded by a General Alexander Spotswood. Only problem is that before the expedition even left England, Spotswood died. And by the time it got there, Cathcart fell ill and he also died. And by the way, get used to that falling ill and dying thing, that's going to happen a lot. You sound like my doctor.

Okay, so two veteran commanders are going to be replaced here, one at the last minute and one at the minute after last. So Spotswood is replaced by a guy named Thomas Wentworth that a contemporary source describes as, quote, wholly defective in point of experience, confidence and resolution, end quote. Well, so Cathcart was replaced by one Edward Vernon, who this same source described as, quote, a man of strong prejudices, boundless arrogance, and overboiling passions. End quote. Needless to say, the two men did not get along.

They did a press conference together with like a baby on some kind of show. A lot of snot on the desk. It all worked out. It did, ultimately. And look, it's not remotely uncommon for military leaders to hate each other. I don't know that there's a profession in the world more ripe with prima donnas than generals and admirals.

Well, maybe the ballet, but. I don't honestly don't even think the ballet, dude. But in this instance, it was made far worse by the fact that it wasn't clear which of the two was in overall charge. Also, their hatred boiled over to the point where they apparently couldn't even have a conversation. This was perfectly encapsulated by a contemporary account of one of their war councils, which I heard in Gregory S. Aldredi's incredible Great Courses series, History's Greatest Military Blenders and the lessons they teach. Quote, Wentworth was interrupted by Vice Admiral Vernon in great heat and passion

and using the most impolite language. To this, General Wentworth made a proper reply to which the vice admiral made no answer but immediately left the cabin. When later asked what was the matter, he said, nothing, I'm fine, I'm fine. Absolutely paints a picture. When later asked what was the matter, he said, nothing, I'm fine. I'm fine. I feel like you're not. So now for his part, Vernon had already achieved some notoriety in England for his military prowess,

though he would later be better known for his mixology skills. Vernon was the British Admiral who first started the process of putting lime into the sailor's rum to stave off scurvy. That practice is where the derogatory term limey comes from. But the name of the drink itself originates from Vernon's nickname. He was well known for wearing coats made of a cloth called grogram, I think. So it's so much so that his nickname was old grog or just grog. And that's okay. They won't just like eat an orange or squeeze a lime on their food. It's so much. All right, right I'm gonna mix it with rum like you know smashing up a pill for a dog just a bunch of sailors trying to lick rum

soaked limes out of a can I mean you laugh Ethan right but I'm I've considered hiding my texts at the bottom of a bottle of Lagavulin. A fun fact, the switch from Sicilian lemons to West Indian limes as a preventative for scurvy was done as a cost-cutting measure and would actually prove disastrous and cause a resurgence of scurvy among the limeys. Although their mojitos were significantly improved. Obviously. Yeah, that's the important thing. They're just muddling it in a kong. It's crazy.

Drunk girl with press on nails waiting at the bar somehow. I'm pregnant! No. So before any of the grog shit, grog had earned himself a reputation the old-fashioned way by winning battles. Specifically, in 1739 at the beginning of the war of Jenkins here, Vernon had led a fleet of just six warships that managed to capture the Spanish colony of Portobello in modern-day Panama.

And this was seen as a huge deal back home. Medals were struck, songs were written, a national day of celebration was announced, a tower was erected in commemoration, and areas in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh were renamed Portobello in honor of this lopsided victory. The only problem with all that is that the forts at Portobello were woefully undermanned at the time, and Vernon just kind of got lucky. He just showed up when basically nobody was home. The Spanish defenders that were there were in full retreat before he even fired a cannon.

Yeah, the trick is to just say, yeah, you keep walking just loud enough for your friends to hear it, but not loud enough for the opposing army. Exactly. And he nailed it. He fucking nailed that. You're a streamer now. So now this victory would impact the siege of Cartagena in a couple of ways. One was that Vernon bought into his own hype and he thought that he was a military genius

that could do no wrong. The second was that it made him untouchable to Wentworth such that no matter how legitimate Wentworth's complaint might be, he couldn't exactly second guess that guy who had towers and metals and regions of London and shit named after him. The third, and perhaps most important, was that it led Vernon to wildly underestimate Spanish military capabilities. He was pretty sure that all he'd have to do is show up with a bunch of ships and they would surrender. Unfortunately for Vernon, though, the Spanish general who was defending Cartagena was a

fucking legend. His name was Blas DeLesso. And you do not want to mess with a guy who sounds like the name of a black queer woman owned dispensary, okay? Yes. No, okay, so DeLesso is the kind of guy that you would expect to find in a fucking pulp novel. I love this guy.

He was brave to a fault, which was super obvious at a glance if you caught him late enough in his military career in 1704, during a naval engagement off the coast of Spain, a cannonball crushed his left leg and he had to have it amputated. Right. So a few years later, during a siege in France, he lost his left eye to a piece of shrapnel. And then I swear I'm not making this shit on. Do one more time. Yeah. In 1714, during the siege of Barcelona, his left arm was blown up. Oh, good old Captain Lucky. Yeah, right. Right. So by the time of this battle, he was missing his left arm, his left leg

and his left eye. His nickname inevitably was El Medio Hombre, or The Half-Man. Okay, after the third one with the left arm, if that's me, I'm thinking there's like a magical curse happening. That's right! I'm just assuming I'm losing my left ear and left testicle in the next two battles, and I'm just like locked in. I'm walking to every battle backwards, and be like, oh, maybe this will mean nothing. They're just spinning toward him actually.

I should probably note here that despite his propensity for getting left parts of his body exploded he was actually a really good military commander which was good because the series of force surrounding Cartagena were almost as undermanned as the ones that Vernon had taken in Portobello. In fact, his forces were so desperate that when he found out the British were sending an armada against him, he pressed 600 natives into service armed with nothing but the bows and arrows that they hunted with. That made up about one seventh of his total forces. Yeah, and imagine how hard it is to take an everything will be fine speech from a guy with half is literally everything.

Trust me, man. I don't have fast these things. Yeah, yeah, right. It is inevitably now out of context. 4200 people that seems like a pretty substantial force to defend a city with, especially given that it's a walled city and it's surrounded by forts and fortifications. But the British were sending what might have been the largest armada that had ever been assembled to that day.

So de Lesseau had 2,700 regulars. The British force had 12,000. De Lesseau has 600 sailors. The British have over 15,000. And sure, he's got way more fucking Native American archers, I guess, but he's only got six ships of the line. The British are bringing 29, along with 22 frigates, two hospital ships, 80 troop ships, 50 merchant ships, and 71 impossible to take seriously because of the name, sloops of war.

There it is. There it is. This is like an overwhelming advantage in force, which will make the degree to which they get their asses kicked that much more embarrassing. Oh man. For a second there, I thought the British had a leg up. All right. Well, it's the mid 1700s and England is feeling great about expanding the empire. Can't lose. We'll see how it goes. But first, a quick break for some Oppo of Nothing. ["Oppo of Nothing"]

Soldiers at arms. Oh, sorry sir. No, no, it is nothing. It is an expression. Men! Today we journey into glorious battle. I know all too well the risk. Lady War, as you can see, she took my eye. The heat of battle, it took my leg. And these scars, each one of them is a kiss left on me to show her love. Sir, can I ask how you... how did you lose your arm?

Oh, this? I put my arm out the car window and my dad said not to. Ooh, I heard about that. Oh, me too. Yes, your parents were telling the truth. So we have an ad, right? Yeah, Factor. Oh, we love those guys. Yeah, food's great. Not so fast.

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OK, wait, you're supposed to heat them up. Yeah, man, let's eat them. 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week. It's easy to pick meals tailored to your goals. Plus, you can choose from preferences like calorie, smart protein plus or keto. Oh, yeah, right here on the box. Look at that it says heat it right up. Yeah I've been a Factor customer since before they were a sponsor. I love how I can save money and eat great. That's why I Ethan Wright personally endorse Factor. Eat smart with Factor. Get started at factor meals dot com slash citation 50

off and use the code citation 50 off to get fifty percent of your first box plus free shipping that's code citation fifty off at factor meals dot com slash citation fifty off to get fifty percent off plus free shipping on your first box All right gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I owe our friends at factor a little apology to their complaints department. Hey Cecil, is Tom okay? No Right?

No? Okay. No. Right? No. Okay. No. Right? No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. When we left off a giant armada of Brits was about to attack fucking Pegatron. What's next? So the bad news for the remaining half of de lesseaux was that the British were sending a ridiculously big armada It represented more than a quarter of their total Navy at this time The good news is that we're still in the age of sale here. So it took ages to get across He had plenty of advanced warning to shore up his defenses, repair his walls, add some new gun batteries, and presumably schmooze some Native American archers. How far are they now? Guy furiously rose out to the middle of the ocean. About three weeks out, sir. Okay, good. How about now?

Yeah, right. Great. But the other thing about the length of the journey is that it gave the Brits a lot of time to get diseases and die. Right? So we already talked about the Admiral in charge of the whole expedition dying en route, but he was hardly alone. By the time they reached the Caribbean, nearly a quarter of their force was either too sick to fight or too dead to fight from shit like scurvy typhus and just general 1741-ness.

And that was before they reached the tropics, right? And you start adding in all the malarial shit you can die of there. Ah, carnival cruises are fun. But they're all inclusive now. All inclusive. Yeah, right. A lot of buffets. All you can eat, shrimp cocktail. Yeah. Now, so by the time the Brits make it actually to the Americans, they realized they're going

to need to like flesh out their crews a little bit to make up some for some of their casualties. So they call up some American colonists. It was, I believe, the first time the British ever impressed Americans into military service in large numbers and included in this American contingent, in fact, was Lawrence Washington, half brother of George. Yeah, he belonged to a little known group called the founding baby daddies. Right, yes. Now, of course, by the time they get to Columbia, the tensions between the two leaders are boiling

over. Vernon says that too many of his guys are dead to operate all the ships, so he requisitions a bunch of Wentworth soldiers and makes sailors out of them. But then when it comes time to lay siege to the forts and shit, he refuses to give them back. No, these are these are my personal. So I brought these soldiers from home. These are mine.

You figure you do a verbal siege, right? You sir are making a mockery of the war of Jenkins here. Yeah. You sir are making a mockery of the war of Jenkins Ear. Yeah, compounding their problems was the fact that even with a big chunk of their forces dead they were still running out of food. The wind had been unfavorable on the way over so the trip lasted longer than they had expected. Plus as soon as they get to the tropics the food they did have was starting to rot so pretty quickly the entire British forces starved it. Okay to be fair though they did bring British food so running out was prefer British forces starve it. Okay, to be fair though, they did bring British food,

so running out was preferable to eating it. Yeah, yeah, like how do you know when it's rotten? Now- It has flavor now. And color, if it's got color, you gotta throw it out. So you might be thinking to yourself, hey, if you're starving in the ocean, why don't you just fish?

And that's actually like most of the ocean that's kind of dumb, but in the Caribbean, that makes sense. In fact, it worked out fairly well for the sailors. So they're taking out a few boats here and there and catching sea turtles to supplement their rations, but they're not sharing those turtles with the soldiers. And when Wentworth asked for a few boats so his sailors can go catch their own turtles, Vernon's like, no, we need all of these boats. We're using them. What's happening? Are they getting like graded separately by the King of England? A real project?

Yeah. So delayed, frustrated, underman and half starved, that's the soldier half, the Brits arrive off the coast of Cartagena on March 13th of 1741. Cartagena was a very defensible city. That's why they put it there. On its ocean side, the shore and the surf were too rough for a landing. And the other major access channel, Boca Grande, was too shallow for big ocean-going ships. So the only way they can approach it

is through this narrow channel called Boca Chica that runs between these two well-defended peninsulas. So the first thing they have to do is take these fortifications on the peninsulas. Plus, de Leso has taken his meager six ships and basically just parked them across that channel. Gentlemen, all we need to do to take this city is sail our ships down. Check the map. It says encircled and murdered Bay. That is probably a translation error though, guys. All right.

So Wentworth and the soldiers, Verden let him keep, disembark. And this is where we start to deal with Wentworth's indecisiveness. So Verden's a dick. He's very clearly a complete asshole and nobody likes working with him in the entirety of his career, but he seems to at least be competent not so much for Wentworth He's got very little battle experience and very little initiative So he's not really doing his job and Vernon is apparently sending all these passive aggressive notes and Just regular aggressive notes telling him what he should be doing constant

Hey, just bumping this to the top of your inbox. Attack now. Attack now. So Vernon keeps telling Wentworth that he has to go faster, but the way that sieging a walled city goes at this point in history is that you set up a bunch of cannons, you blast the shit out of the walls for days or weeks, right? And then when you breach them, you send in your infantry. That is not a method that you can hurry up unless you can get more

cannons, which they can't do. That being said, there's a ticking clock hanging over them on this, and it's not just that they're running out of food, because as bad as the disease that's afflicting a quarter of their forces plus already is, it's about to get way worse. This area, this part of the world, especially at this time, has basically a malaria season. And that starts in May. So they basically only have a couple of months to make this shit work. So ultimately they do manage to take control of these fortifications on the peninsula. DeLesso burns his remaining ships. He sinks them in the harbor, but that doesn't slow the British fleet down for long.

They do manage to make it into this harbor, but that just means that now they can actually start laying siege to the city itself. Now, these days, Cartagena is a city of about a million people, but back then it's more like 10,000, though that number was significantly higher with all the reinforcements that he brought into the lead up to the siege. But it's a pretty substantial city by the standards of the day, and it's a damn substantial city by the standards of the Americas of the day. The whole city is walled and it's surrounded by a ring of forts.

So pretty quickly Wentworth's men managed to take over one of the minor forts. So Vernon does the math and he's like, all right, well that's one fort. There's like 40 forts. That took us a day and a half to get into. Once we have 20 of these things, they'll probably give up. So we're what? Three, maybe four weeks from victory at most. So I might as well send a message back home telling them we have this wrapped up, because by the time it gets there, that will be true. And when you get there, tell them Dewey defeated Truman, too. So Vernon sends back a dispatch saying that victory is inevitable

and that will likely have already been achieved by the time the letter gets there. England goes into full celebration like they did with Portobello. They strike more more medals. They renamed towers. They declare another couple of days of celebration for Verdant's latest great victory. Okay, I'm looking forward to the correction lettership trying to like catch up and delete an email that Rowan real fuck is the ship that says star lose So now of course there is no victory

They took a couple of minor forts early on because de lesseaux was marshaling his forces to defend the big ones and the whole time They're dicking around with his meaningless shit. They're slowly losing a war of attrition to disease and desertion. So he manages to stall their momentum, bog them down, and ultimately they decide that their only chance at taking the city is to mount a land assault on the biggest of the forts, Fort San Lazaro. We have 20 of the forts. You guys have to give up now. No, you... What do you mean, no? You have to... We have 20 of forts. We have more of fours.

Sorry, you gotta trade in four garrisons and $500 for a fort. That's how it works. That's true. I hate Reiner Knytsia. So the idea is that they're gonna send two columns to attack this fort, and each one is gonna be led by a Spanish deserter that's acting as a guide. The guys are supposed to take the soldiers up the gentlest slope to the low walled southern side of the fort. That's the idea. And we don't really know if the guys were incompetent or intentionally misdirecting them, but the one leading the northern column got fucking lost, led him into a well-defended area and got himself killed.

That probably wasn't on purpose. The other one managed to get to the fort at least, but he did so along one of the steepest and least traversable possible paths. Hey guys, check this out. Parkour. Parkour. So eventually the North column just turns back. That's not actually the worst thing. They were basically a diversionary force to begin with. Meanwhile, the southern column is under fire, but they do manage to make it to the wall, or a wall anyways, like not the wall to the fort itself. It's just sort of an outer barricade, but no worries. They brought ladders. It's just that all the supplies are all being carried by the Americans who they've kept all the way at the back so that the supplies wouldn't get in the way

of the main soldiers. So when they decide they need to bring up the ladders, it takes for fucking effort to bring them forward. Plus a bunch of the Americans who just didn't want to fucking be there to begin with, just dropped all their shit and deserted when they realized that they were in the rear. So a lot of the matter. So a lot of the ladders just didn't make it. I'm just picturing like a thousand soldiers trying to make a 15 point turn

in this narrow with ladders on their shoulders. Yeah. Pivot up, up, up. So so eventually they scale this first wall, they make it to the real wall, but they're not at the low portion of the southern wall that they expected. Instead, they're at this spot further down where the wall is like 10 feet taller than their ladders. So close. Not even Heath could make it.

All right, guys, how much tape do we have? And is it duck or ducked? Is it? Yeah, right. I've heard conflicting reports. Now, so at this point, they turned around and they went home. Or by 1,500 guys making this salt,

about 900 of them made it back. And from that point Wentworth and Vernon had little choice but to pack up their would be siege sail home and spend the rest of their lives blaming one another for everything that went wrong and ever more verbose publications. For his part, DeLessa would have about four months to celebrate the victory before he would die of a disease that he contracted during the siege. Yeah, that siege was more than he could take. He really had nothing left. Damn! So... Interesting postscript to the story, or interesting to me anyway.

Lawrence Washington goes home firmly in the It Was All Wentworth's Fault Camp, and in a show of solidarity with his commanding officer, when he inherits some family land in Northern Virginia, he names the estate Mount Vernon. All right if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence what would it be?

If we keep up all this mercantilist bullshit somebody's gonna lose an ear. Just gonna graze it. And are you ready for the quiz? quiz Right Noah, it's obvious that this story is missing a musical rendition Yeah, what should we call it a? Los miserables See the last five Spears or see slipsy Alright, I like slipsy

You that is correct all right Noah Thankfully the world has learned its lesson about massive foreign superpowers attempting to invade and occupy South American territory into flimsy guises to secure purely monetary rewards Hey See you in Panama Yeah, right you just were just left out of our mercantilist is honestly the only thing you left her there Okay, okay Noah. We learned about General de Lezo who had only a right side of his body after his war injuries What was his epitaph? Oh, I'm already excited. So I'm so excited. I wish we had a drum roll. A left for dead. B all half measures.

C taken down a few pegs or D a general that lost his army and his leggy. So bad. So bad. But it's great. I fucking love it so goddamn much I'm gonna go with D a general that lost his army and his leggy and tattooed on my fucking arm so I can see it whenever I want. You are correct sir. My military career was alright. whenever I want. Correct, sir. My military career was all right. It was all right. Noah, you got them all.

You were the winner. All right. Well, if I want my essays to seem succinct and to the point, my only hope is that people compare them to Tom. So how about a Tom essay next week? All right. All right. Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil and Eli,

I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week and Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, the no-Rogan-experience new show, very exciting, Dear Old Dads, God awful movies, the scathing atheist, the skepticrat, and D&D minus. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod.

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