Admiral Edward Vernon had already failed spectacularly once that year. His assault on Cartagena de Indias in early 1741 had been repulsed with devastating losses, leaving him with the shattered remnants of a once-formidable expeditionary force. Rather than retreat to lick his wounds, Vernon turned what was left of his fleet toward Cuba. The plan was ambitious: land at the bay the Taino people called Guantanamo, march 105 kilometers overland, and seize Santiago de Cuba, the island's second city. He had warships bristling with guns, 3,000 British and colonial troops, and 1,000 Jamaican reinforcements. What he did not have was a colleague willing to move. The invasion that followed became one of the War of Jenkins' Ear's strangest episodes - not a battle lost, but a campaign that simply rotted from within.
The War of Jenkins' Ear, sparked in 1739 by British outrage over Spanish interference with Caribbean trade, had already produced more embarrassment than glory for the Royal Navy. Vernon's disastrous siege at Cartagena cost thousands of lives and accomplished nothing. The soldiers he brought to Cuba were, in the words of contemporary accounts, "sickly and dispirited" - survivors of one catastrophe pressed into service for another. They sailed from Port Royal, Jamaica, aboard a fleet that still looked fearsome on paper: ships carrying 80, 70, and 60 guns, bomb vessels, fireships, sloops, hospital ships, and 40 transports. But the men aboard those transports were already weakened by months of tropical campaigning, and the two commanders - Vernon at sea and Major-General Thomas Wentworth on land - could barely tolerate each other. Their mutual contempt would prove more destructive than any Spanish cannon.
On the night of August 4-5, 1741, the British force landed across three beaches at the bay they renamed Cumberland Bay. They met no resistance. Santiago's governor, Francisco Caxigal de la Vega, had only 350 regulars and 600 militia under garrison commander Carlos Riva Agüero and local militia captain Pedro Guerrero. Faced with overwhelming numbers, the Spanish simply pulled back. The road to Santiago lay open - sparsely populated country, far from Havana, with no serious fortifications between the landing beaches and the objective. A rapid advance might have ended the campaign in days.
But Wentworth did not advance rapidly. He did not advance at all. Three days after landing, still 105 kilometers short of Santiago, the general halted his army and began fortifying positions around the beachhead. His reasons remain debated by historians, but the result was unambiguous: the British dug in and stayed put.
What followed was not a siege but a slow collapse. The British army sat encamped in the tropical heat through August, September, October, and November, going nowhere. Spanish forces, too few for a pitched battle, harassed the camps with sporadic raids - just enough to keep the British on edge, never enough to force a decisive engagement. The real enemy was disease. Tropical fever swept through the encampment with merciless efficiency, felling soldiers faster than any skirmish.
Vernon watched from his flagship with growing fury. He considered Wentworth's paralysis inexcusable but refused to risk his warships in an independent assault on Santiago's harbor defenses. Instead, he sent ships to cruise the coast independently, a gesture of frustration more than strategy. By December 5, the sick list had reached 2,260 men - more than half the original force. The army that had landed with enough strength to take a city could barely stand.
On December 9, 1741, the British re-embarked at dawn and sailed away. They reached Port Royal ten days later, having held Cuban soil for four months without fighting a single significant engagement or advancing a single mile toward their objective. Vernon's enterprise, as one account summarized it, "accomplished nothing but the loss of many of his soldiers and his own disgrace." He was recalled to Britain in 1742, his Caribbean career finished.
The invasion of Cuba stands as a peculiar monument to the gap between military power and military will. Vernon had the ships. Wentworth had the soldiers. The Spanish had almost nothing. Yet the campaign consumed itself through indecision, disease, and the poisonous relationship between two commanders who could agree on nothing except that the other was to blame. The bay the British briefly called Cumberland returned to its older name. The hills they fortified returned to scrub. Within a generation, the whole episode had become a footnote - one of many failed colonial ventures swallowed by the Caribbean heat.
Located at 19.97N, 75.14W on the southeastern coast of Cuba, at the entrance to Guantanamo Bay. The 1741 British landing took place on multiple beaches along the bay's outer coastline. From 5,000 ft, the bay's horseshoe shape is clearly visible, ringed by the steep, arid hills that made the interior approach to Santiago de Cuba so daunting. The British objective, Santiago de Cuba (ICAO: MUCU), lies approximately 65 km to the west-northwest. The modern U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay (ICAO: MUGM, Leeward Point Field) now occupies the southern portion of the same bay where Vernon's fleet anchored. The surrounding terrain is semi-arid with sparse vegetation - notably drier than most of Cuba. Clear flying conditions typical, with warm temperatures year-round. The Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti is visible to the east.