Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/114

 94 have made it easy for England to take not only Darien but the whole Isthmus of Panama. Later, England realized the truth of Patterson's statement that, "These doors of the seas, and the keys of the universe, would be capable of enabling their possessors to give laws to both oceans, and to become the arbitrators of the commercial world."

When England had her next war with Spain, "The War of Jenkins's Ear," Admiral Edward Vernon, after whom Washington's home, Mt. Vernon, is named, was sent to attack Porto Bello. With six ships of the line he battered down its stone castles, captured the town, and sank some Spanish guarda-costas or revenue-cutters, including the one whose captain had cut off the ear of Captain Jenkins, an English trader, and so started the war. This was in 1739. Next year Vernon captured the present stone castle of San Lorenzo, that had replaced the wooden one destroyed by Morgan, and prepared to send a force across the Isthmus to attack New Panama, against which another fleet, under Admiral Anson, had been sent round the Horn. But Vernon's men began to die of fevers, and he feared to advance without cannon, which could not be taken either up the Chagres or along the Royal Road; so he attacked Cartagena instead, failed there, and went home. Hearing this, Anson sailed away to attack Manila, and Panama was saved.

Only the shell of its former greatness was saved, however, for all these wars had driven trade away from the Isthmus to the Straits of Magellan. Moreover, the Peruvian mines were nearly exhausted, and after the middle of the eighteenth century, the plate fleets sailed