When the inevitable war came with Spain, in 1739,—inevitable because of trade rivalries in the West Indies and in South America, and because of political rivalry at the borders of Florida,—Oglethorpe was almost the first to strike. Admiral Vernon had been despatched in midsummer, 1739, before the declaration of war, to destroy the Spanish settlements and distress Spanish commerce in the West Indies; and had promptly taken Porto Bello in November, scarcely a month after war had been formally declared. Oglethorpe struck next, at St. Augustine. It was this he had looked forward to in founding his colony. In May, 1740, he moved to the attack with a mixed army of redskins and provincial militia numbering a little more than two thousand men,—supported at sea by a little fleet of six vessels of war under Sir Yelverton Peyton. But there had been too much delay in getting the motley force together. The Spaniards had procured reinforcements from Havana; the English ships found it impracticable to get near enough to the Spanish works to use their guns with effect; Oglethorpe had no proper siege pieces; and the attack utterly failed. It had its effect, nevertheless. For two years the Spaniards held nervously off, carefully on the defensive; and when they did in their turn attack, Oglethorpe beat them handsomely off, and more than wiped out the disrepute of his miscarriage at St. Augustine. In June 1742, there came to St. Simon’s Island a Spanish fleet of fifty-one sail, nearly five thousand troops aboard, and Oglethorpe beat them off with six hundred and fifty men,—working his little forts like a master, and his single guard-schooner and few paltry armed sloops as if they were a navy. Such a deliverance, cried Mr. Whitefield, could not be paralleled save out of Old Testament history. Meanwhile Vernon and Wentworth had met with overwhelming disaster at Cartagena. With a great fleet of ships of the line and a land force of nine thousand men, they had made their assault upon it in March, 1741; but because Wentworth bungled everything he did with his troops the attack miserably failed. He was caught by the deadly wet season of the tropics; disease reduced his army to a wretched handful; and thousands of lives were thrown away in his dismal disgrace. Both New England and Virginia had sent troops to take their part with that doomed army; and the colonies knew, in great bitterness, how few came home again. The war had its issues for them, they knew, as well as for the governments across the water. It meant one more reckoning with the Spaniard and the Frenchman, their rivals for the mastery of America. And in 1745 New England had a triumph of her own, more gratifying even than Oglethorpe’s astonishing achievement at St. Simon’s Island. [Illustration: THE ACTION AT CARTAGENA]