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Penn, whose Quaker beliefs prohibited warfare and the forms of aggression that led to war, did not seek to possess Delaware. The semicircular top that Delaware has today originated in Pennsylvania’s charter, when Penn urged that it include a southeastern border with a twelve-mile radius away from the Dutch town of New Castle, so as not to create conflict. He did, however, seek proprietorship over Delaware, to assure that Pennsylvania had free navigation to the sea. By seeking proprietorship, Penn left Maryland no choice but to contest the issue again. For Delaware’s mostly Protestant residents, the choice of incorporation into Maryland under the anti-Protestant Charles Calvert or proprietorship under the pacifist William Penn was a no-brainer.

England, not wanting colonial conflicts it could avoid, ruled in favor of Penn. In granting him proprietorship over Delaware, England implicitly recognized Delaware as an entity unto itself. The Board of Trades and Plantations, which arbitrated the case for the king, cited the reasoning first posited by Augustine Herman regarding Maryland’s charter excluding land previously cultivated by Europeans.

Following this act, Penn journeyed to Delaware, where he was officially greeted at New Castle by John Moll and Ephraim Herman, who presented Penn with the key to the town’s fort. Augustine Herman, now an elderly man quietly living out his final years on his vast manor, had succeeded in achieving what Bohemia did not.

FLORIDA, GEORGIA

ROBERT JENKINS’S EAR

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Official persons … endeavored to deny, to insinuate in their vile newspapers, that Jenkins lost his ear nearer home, and not for nothing.… Sheer calumnies we now find. Jenkins’ account was doubtless abundantly emphatic; there is no ground to question the substantial truth of him and it.

—THOMAS CARLYLE1

In today’s society, people often refer to “fifteen minutes of fame,” pop artist Andy Warhol’s notion that mass media have become so prevalent that everyone will be in the spotlight at some point in their lives. Warhol actually said that in the future everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame, but in fact there is nothing new in this phenomenon. Mass media have created fleeting fame for as long as mass media have existed—which is to say, since the printing press or even the politically charged graffiti of ancient Rome.

Such was the case with one Robert Jenkins, the captain of a British merchant ship in the eighteenth century. At a key moment, the newspapers of the day put the spotlight on Jenkins—technically, on his ear, or more technically, on the absence of his ear—and in so doing provoked a war between England and Spain. Though the war had nothing to do with Florida and Georgia, it resulted in the boundary between those two states that exists to this day.

In April 1731 Jenkins was at the helm of the Rebecca, carrying a cargo of sugar from the British colony of Jamaica to London. While off the coast of Cuba, Jenkins’s ship was overtaken by the Spanish coast guard, which boarded and searched for contraband goods from Spanish ports. Finding none, Captain Juan de León Fandino brandished his cutlass and ordered Jenkins to reveal where he’d hidden the contraband. When Jenkins continued to insist he had none, Fandino sliced his sword across Jenkins’s ear. Still, Jenkins maintained he could not confess to what was not there. Fandino then had his men tie Jenkins to the yardarm using a neck halter. But even as the Spanish captain ordered the halter incrementally raised, thereby approaching the point of a lynching, Jenkins maintained there was nothing to tell. Frustrated and furious, Fandino took hold of Jenkins’s wounded ear and tore it off, handing it to Jenkins and saying (depending on which version one reads), “Carry that to your king, and tell him of it!” Clearly an act of war.

But not in 1731. George II, the last British monarch born outside Great Britain, was uncertain as to his clout