6 of History’s Silliest Wars

Lobsters, pigs, and severed ears—people have gone to war on some pretty ridiculous grounds.

Let’s take a look at some wars and conflicts that were ignited for some fairly silly reasons, as adapted from the above episode of The List Show on YouTube.

1. The War of Jenkins’s Ear
2. The Lobster War
3. The Pig War
4. The Pastry War
5. The Kettle War
6. The Hypothetical War

The War of Jenkins’s Ear

In 1738, Captain Robert Jenkins strode into Parliament and displayed his ear to members. Unfortunately, it was no longer attached to his head. Allegedly, it had been lopped off seven years earlier Reservoir Dogs-style by Spanish ship inspectors who had boarded his British vessel near Cuba to search for contraband. This was often just a pretext to plunder British ships and harm crew. In this case, poor Captain Jenkins was disfigured. Jenkins demanded revenge for years until the British were finally ready to listen as he stood before them, his severed ear on display, and told them his story.

In the early 1700s, Britain and Spain had an agreement that helped end the War of Spanish Succession. The British could trade 500 tons of goods annually and traffic in enslaved people in Spain provided that Spanish patrols, known as the guarda costa, could board the ships to make sure there was no smuggling. Well, there was some smuggling, and the guarda costa quickly turned malevolent, stealing goods and torturing crew members for their impertinence. 

When they encountered Captain Jenkins on his ship Rebecca, they accused him of taking sugar from Spanish colonies and then sliced off his left ear; they also stole the ship’s navigational equipment so the crew had to find their way back by looking at the stars.

Captain Jenkins was most displeased with this turn of events, but British officials wanted to keep the trade agreement going and largely did nothing to retaliate. But then, in 1739, a new agreement that gave Britain only some financial restitution for their stolen stuff became a public relations disaster. The people wanted war, and Jenkins’s ear proved to be an incident to rally around. Adding to the drama of his story was his alleged habit of carrying the ear around with him.

The British quickly captured Porto Bello in Panama but suffered losses elsewhere. Before Jenkins could get his satisfaction, both sides were effectively subsumed by the War of the Austrian Succession in 1742; that war ended in 1748 with the The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

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The Lobster War

Here’s an odd question: Do lobsters swim, or do they crawl? An argument over the answer led to what became known as the Lobster War between Brazil and France. 

It began in 1961, when some French fishermen were on an expedition in Morocco and then decided to head to Pernambuco in Brazil to see if they could catch some highly desirable crustaceans. They got lucky with the lobsters—but not with international fishing agreements, which prohibited fishing fewer than 12 miles off the coast. But the fishermen refused to back off, even in the face of the Brazilian Navy. They called in the French military for back-up. 

Part of the tension was the fact that France had helped fund some Brazilian infrastructure, leading French president Charles de Gaulle to dig his heels in. He sent in a destroyer-class ship to protect the fishing boats, but Brazil dispatched an aircraft carrier to send the destroyer scurrying. Soon a French ship was captured, and Brazil insisted that no French fishing ship come within 100 miles of the coast. The Brazilian argument was that lobsters crawled on the surface of the ocean floor and therefore were Brazilian property; France argued lobsters swam and were therefore free for anyone to retrieve. 

This stand-off lasted until 1964, when the two countries came to a deal. Brazil extended their coastline protection to 200 miles offshore but would allow French fishermen to grab lobsters for five years. 

Incidentally, Brazil was right. Adult lobsters usually crawl on the sea floor. They typically only swim when threatened.

The Pig War

On June 15, 1859, a farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot a pig on San Juan Island, off the coast of present day Washington. This would ordinarily be a pretty normal event on a farm. But Cutlar happened to shoot this pig when tensions between the British and the U.S. were running extremely hot over ownership of the island. Cutlar was an American, and the pig, more precisely a Berkshire boar, was British—well, kind of. It was kept by a British sheep farm, wandered off, and wound up on Cutlar’s property, where it began digging up his garden.

Cutlar offered the pig’s owner, Charles Griffin, $10 as restitution. Griffin was having none of it. He reportedly said it was “so insignificant it only adds insult to injury” and that the animal was worth $100.

The situation blew up very quickly. The British wanted to arrest Cutlar and throw every American living on the island off of it. That resulted in Company D of the 9th U.S. infantry storming onto the island to set up a base camp near the British sheep farm. Hoping to avoid a full-out military clash, nearby Vancouver Island dispatched war ships to mitigate the American presence and get them out. But the infantry stayed. By the end of August, 461 American soldiers were on the island, many more than had been there pre-pig shooting. 

Finally, in October, American military general Winfield Scott arrived at the behest of president James Buchanan in the hopes of avoiding an all-out war over a porcine. Scott eased the tension, getting both parties to agree to leave just a small military presence on the island. That joint occupation lasted an astounding 12 years, until San Juan Island became the property of the U.S.

Even though no shots were fired, there were casualties. In the decade-plus of dual occupation, both sides lost soldiers due to illness, suicide, and accidents. One British soldier who was deer hunting mistakenly shot and killed his own brother. 

The Pastry War

In 1828, a French pastry shop owner known as Monsieur Remontel approached the French government with a complaint. Remontel claimed that drunken Mexican military officers had ransacked his shop, which he had set up just outside of Mexico City. It was part of a litany of stories that were eventually brought before King Louis-Phillippe I years later in 1837. Tensions between the two countries had already come to a boil with Mexico, which was newly independent from Spain, and deep in debt to the French for supporting their fight for Texas against the U.S. Throughout the 1830s, there were many reported cases of violence and crime against the French in Mexico. 

Louis-Phillippe finally took action, demanding payment from Mexico. The bill was 600,000 pesos. Mexico’s president, Anastasio Bustamante y Oseguera, flatly turned him down. Louis-Phillippe then started negotiations by parking warships at the port city of Veracruz. When that failed to convince Oseguera, France began blowing things up and captured the city.

Hope arrived—sort of—in the form of Antonio López de Santa Anna, Mexico’s former president, who had seen public sentiment turn against him when Mexico lost Texas during the Texas Revolution of 1835. Santa Anna bravely charged into battle and promptly lost his leg to a cannonball. 

Things got even worse for Mexico when Texas joined the fray, adding to France’s blockade. Why did Texas care? Mexico was smuggling goods out of the port of Corpus Christi. Sensing defeat, Mexico finally capitulated and agreed to pay the money owed to France. The war lasted just four months. 

While trashing a pastry shop wasn’t the lone reason for this war, it seemed to be one of the sparks that led to it. Mexican news sources took to calling it Guerra de los Pasteles while French outlets dubbed it Guerre des Pâtisseries—the pastry war. 

The good news? Santa Anna became a kind of folk hero and was reelected president in 1842. His lost leg was ceremoniously dug up, preserved, given a funeral, and buried again. While his actual leg is gone, several of his prosthetic legs have endured. One is on display at the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield, Illinois, complete with a black boot.

The Kettle War

When we think of war, we usually think of big casualties and brave soldiers risking life and limb for their cause. Sometimes, wars can end when someone’s kettle gets broken.

There was longstanding tension between the Holy Roman Empire of central and western Europe and the Dutch Republic over access to Belgian shipping ports. The Empire wanted access to the Scheldt River to assist in trade. The river was about 270 miles long and flowed through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The Dutch, however, wanted to restrict the river so they could retain their sizable commercial advantage. 

In 1784, tensions came to a head. The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, sent a fleet of warships to assert their dominance, led by the formidable Le Louis. The Dutch dispatched just one ship, named the De Dolfijin.

Picture a total of three ships challenging one Dutch ship. The odds seemed grim. But the Dutch launched a single cannon into the deck of Le Louis, which happened to hit a soup kettle. The imperial fleet, not wishing to experience any kind of actual violence and apparently afraid of missing dinner, retreated.

Emperor Joseph II was less than impressed with the courage of Le Louis and took the battle to land, where he had his men destroy dykes that led to massive flooding. Dutch leader William V finally agreed to negotiate, agreeing to pay compensation for the inconvenience caused. The Scheldt River remained closed until 1792. 

The Hypothetical War

One of the longest wars in recorded history may have also been the dumbest. In 1651, the Dutch broke off friendly ties with the Royalists, or supporters of King Charles I of England during the English Civil War, and aligned with their arch-nemeses, the Parliamentarians. After raiding Dutch shipping paths, the Royalists were forced to retreat to the water, where they eventually found a safe haven in the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago in southwest England comprising five inhabited islands and a lot of rocks. 

The Dutch gave chase, hoping to bombard the Royalists with all their naval might. War was officially declared by Dutch Admiral Maarten Tromp, but the Royalists soon surrendered. The only problem was that the Dutch failed to sign a peace treaty with the Isles of Scilly. For the next 335 years, the two parties were technically in a war with one another, although no one was actually fighting. Talk of war was passed down from generation to generation on the Isles, which today numbers about 2200 people. 

Finally, a historian named Roy Duncan wrote to the Dutch Embassy asking for confirmation—was there or was there not a peace treaty? The Dutch Embassy couldn’t find one. And so, in 1986, Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Huydecoper traveled to the Isles to formally end the conflict. Arriving by helicopter, he revealed a magnificent scroll that signaled an official conclusion. Huydecoper jokingly said that the Dutch “could have attacked at any moment.”