{
  "id": "blas-de-lezo",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Blas de Lezo",
  "summary": "Spanish naval commander who, with viceroy Sebastián de Eslava, defended Cartagena de Indias in 1741 against one of the largest amphibious expeditions assembled to that date. The British failure — documented here from British-archive scholarship, the unfriendly witness — ended the attempt on Spain's Caribbean trade centers and left the convoy-and-fortress system intact.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "navy",
    "caribbean",
    "cartagena",
    "military-history",
    "biography"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-real-global-currency"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "medical-services-of-the-spanish-armed-forces-1665-1700"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "montepio-de-viudas-en-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "real-arsenal-de-la-habana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "rojas-teorica-y-practica-de-fortificacion-1598"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Who defended Cartagena de Indias in 1741?",
    "Why did Vernon's expedition against Cartagena fail?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "In 1741 the British expedition under Admiral Edward Vernon — among the largest amphibious forces assembled to that date — attacked Cartagena de Indias and was repulsed with catastrophic losses, the greater part from tropical disease, as documented in the British-archive scholarship of the campaign.",
      "sources": [
        "harding-amphibious-1991"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The defense was conducted by viceroy Sebastián de Eslava and naval commander Blas de Lezo with a far smaller force, using the fortifications and harbor geography of Cartagena to deny the landing force a decisive success before disease destroyed it.",
      "sources": [
        "harding-amphibious-1991"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The failure at Cartagena ended British hopes of seizing the Spanish American trade centers in the War of Jenkins' Ear and left the Spanish convoy-and-fortress system in the Caribbean intact.",
      "sources": [
        "harding-amphibious-1991"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Lezo is either absent from English accounts or wrapped in patriotic legend in Spanish ones. This object rests deliberately on the British academic study of the expedition — the unfriendly witness — and claims only what that scholarship supports, without the mythology.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-08",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/blas-de-lezo",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/blas-de-lezo.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Blas de Lezo",
    "description": "Spanish naval commander who, with viceroy Sebastián de Eslava, defended Cartagena de Indias in 1741 against one of the largest amphibious expeditions assembled to that date. The British failure — documented here from British-archive scholarship, the unfriendly witness — ended the attempt on Spain's Caribbean trade centers and left the convoy-and-fortress system intact.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/blas-de-lezo",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-08",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740-1742"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Blas de Lezo"
  }
}