driving away the rest. An English military presence was briefly established at Gibraltar for the first time in 1620. The Spanish granted permission for the English fleet to use Gibraltar's port as a base for operations against the Barbary pirates, who were raiding the British and Irish coasts. Some in England had ambitions to turn the fleet against Spain rather than the Barbary coast. However, James I successfully resisted Parliamentary pressure to declare war on Spain and the fleet returned to England. After Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, a second English fleet was sent to the region with instructions to "take or spoil a town" on the Spanish coast. Gibraltar was one of the proposed targets on the basis that it was small, could easily be garrisoned, supplied and defended, and was in a highly strategic location. The English fleet instead attacked Cádiz in the belief that its sacking would be more immediately profitable, but the raid turned into a fiasco. The landing force looted the town's wine stores and was evacuated after four days of mass drunkenness without anything useful having been achieved. The presence of Spain's enemies in the Straits prompted the Spanish king Philip IV to order Gibraltar's defences to be strengthened. A new mole and gun platforms were built, though the latter's usefulness was limited due to a lack of gunners. The town was an unsanitary, crowded place, which probably contributed to the outbreak in 1649 of an epidemic – reportedly plague but possibly typhoid – which killed a quarter of the population. English fleets returned to Gibraltar in 1651–52 and again in 1654–55 as temporary allies of the Spanish against French and Dutch shipping in the Straits. In 1654, Oliver Cromwell decided to turn on Spain (which had been the first state to recognise the Commonwealth of England) and seize the island of Hispaniola to make it a base for English expansion in the Caribbean. To do so, two fleets were fitted out: one set out to America and another to the western Mediterranean with the ostensible objective of fighting the Barbary pirates. The fleet in the Caribbean failed to seize Hispaniola but took over Jamaica instead in May 1655. The fleet in the Mediterranean sailed off Cádiz trying to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet with no success. With the arrival of the winter, the fleet went back to England. However, Spain did