In 1655, Oliver Cromwell dispatched a fleet, commanded by Admiral Sir William Penn, to capture Santo Domingo. A Spanish defending force of perhaps 400–600 men, mostly militia, repulsed a landing force of 9,000 men. Despite the fact that the English were defeated in their attempt to capture the island, they nevertheless captured the nearby Spanish colony of Jamaica, and other foreign strongholds subsequently began to be established throughout the West Indies. Madrid sought to contest such encroachments on its own imperial control by using Santo Domingo as an forward military base, but Spanish power was by now too depleted to recapture lost colonies. The city itself was furthermore subjected to a smallpox epidemic, cacao blight, and hurricane in 1666; another storm two years later; a second epidemic in 1669; a third hurricane in September 1672; plus an earthquake in May 1673 that killed two dozen residents.