Port Royal, 1692

Port Royal, 1655 - 1692

Port Royal is a city on the coast of the Carribean Island of Jamaica. Despite being inhabited and in the rule of several people including the Indigenous Taino Indians and the Spanish, it was captured by the English in 1655 and named firstly Point Cagway, later to be renamed Port Royal in 1664.5 Port Royal was ideally situated for being a centre of commerce, surrounded by deep water on nearly all sides that was suitable for mooring a variety of sized ships, Port Royal was effectively one huge harbour. It was indeed chosen for its physical situation, an official in 1657 stating 'there is the faire beginning of a town upon the poynt of this harbour', however the key problem with the infrastructure was that the physical land making up Port Royal was nothing but 'hot loose sand'; this would have serious repercussions during the earthquake.6

Although Port Royal started off small with only a population of 740 including '50 Africans' and 300 dwellings in 1662, it soon grew to around 1000 dwellings and a population of '2,086 whites and 845 Africans' with one in every six white colonists living in Port Royal by 1680, peaking with a population of around 6500 in 1692.7 This rapid increase in population is demontrative of the economical value of Port Royal and representative of its place as 'Treasury of the West Indies'.8 It is clear that with the so dense a population, there would need to be more physical land for people to be able to habitate and as we can see from earlier accounts, Port Royal as a piece of land was distinctly small, only the 'beginning' of a town. From a combination of contemporary sources and secondary source publications we can see that in order to combat the issue of land size, residents of Port Royal started to dredge the harbours in order to create landfills they then filled in with 'stones and earth', effectively creating new land that was 'gained in time out of the Sea'.9 In later manuscripts from the 1670's we can see officials starting to award land in the form of 'wharfs to be drained from the sea', in 1680 Benjamin Bathurst was awarded 'Ground . . . to be Restored out of the Sea for a Wharfe' whilst Peter Beckford received a grant for 1748 feet of 'Shoal Water . . . to be recovered for Wharfe Ground'.10 It was noted that 'All People know, that the part of Land whereon Port-Royal was built, was always encreasing since first inhabited', however it was this building on saturated sand that allowed the earthquake and subsequent tsunami to cause such catastrophic damage.11

 The Earthquake, 1692

Due to the excavation of a broken watch from the site of the sunken city of Port Royal, we can assume the earthquake started around 11.43am on the 7th June.12 A London newspaper wrote of the events that 'In two minutes time the Town was sunk underground and Two Thousand souls perished’', condemning it to be 'a Dreadful warning to the Sleepy World, of God’s heavy Judgements … on a Sinful people’.13 From reports from residents at the time it suggests the quake lasted around 15 minutes and immeditely submerged the primary wharf 'with all those goodly Brick Houses upon it ... and two Intire Streets beyond that'.14 There are also reports of the ground opening up in several places simulataneously, this was the result of the building of properties on what was essentially just saturated sand. Through a process called liquefaction casued by the tremors, the sand underneath the buildings simply flowed away back into the water, causing the buildings to collapse and holes in the ground to open. Due to the churning motion of the water, many buildings and people were sumerged under the sand only to spewed forth again soon after. One account from the resident Reverend, Emmanuel Heath, talks of the movement of the sand, stating

   ... some were swallowed up to the Neck, and then the Earth shut upon them;and squeezed        them to death; and in that manner several are left buried with their Heads above ground.15

It was those bodies left partially above ground and rotting that caused the subsequent disaster. Whilst, as earlier stated, around 2000 people were killed instantly as a result of the earthquake, the rotting bodies and lack of access to fresh water meant that disease quickly struck the remaining Port Royal residents, killing an estimated 2000-3000 people further, as corroborated in a variety of studies including the Port Royal Project.16

Due to this dramatic loss of life, land and commerce, Port Royal ceased to be the centre of trading and the main city in Jamaica. The loss of economic value meant that Port Royal and its remaining residents never recovered or regained their original prestige as the 'treasurey of the West Indies' and instead remained stagmant even to the current day where it is viewed as a place of historical interest as opposed to holding contemporary importance. It is for this reason that I am attempting to map out the buildings and land ownership of Port Royal prior to its fall in order to be able to see it in its peak.