Port Royal
The wickedest city on earth
c.1655 – 7 June 1692
Port Royal stood at the tip of the Palisadoes, a long narrow sandspit that encloses the great natural harbor at the southern end of Jamaica. The English took the island from Spain in 1655 and immediately recognized the position's value: the harbor was deep, defensible, and well placed for raids against the Spanish Main.
The buccaneer era
From the late 1650s until the 1680s, Port Royal was the headquarters of the English buccaneers — privateers who operated, with intermittent commission, against Spanish shipping and ports across the Caribbean. Henry Morgan's expeditions against Portobelo, Maracaibo, and Panama were all outfitted from Port Royal, and the loot returned there. By 1660 the town held nearly seven thousand people, more brothels per acre than any city in the New World, and an exchange where buccaneers swapped pieces-of-eight for taverns, fine clothes, and indentured servants.
Contemporaries called it the "wickedest city on earth." Visiting clergymen pronounced it Sodom afloat. Behind the rhetoric lay an unsentimental truth: Port Royal was where England's empire in the Americas was, for thirty years, kept supplied with hard currency by openly tolerated piracy.
The earthquake of 1692
At twenty minutes before noon on 7 June 1692, three violent shocks struck the Jamaican coast. The sand under Port Royal liquefied. Two-thirds of the town — approximately thirty-three acres — slid into the harbor in less than a minute. Buildings sank intact. Eyewitnesses described people swallowed to the neck by the sand and crushed when it solidified around them; others fell into open fissures that closed behind them. The death toll was reckoned at around two thousand at the time of the quake and an additional three thousand from disease and starvation in the weeks after.
Many in England and the colonies took the disaster for the obvious divine commentary.
Afterlives
Port Royal was rebuilt in a reduced form and continued as a Royal Navy base into the nineteenth century. But its commercial center never returned; trade had shifted across the harbor to Kingston. Most of what was lost remains where it fell — drowned cobblestone streets, sunken brick walls, and the rusted shells of cannons — under twenty to forty feet of water. The submerged city is one of the best-preserved seventeenth-century urban sites anywhere in the world.
Related: Henry Morgan · Calico Jack