Port Royal earthquake

Earthquake and tsunami

Date: June 7, 1692

Place: Port Royal, Jamaica

Magnitude: X on the Modified Mercalli scale (estimated)

Result: About 3,000 dead, more than 1,000 homes and other structures destroyed

In the late seventeenth century, the Jamaican city of Port Royal was a major trade center for the New World. Situated on a cay, or small low island, off the Palisadoes sands on Jamaica’s southern coast, this Caribbean seaport owed its prosperity largely to smuggling and plundering. By the 1690’s, Port Royal boasted at least 6,500 inhabitants and more than 2,000 densely packed buildings, some of which were constructed on pilings driven into the harbor.

Formerly a popular haunt for pirates, the city retained a reputation for hedonism and godlessness. Typical contemporaneous accounts called it “the most wicked and sinful city in the world” and “one of the lewdest [places] in the Christian World, a sink of all filthiness, and a mere Sodom.” Those citizens who warned that Port Royal’s widespread drunkenness, gambling, and debauchery were inviting divine retribution believed their fears were realized when, in the spring of 1692, a devastating earthquake destroyed most of the city.

Earthquakes were nothing new to Port Royal. Jamaica lies along the boundary between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates and is seismically active. Since 1655, when England captured Jamaica from Spain and founded the port, settlers had reported earth tremors almost every year. However, most of these quakes caused little or no damage. One of the more severe quakes, which occurred in 1688, was large enough to destroy 3 houses and damage many other structures. The major earthquake that would follow it four years later was to prove far more destructive.

On Tuesday, June 7, 1692, between 11 a.m. and noon, a series of three strong earthquakes struck Port Royal within a period of a few minutes. After the third and most severe quake, a large tsunami pounded the seaport, snapping the anchor cables of ships moored in Kingston Harbor, smashing those ships nearest the wharves, and pouring into the city. In this case, not the crest but the trough of the tsunami struck land first, pulling out the harbor waters, then sending them back to finish off the town. The tsunami submerged half the town in up to 40 feet of water, pulling down what remained of the structures, causing hundreds more fatalities, and capsizing the vessels at anchor in the harbor.

One of Jamaica’s two warships, the HMS Swan, had recently had its ballast removed during maintenance; the tsunami tossed this relatively light ship from the harbor into the middle of town and deposited it upright on top of some buildings. Such a ride through the city would have revealed streets littered with corpses, of those killed by both the quake and the tsunami, and those washed out of tombs by the waves. While the ship’s masts and rigging were lost and its cannons dislodged, the Swan remained intact enough to serve as a refuge for more than 200 people who survived the devastation by clinging to the boat.

Multiple eyewitness accounts of the disaster describe the earth swallowing up whatever or whoever stood upon it, leading modern researchers to conclude that liquefaction played a major role in the devastation of Port Royal. In liquefaction, a process observed in loose, fine-grained, water-saturated sands subjected to shaking, the soil behaves like a dense fluid rather than a wet solid mass. This phenomenon is believed to be what caused “the sand in the streets [to] rise like the waves of the sea,” as one witness reported, and many of Port Royal’s buildings to topple, partially sink, or disappear entirely. Much of the city’s population was also engulfed by the flowing sands.

The disaster killed roughly 2,000 people in Port Royal and left almost 60 percent of the city submerged below Kingston Harbor. Of those buildings left standing, most were uninhabitable. Two of the city’s three forts, which had been heavily manned in anticipation of French attack, sank beneath the harbor. Several ships that had been moored in the harbor disappeared. Fill material that English settlers had dumped in the shallow marshy area between Port Royal and the Palisadoes to connect the cay to the sandspit was washed away. In Kingston Harbor, the bodies of the drowned floated with corpses the tsunami tore from the cemetery at the Palisadoes.

The devastation in Jamaica was not confined to Port Royal. In the settlement of Spanish Town, located 6 miles inland from Kingston Harbor, almost no buildings were left standing. On the island’s north coast, roughly 1,000 acres of woodland slid into St. Ann’s Bay, killing 53 Frenchmen. Plantations and sugar mills throughout Jamaica were damaged or destroyed. The island suffered about 1,000 fatalities in addition to those killed at Port Royal.

The evening of the disaster, with aftershocks still rattling Port Royal, pillaging and stealing began among the ruins of the city. Looters had free run of the seaport for almost two weeks. During this time, law-abiding citizens took refuge aboard ships in Kingston Harbor. With few doctors and limited medical supplies, many of the injured soon died. Still more survivors succumbed to illness spread by unhealthy conditions aboard the crowded rescue ships. Injury and sickness claimed about 2,000 more lives in the weeks immediately following the disaster.

Survivors hesitated to return to Port Royal and rebuild. What was left of the city appeared to be sinking gradually into Kingston Harbor, and there was concern that the entire island would slip beneath the water. Aftershocks large enough to feel persisted for at least two months after the June 7 disaster, contributing to the people’s doubts concerning Port Royal’s safety. Members of the Council of Jamaica (who were in Port Royal for a meeting on the day the quake struck) and Port Royal’s remaining residents decided to establish a new town across the harbor, a settlement that later became Kingston.

While Port Royal was too important strategically for the English to abandon entirely, it never regained its importance as a commercial center. It became primarily a base for the British navy, and for the remainder of Jamaica’s history as a British colony its civilian population remained small.

Bibliography

Briggs, Peter. Buccaneer Harbor: The Fabulous History of Port Royal, Jamaica. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

Marx, Robert F. Pirate Port: The Story of the Sunken City of Port Royal. Cleveland: World, 1967.

Pawson, Michael, and David Buisseret. Port Royal, Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000.

Zeilinga de Boer, Jelle, and Donald Theodore Sanders. Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.