14

Apocalypse

The day of June 7, 1692, came in hot and airless. As the lamplighters moved through the blue-and-violet dawn, snuffing out the streetlights, there wasn’t a breath of wind or a cloud in the sky to give the promise of rain. It was growing unbearable. For the last five months, the weather had continued in this nervous-making pall of heat. A sharp burst of rain in May had served only to increase the mosquito population, which was now feasting on pale English skin. The lack of wind was not only annoying, it was bad for business: The ships waiting in the harbor with their holds full of logwood and sugar couldn’t exit Port Royal and sail out to the open seas to markets in Europe and North America. Nor could the merchant ships loaded with the latest Parisian brocaded dresses and fine linens make the dock and unload the European trade goods that Port Royal was rich enough to buy. The term “earthquake weather” had not yet been coined, but the townspeople would have understood it instinctively.

The stifling heat was connected, in locals’ minds, with the tremors that had shaken the town every year of its brief history. The smoldering air also tended to agitate the more sensitive members of the population; doctors were kept hurrying from home to home to minister to the neurasthenic wives of merchants who could not leave their beds because of black moods and bouts of low energy. Many of that morning’s patients had their conditions worsened by the latest gossip. An astrologer had visited the island weeks before and left it with a prediction: There would be a major earthquake in the near future. Four years earlier another mystic had given a similar reading, and a quake followed, strong enough to topple some of the brick-and-mortar buildings constructed in English style (the residents living as if they were on a floating remnant of Sussex or Coventry and building their homes accordingly). The sick were prone to rumors, of which Port Royal had plenty. The crazed-looking men who strode up and down Market Street loudly proclaiming that “judgment was at hand”—did the doctors think they knew something? The physicians tried to comfort the patients, but, sweating and wild-eyed, they broke in with the latest gossip: Dr. Heath in his sermon that Sunday had reminded his congregations about the wife of his colleague John Taylor. She’d suddenly quit Jamaica, left Port Royal and her husband behind, because she could no longer stand “the badness of this place.” It was not as if she were being original: Ever since its founding, Port Royal had been the scourge of religious men and women, who were constantly predicting, even praying for, its destruction. “Port Royal could not stand,” went the refrain, “but would sink and be destroyed by the judgment of God.” It was just that all the signs—religious, astrological, meteorological—were now conspiring to make the nervous women call for the rum punch and the doctor. The physicians came promptly and soothed their patients, dispensing advice and “cooling, diluting drinks,” but not what the women truly wanted: the Bolus of Diascord, an elixir that contained one-tenth of a grain of opium. The merchants’ wives were high-strung enough; all they needed was a dose of it, and a rumor of unrest in the slave quarters, for pandemonium to infect the white community of Port Royal.

Down by Fishers Row, the markets were open. Meat in the tropics spoiled within hours, so fish and fowl were brought fresh and slaughtered just before cooking. In the fish market, the huge local tortoises swam placidly in the “turtle crawl”; June was the month when they emerged from the sea to climb onto the beaches and lay their eggs, only to have them snatched up by local fishermen. Along with turtles, there were lobsters and crabs and manatee and snapper and eighteen other varieties of fish for the servants coming down from High Street to choose from. Out in the harbor, the water was as smooth and reflective as a pane of silvery glass; the only ripples came from porpoises surfacing to snipe at a school of minnows or sharks snatching the offal thrown into the water by the butchers and fishmongers. Everyone glanced occasionally at the horizon for unfamiliar shapes against the sky; England and France were at war again, and the French had in late May swooped down onto the north of the island, sacking and torching sugar plantations and killing anyone they came across. The next logical step was a strike at Port Royal itself, especially as one of the town’s two guard ships, the HMS Guernsey, was becalmed to the east and couldn’t reach the port in an emergency. Port Royal lay open to any strong force. The lieutenant governor, John White, had scheduled an assembly of the Council of Jamaica to assess the threat, but there was little one could do; this was Jamaica, a jewel envied by foreign powers. Martial law had been declared, and the local garrisons had been called to arms in Port Royal, Liguanea, and Spanish Town. Lookouts at the town’s formidable military forts—including Morgan’s Fort, finished in 1680 and named after the great Welshman—watched the horizon.

Just the night before, a strange ship had been spotted lurking at the eastern end of the harbor, flying no flag. Was it a pirate—or a scout for a fleet waiting over the horizon? The commander of Fort Charles had sent an armed squadron to investigate; as they had approached the vessel, the soldiers were on standby with their muskets. But it was just a merchant ship out of Bristol that had coaxed enough speed from the occasional breeze to make it this far and was waiting for dawn to unload its goods and passengers. The commander reminded the ship’s captain to have the newcomers brought to the King’s Warehouse to sign the register; if they refused, they’d be thrown into the prison as suspected spies or provocateurs. If they signed, they’d be handed a certificate giving them each fifty acres of land; the interior needed fresh men—white men, that is—and Port Royal was their entryway into the dream they had nourished back in England. Soon they would most likely be either building their fortunes or dead from malaria.

The men who had made it in Jamaica emerged from their brick homes dressed as any London gentleman would be; when a fashion was all the rage in London, it was all the rage on the streets of Jamaica. In the 1670s, down the paths of this steamy tropical town, you might find a man striding toward his offices dressed in “a Turkish garment of black watered chambles lined with crimson taffety, a black cloathe coat lined with blew sarconet, creeches, black silke stockings and a pair of garters with christial stones, a Turkish capp of crimson velvet, a silke crimson Turkish sash, a pair of Turkish shoes, gloves and a periwig,…a sealed gold ring, a silver ring with a blew stone in it and a pair of silver buckles.” What a sight he must have been, every fold and stitching in his clothes brought into sharp focus by the Jamaican sun! It didn’t matter that such an outfit was far better suited to chilly London than to sweltering Port Royal; the Turkish outfit was based on the wardrobe of Charles II, and thus one wore it. There was so much money flowing through the town, licit and illicit, that it had to be spent. The merchants did their level best, living “to the height of splendour, in full ease and plenty, being sumptuously arrayed, and attended on and served by their Negro slaves, which always waits on them in livereys, or otherwise as they please to cloath them.” The traders’ wives were not left behind. The local shops carried a full line of materials—Persian silks, fine serge—ready to be whipped into a ball gown or a fashionable tucked-up skirt. Unlike their predecessors, their men did not get rich off the privateers’ spoils. Port Royal had become a hub of the West Indies plantation economy, a huge trading post, and an important slave mart. Between 1671 and 1679, nearly 12,000 African men and women had emerged from the holds of ships in her harbor and taken their miserable place as slaves on the vast sugar plantations that now covered the island. It was a different sort of pillaging, but Port Royal had found it just as lucrative.

For the pirates and their brethren, at least those who had not made the switch to farmer or merchant, the dawn found them still drinking in the malodorous taverns or unconscious in local alleyways, knocked senseless by round after round of Kill Devil, the “hot, hellish” rum made from the plantation molasses; it got its name from the belief that it was potent enough to kill Satan himself. Some had attempted to reach their homes on horseback, but the black liquor was so potent it was known to drop men from their mounts and leave them unconscious in the street, where they would “lie on the ground sometimes the whole night exposed to the injuries of the air.” There were two captured ships in the harbor, legally taken under commissions against the French, and many of the matelots were guzzling their part of the proceeds. With the whores draped over them in repose, they could have been Parisian dandies after a long night of slumming—that is, if you didn’t study their hands or faces too closely. Like marauding bears, they’d sleep for a day or two, then wake up penniless and brain-coshed and clamor to their captains for another mission. Roderick had made his way back to Port Royal, working the logwood boats and taking a privateer mission whenever one came around. He was yellow-eyed, his blood coursing with malaria, and his body had been racked by years of alcohol intake that would have killed most civilians. He lived with a whore and took part of her earnings when things were tight.

Nearby were the two prisons, the Bridewell, home to the “lazie strumpets” who had run afoul of the law, and the Marshalsea, where the more violent criminals were housed. Also close at hand were the courts where wrongdoers were tried; as the sun rose higher in the sky, the first prisoners of the day emerged, those who had not escaped the eyes of the militia on their regular tours. By midmorning the prisoners had already been sentenced and were being marched to the prison to be whipped or dunked. Then they’d spend the rest of the day in the stocks, broiling under the merciless sun, with passersby tossing rocks and garbage at their heads. There were more serious cases, too: The courts tried runaway slaves, and the guilty were ushered out to the gallows, followed by their owners. The luckier ones avoided the penalty for rebellion: being nailed to the ground with crooked sticks and having fire applied first to the hands, then the legs, then the head. (“The pains,” Sloane reported, “are extravagant.”)

There were places of worship dotted through the town for Quakers, Jews, Anglicans, Catholics, and Presbyterians, and the town’s leaders liked to believe that it was a tolerant place. But, even in this small corner of the world, the old bacilli of Europe had found a home in Protestant hearts, and bitter jealousies and hatreds ran through Port Royal society, sharpened by competition. The Jewish residents were hidden away in their own precinct and were active in business—far too active, according to some. Just weeks before, the council had written to England a petition, saying that Jewish merchants “eat us and our children out of all our trade” and were an evil spreading itself across the islands.

The pastor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dr. Heath, began his day by reading prayers at the church, which he did every day “to keep some show of religion among a most ungodly, debauched people.” Afterward he strolled over to meet with the lieutenant governor, John White; they had been friends for years, and Dr. Heath allowed himself a glass of wormwood wine “as a whet before dinner” (which, in Jamaica, was taken just after noon), while White puffed on a pipe filled with tobacco. Some West Indies planters had tried to compete with the American colonies and planted the addictive weed, but the soil did not produce a leaf anywhere near as rich and flavorful as that grown by the planters up north. The tobacco in White’s pipe came directly from Virginia, part of the triangular trade that kept Port Royal humming. The two men talked about the heat, about business, and about the French.

For all the signals and portents that people the world over would later point to, it was really an ordinary day. Disaster would subsequently etch significance into each everyday thing, but Port Royal was simply living its remarkably successful life as it always had. Everyone was merely waiting for noon, when the three-hour siesta, one of the few concessions to the latitude in which these expatriates dwelled, would begin and the town would drop off into a fitful sleep.

Seventeen minutes before noon, the ground started to roll gently under the feet of the townspeople. “It began with a small trembling,” wrote Hans Sloane. People froze and marveled at the feeling of the earth turning oceanlike, but they were not panicked; the town had suffered these rollings ever since the English had been on Jamaica. Dr. Heath asked White, “What is this?” “It is an earthquake,” White said. “Don’t be afraid, it will soon be over.” The ground swelled and dipped slightly like a wake under a ship, but the buildings stood. Then a second, stronger heaving motion rolled in from the north, and they heard a crash as St. Paul’s collapsed to the ground, followed quickly by a huge metallic clang; it was the church steeple, the pride of the town, slamming into a crowd gathered at its foot and snuffing out the lives of twelve townspeople. The tower bell shuddered out a strange ring, but it was quickly swallowed up in the sounds now vectoring in from all directions: the screams of men, the bomblike thud of three-and four-story brick buildings imploding, and a strange “hollow rumbling Noise.” The second wave had given way to a third tremor, which dwarfed the others in its ferocity. Terrified, Heath and White ran into the street and were instantly separated in the noise and chaos.

Heath ran toward Morgan’s Fort, and the scenes that greeted him along the way were a combination of Jules Verne and Hieronymus Bosch. The tremors had literally liquefied the earthen streets on which the townspeople were fleeing for their lives; with its surface gleaming as water saturated the sandy soil, earth became water, and the streets rose and fell in nauseating ripples. People were swept along like corks tossed on a wave, and some clutched at the gables of buildings that went past like boats; one doctor snatched at a passing chimney with his two children around his neck and miraculously survived. But most did not. “While they fled from the Sea, the Earth devoured them in her gaping Jaws,” said Heath. “Or they were knockt on the head with their houses falling on them…or the Sea met them and swept them away.” Men and women were pulled down into the sand and then cemented there, as the quake caused all the water that had surged up into the now-briny earth to be sucked away just as quickly. Some stood trapped in the earth up to their necks, crying for help. One observer reported:

That watery haitus closed again the next moment, catching hold of some people by a Leg, of others by the middle of the Body, and of others some by the Arm, etc., detaining them in dismal torture, but immovably fixed in the ground, till they, with almost the whole Town besides, sunk under Water.

The hardening sand squeezed the captives until they suffocated or until wild dogs swarmed on them and ate their heads. A drawing of the calamity shows women’s heads sticking out of the earth like cauliflowers, with dogs poised nearby, as well as a woman and her daughters who were “beat to pieces” by smashing into each other during the quake. “Others went down,” Sloane wrote, “and were never more seen.”

As he ran toward the fort, Heath looked up to see a sight he’d never forget: water cresting over the fortress’s three-story stone walls. Clearly this was Judgment Day, and the deluge would now follow the first catastrophe. Strangely, the fact that he believed that hope was now gone calmed Heath; he was certain he’d die, and so the pastor turned and ran back toward his own house. “I then laid aside all thoughts of escaping,” he remembered. “And resolved to make towards my own lodging, there to meet death in as good as posture as I could.” Heath hurried through narrow lanes that separated him from his home on Market Street; as he ran, the walls and houses on each side of him collapsed, spraying bricks and timbers across his path like props in a Buster Keaton film. “Some Bricks came Rowling over my shoes,” he said. “But none hurt me.” Dr. Sloane reported that “the Ground heaved and swelled like a rolling swelling Sea”; people who had been tripped up lay facedown on the ground, their arms and legs spread out and their hands digging into the sand, trying to hold on to it as one would a raft in a plunging river. The violence of the rippling earth astonished those who saw it; one said the earth in the town of Liguanea moved “as a man would shake a twig.”

When the rector reached his lodgings, he was stopped by another bizarre tableau: The home sat there pristine, unmarked, as if it were just an ordinary day. The street had not been touched. “Not a picture, of which there were several fair ones in my chamber,” was even a half inch out of place, he reported. Rushing to his balcony, Heath threw open the doors and looked out over the town. His immediate neighborhood was intact down to the panes of glass, while over the roofs he could see a picture of utter destruction: homes, warehouses, and townspeople being flung up into the air or dropping into the open maw of the earth. Spotting the pastor at his window, men and women in the street began shouting to him; they, too, were convinced the Rapture had arrived, and they wanted to pray with him. (The minister later said that even some of the Sephardic Jews called him to their side and were eventually converted to his faith.) Heath must have hesitated a fraction of a second: His survival had been nothing short of miraculous; why tempt God? But he turned and went down, with the roar of the earthquake still deafening. “When I came down,” he wrote, “every one laid hold of my clothes and embraced me, that with their fears and kindness I was almost stifled.” These men and women did not believe they were witnessing a random natural event; for them it was the Day of Judgment unfolding just as the Bible said it would. Didn’t they live “in the very place where Satan’s throne is erected,” as they had been warned many times before? And so the quake signaled the breaking of the Sixth Seal, as described in the Book of Revelation:

When I saw the Lamb break open the Sixth Seal, there was a violent earthquake; the sun turned black as a goat’s-hair tentcloth and the moon grew red as blood. The stars in the sky fell crashing to earth like figs shaken loose by a mighty wind. Then the sky disappeared as if it were a scroll being rolled up; every mountain and island was uprooted from its base.

The devout could expect only one thing to follow: the breaking of the Seventh Seal, followed by a half hour of silence and then the approach of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, their breast-plates the colors of fiery red, deep blue, and pale yellow, riding horses with heads like lions spitting sulfur and smoke and fire, and then the seven-headed dragons with diadems, and then unthinkable things. The rector, whose calm had returned after his panicked moment with White, spoke to his fellow citizens gently and urged them to kneel down in a circle around him. Expecting the final crack of doom at any moment, he prayed in a loud voice, his eyes closed, his face tilted up toward the cloudless sky.

All around the circle of men and women, oddities of nature that would rarely be seen again were unfolding. Geysers erupted from the ground and arched towering plumes of water into the summer sky; some opened beneath men’s feet and shot them a hundred feet in the air until gravity caught up with them and they began to fall on the descending pillar of water, down to the ground and then into it, as they disappeared into the holes that had caught them unawares. Thousands of these “sand volcanoes” were reported throughout the island. “In Clarendon Precinct, the Earth gaped and spouted up with a prodigious Force great Quantities of Water into the Air, above Twelve Miles from the Sea.” The vicar of Withywood reported that “dire Chasms spew’d out Water to a considerable heighth above ground.” People running for their homes dropped away into “the Pit,” tumbling into an infernal washing machine filled with sand, water, and flotsam; a lucky few hit subterranean rivers that had been born just minutes ago and were carried horizontally under the earth at great speed, whipping beneath the feet of their fellow residents, only to crash into another geyser moving upward and so shoot back to the surface a half mile from where they first went down into the earth, drenched but unhurt. One woman ran out of her house into the street and saw the sand before her “rising up”; she clutched her black servant, and they dropped together into the earth, “at the same instant the Water coming in, rowl’d them over and over,” until in this sunken world they saw a beam from a house passing and grabbed on to it and were saved. A merchant named Lloyd gave his story: He’d been in his shop when the “earth opened and let me in.” He was carried along in an underground channel until he was pushed up through a wooden floor and found himself lying with other victims, many of them critically wounded. He himself was nearly unhurt, but his house had disappeared completely into the muck that had swallowed him up. One French refugee, Lewis Gauldy, was sucked down and released not once but twice, popping up at various points in the landscape like a target at a shooting gallery. The next day he announced that he’d found God.

With the ground turning to mush, the living ran in terrified packs toward the harbor but were thrown down as they fled. Many of them jumped into the water and swam for the surviving ships that bobbed there in the chop, where six-foot waves swept over them. Stray timbers, canoes, and other refuse from the ruined city swept by in the strong current, braining some of the swimmers as they tried to escape. Soon the boats were crowded, and men fought for space on the decks. There were scenes of memorable courage, including that of a slave saving a white man and then drowning while trying to save his master, and another of a bondsman who dug a Colonel Beckford out of the sand before it crushed him. Depravity would soon overwhelm the memories of kindness.

The earthquake tore the city apart. But it was the tsunami that followed hard upon it that proved lethal. Sweeping in, three stories high and traveling at sixty miles an hour, the great wave carried on its back the HMS Swan from the harbor, which “by the violent motion of the Sea, and the sinking of the Wharf,” reported one resident, “was forced over the tops of many Houses; and passing by that House where my Lord Puke lived, part of it fell upon her, and beat in her Round House.” The frigate stayed upright and later served as a life raft for over two hundred people. The foamy top of the inrushing water was even with some of Port Royal’s tallest structures as it came toward the town, then smashed buildings to pieces and carried off citizens back toward the harbor. The enormous surge of water bore away carts, cannon, fishing boats, wooden homes, and hundreds upon hundreds of men, women, and children, depositing their naked bodies miles away or, as it drew back, taking them out to the ocean, never to be seen again. One resident wrote home about the horrors but could not express them to his satisfaction: “’Tis impossible for my pen to write, or tongue to relate ye horror and terror of that daye.”

As the wave rippled across the landscape, sections of the smoky blue mountains that had framed the town’s horizon dropped away like children’s blocks; one landslide dammed the river that supplied the town with drinking water (which would soon be selling at exorbitant prices in the postdisaster city). The drought lasted sixteen hours, until the runoff from the mountains could cut new paths down their sides and onto the plains. Many believed that the earthquake was even more intense in the blue hills than it had been in the towns. The sounds that rumbled in from their direction testified that tremendous natural forces were at work; the mountains “bellowed forth prodigious, loud, terrible Noises and Echoings,” and the rich forest that used to cover their sides was stripped away in places from peak to foot so that it looked as if they had been peeled clean. Hans Sloane wrote a long letter in 1694 filled with accounts of the earthquake, and his contacts from all over the island reported that the earth had acted in unaccountable ways. In Yallahs, west of Port Royal, “a great Mountain split, and fell into the level land, and covered several Settlements, and destroy’d nineteen white People.” The locals believed it was a judgment on the victims’ evil ways, and the place is now known as Judgment Hill. A man named Hopkins rushed home to his plantation, only to find it gone, the entire mass of earth, sugar crop, and house, and all having moved half a mile from its original spot. New lakes appeared where there had been only dry fields; a thousand acres of forest near the French settlement of St. Ann’s Bay disappeared underwater, taking fifty-three settlers with it. The seventeenth-century mind groped for words to describe the unsolid earth they now inhabited; it had become animated, even willful. A section of one mountain, “after having made several Leaps or Moves,” proceeded to track down and “overwhelm” a family, having traveled more than a mile to snuff out its victims.

Four of the town’s five forts dropped into the harbor with their heavy guns, leaving only Fort Charles standing. Which of the ordinary citizens survived depended in most cases on what kind of house they lived in. The poor and piratical fared best: The huts that the slaves and the very destitute inhabited were made of thatch and wood held together with dried mud or mortar. The Spanish-built dwellings were the next step up in the social ladder. These low-slung houses, with their wall beams driven deep into the ground, withstood the earthquake very well. It was the rich merchants’ houses, which had been constructed to resemble the middle-class dwellings back in England, that proved to be death traps; they were three and four stories high, built of bricks, with tile roofs and glass in the windows. Heavy and rigid, they collapsed en masse, killing everyone inside. All the structures built of brick or stone—churches, warehouses, sugar works, and homes—were affected. The vicar of Withywood, whose parish lay thirty-five miles inland from Port Royal, wrote that the buildings “are now either leveled with the ground, or standing Monuments of the Wrath of God,…so shattered and torn that they are irrepairable.” Those neurasthenic wives who could not escape from their beds were among the first to die, while tiny huts that housed black slaves easily withstood the shaking of the earth. It was an early lesson in the earthquakeproofing of houses.

The echo of the original, enormous boom faded away, and soon the sound of seabirds could be heard above “the wailing and the screaming.” The quake had lasted approximately six minutes. In that time 90 percent of the town’s homes, its warehouses stuffed with goods, and the main pier for the city had been destroyed or simply vanished into the sea. Two thousand people died from the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami; another two thousand would die in the coming weeks from injuries and disease. The death toll was twice that of the San Francisco calamity of 1906, but that had occurred in a city of hundreds of thousands. The Great Earthquake of 1692 took more than 70 percent of Port Royal’s 6,500 residents; it would stand as the most lethal quake until the 1868 Peru-Ecuador disaster.

Professor George R. Clark of Kansas State University, who has studied the 1692 quake intensively, has rated it between values X and XI over the majority of Jamaica, with spots of Value XII intensity in isolated spots. A Value X earthquake involves the destruction of most buildings and foundations; in a Value XII, objects are thrown into the air and the ground moves in waves. The Port Royal was one of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the Western Hemisphere. It was accentuated by the formation of the land beneath the city. The sand that Port Royal stood on was loosely packed and saturated with water before the tremors struck. As the earthquake hit, violent seismic waves rippled through the sand and literally changed the granular structure of the soil. The shaking caused the sand molecules to sink downward, where they were met by water rushing up to fill the empty space; this caused the layers of sand to lose their stiffness and strength. Very quickly the sand stopped acting as a solid and began behaving as a viscous liquid, and the ground beneath the residents’ feet changed from solid earth to quicksand in an instant. People and buildings dropped down into the watery mush and were lost. As to the tsunamis that Heath and others reported seeing, they may have been classic tidal waves caused by the violent buckling of a tectonic plate offshore or simply the result of the ocean’s flowing in to fill the space once occupied by the plunging surface of sand. Only those buildings, such as Heath’s home, which happened to sit on a solid base of limestone or gravel, were saved.

Looking over the ruined city, one of Hans Sloane’s correspondents grew somber:

Indeed, ’tis enough to raise melancholy thoughts in a Man now, to see the Chimneys and Tops of some Houses, and the Masts of Ships and Sloops, which partak’d of the same Fate, appear above Water; and when one first comes ashore, to see so many Heaps of Ruines, many whereof by their largeness shew, that once there had stood a brave House; to see so many Houses shatter’d, some half fallen down, the rest desolate and without Inhabitants,…there, where once stood brave Streets of stately Houses stood, appearing now nothing but Water, except here and there a Chimney, and some parts and pieces of Houses, surviving only to mind us of their sad Misfortune, Habitations for Fish, contrary to the Intent of the first Builders.

Sometime during the six minutes, Henry Morgan’s coffin erupted from the sandy ground of the cemetery and was spewed out into the churning waters of the Port Royal harbor, never to be found again. At 11:49 the great pirate city that he’d helped create ceased to exist.

In Port Royal the geological quake triggered a social one. The richest survivors were set upon by looters and, in some rare cases, slaves who had seen their chance for freedom. Men died in revenge attacks or simple robberies; in fact, what happened after the disaster might be described as a class war: A minority of the town’s despised lower orders, including those pirates who remained in Port Royal, rose and began robbing the upper-crust stalwarts who had tried to banish them from the town. “No man could call any thing his own,” a minister wrote. “The richest are now the poorest…. The strongest and the most wicked seized what they pleased, and where they pleased and when they pleased.” The old nightmare of the rebellious buccaneers had finally come true. Poor men and criminals broke into shops and battered down the doors of rich men’s homes, carrying away gold and jewels and plate pillaged in Morgan’s raids. Roderick was among them. Asleep on the beach, he’d awoken during the earthquake from a rum-induced sleep, turned over, and grabbed at the earth as it rolled beneath him. When the quake had passed, he’d run into his mates and formed a plan. They began breaking into the warehouses that had not sunk underwater and pilfered whatever they found. When one roof collapsed, he saw two of his friends crushed beneath the falling timbers, but he didn’t stay to pull them out. Slaves joined in, since, according to one writer, they “thought it their time of Liberty, wherein they committed many barbarous Insolencies and Robberies,” until arrests of some and the killing of others quelled the revolt. Traders who had for so long depended on the buccaneers’ violent natures when they were unleashed on Spanish cities now found the same hands raised toward them. If the irony of Port Royal was that it had grown fabulously wealthy on the backs of the men it at least in part despised, there was a measure of divine justice in what happened.

The receiver general of Jamaica, Edward Ellyn, wrote to a colleague about the behavior of the local sailors, a significant portion of whom would likely have been ex-buccaneers:

That afternoon most of the seamen, English and Spaniards, contented themselves with what was floating on the water, tho’ some instantly entered and riffled standing houses. But the following nights and dayes those villains, more savage and cruel than any Indians and Negroes, robbed all houses, broke in pieces all scriptores, boxes, trunks, chests of drawers, cabinets and made spoil of all of value in the town, threatening to kill several inhabitants, if any durst be so hardy as to say, “This house is mine.” Our enemies could not have treated us worse than the seamen.

Dr. Heath was more precise. He called the marauders “a company of lewd rogues whom they called Privateers” and reported that they had proceeded to pillage their own town even while the earthquake was shaking the ground. Roderick took the loot he’d gathered and began celebrating among the ruins with the local whores, who were just as “Impudent and Drunken as ever.” As slaves said after the American Civil War, the bottom rail was now on top. Some of that old feeling, of being one of the great men of Port Royal, came back to Roderick that day. He drank and danced with his friends, robbed any civilian who happened past, while the scene around him prompted him to tell stories of old Panama and how they had left it. He departed the town the next day and was sighted in Nassau two years later. In 1695 he was lost at sea while chasing a French trader with a crew of Dutch and English pirates off Hispaniola. He left nothing to anyone.

With law and order vanished, the poor sold the goods they had managed to extract from the sunken buildings, most of Port Royal now resembling a kind of Atlantis, with streetlamps, benches, and shops sunk to between eighteen and thirty feet of seawater. The survivors dived down like pearl fishers and extracted the good Spanish silver that had been displayed in every respectable home. Some of the former owners of the brick homes were still trapped in their rooms, their eyes goggling, their hair waving gently in the current. Heath reported that many of the town’s most wretched citizens, “by watching opportunities,” had grown rich. A Quaker citizen, John Pike, wrote a sibling:

Ah, brother, if thou didst see those great persons that are now dead upon the water, thou couldst never forget it. Great men who were so swallowed up with pride, that a man could not be admitted to speak with them, and women whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds, now lie stinking upon the water, and are made meat for fish and fowls of the air.

Port Royal was forced to relive the fate that had come to Panama after Morgan’s raids. With only a tenth of the houses remaining habitable, the wealthy traders returned to their homes to find them heaps of brick and mortar, and so they were forced to seek accommodation in the thatched huts of the black slaves. “Here you see colonels and great men bowing their bodies to creep into this little hutch,” wrote John Pike, “who before had houses fit not only to receive but to feast in an extraordinary manner a prince or King, as great as England’s monarch….” Although some slave owners did rent “Negro quarters” instead of evicting their servants, others threw their slaves out of their huts and moved their families in. The gentry had always feared a slave uprising more than an earthquake; their dreams were filled with Negro butcheries and rapes, and as they surveyed the ruined city, their thoughts quickly turned to rebellion. “Our first fears were concerning our slaves,” wrote one merchant. “Those irreconcilable enemies of ours…who seeing our strongest houses demolished, our Arms broken…might in hopes of liberty be stirred up to rise.” There were some incidents of slaves’ joining in the robberies, but in the end it was the gentry who turned on the Negroes and cast them out of their humble shacks.

The most immediate problems for the townspeople were disease and supplies. One observer recalled looking out into the harbor and seeing corpses packing the water’s surface from one end of the harbor to another, like logs on a Wisconsin river. The bodies “caused such an intolerable stench, that the Dead were like to destroy the Living.” The corpses that had been expelled from the graveyard mixed with the cadavers of the newly dead, and in the heat their flesh roasted and blistered. Inevitably they became carriers of diseases that struck the survivors with shocking force.

To get away from the spreading plague, some Port Royalists moved their shelters across the bay, thereby founding the city of Kingston. Others began to rebuild on the narrow strip of land where the old town had stood. A year later the survivors were still struggling to reestablish their society. “The island is in a very mean condition,” wrote Sir William Beeston nine months after the calamity. “The earthquake, sickness and desertion of discontented people have carried off so many as to leave the island very thin of people.”

In the face of the disaster, people ignored faddish scientific theories and thought only of God. Natural disasters were seen as divine warnings by the vast majority of people. The London earthquake of 1580 prompted the writer Thomas Twynne to publish his Discourses of the Earthquake, in which he stated that each man was being warned to “call himself to an accompt, and look narrowly into his own life.” Another treatise linked the severity of the earthquake to debauched living: The quake had been a reaction to “the horrid Enormities that are boldly committed amongst us.” This was the dominant theme of the commentaries on the Port Royal catastrophe the world over. The news of the earthquake reached London, Boston, and New York within weeks. The disaster had immediate ramifications for the English empire, and especially the colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts; in the short term the lucrative trade with Port Royal was completely disrupted, and in the long term the Americas vaulted ahead of their West Indies neighbor. “Never again before American independence,” wrote one historian, “did any Caribbean community rival the five cities on the continent of America.” The events in Jamaica seemed to inaugurate a series of disasters around the world: There was a strong quake in England on September 8 that, according to John Evelyn, “greatly affrighted” the people and led to rumors of the coming Armageddon; hoping to defray the Lord’s anger, authorities began cracking down on drunkenness and other public vices immediately afterward. Along with the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts colony, the quake spread a mood of divine retribution throughout the English-speaking world. Pamphlets and books were published warning that the destruction of the Sodom of Jamaica was a message from above. “Behold an accident speaking to all our English America,” wrote Boston’s famous preacher, Cotton Mather, of the quake. Priests and ministers through the civilized world spoke of Port Royal as an omen. “To the inhabitants of that Isle,” wrote one commentator, “has the Lord spoken terrible things in righteousness.” Even the people of the island accepted the quake as a sign of their own sinfulness. “I shall only instance myself for one,” wrote one resident, “who have lost my ship, and very considerably other ways but I am very well satisfied because it is the Lord’s Doings.” Of course, if it was a sign of divine punishment, in retrospect men insisted on reading it selectively. The slave empire was just beginning to take hold in places like Port Royal, but it was the venal sins that obsessed the chattering classes: Port Royal had surely been struck down because of whoring and booze. The possibility that it was the sugar plantations where Africans were burned alive for attempting to escape that was the source of God’s displeasure was not mentioned in a single letter or sermon.

The calamity put a hard stop to the golden era that Port Royal had embodied. The city was rebuilt, but it never again rose to the heights of the glory days. Pirates continued to cruise the waters off the city, and some were occasionally hung on Gallows Point during fits of law and order, including the randy and dashing “Calico Jack” Rackham, in 1720. His lover, the rare female pirate Anne Bonny, and her widely feared friend Mary Read, escaped the noose by “pleading their bellies” (both were pregnant). Bonny’s reprieve was short; she died of a fever in a Port Royal jail, while Read disappeared off the face of the earth. Officials in Jamaica and Tortuga often looked the other way when pirates strolled through town, as many of the locals had a soft spot in their hearts for the old Brethren, but the pirates no longer ruled the town and the entire region as they once had. Those privateers who had earned enough pieces of eight from Morgan’s raids and managed not to relinquish them to the Port Royal vice economy settled onto their estates and emulated the admiral’s final years. Jamaica, however, no longer belonged to them.

No longer would the city shelter large numbers of the men who had made it rich and infamous the world over. No longer could a buccaneer organize the largest army in the Western Hemisphere, made up of trash tossed out of half a dozen European countries, plus runaway slaves and restless servants, and roam far and wide over half a continent, facing down an empire and stealing its riches. The Royal Navy stationed warships at Port Royal; Admiral Lord Nelson did a tour of duty at Fort Charles, and the English fleet took over from the Brethren the role of naval enforcers. The remaining pirates often restricted themselves to small lightning attacks on merchant vessels, instead of the audacious land attacks on major cities that Morgan had perfected. In the 1700s the sugar-and-slave economy came into its own, and more and more Port Royal became a traders’ town where it paid to be good with an abacus and not a musket. Not long after Morgan’s death, young men clambered out of ships arriving in Port Royal no longer dreaming of pirates. They wanted to own plantations and as many Africans as possible to work them. A different kind of cruelty won out.

But somehow over the years, the exquisite cruelties of the pirates’ expeditions were forgotten, their exploits resonated louder, and they became romantic figures. Crazy, yes, but romantic. Perhaps the traders’ world was simply too boring and too successful to compete with the story of the flaming arrow at San Lorenzo, the Maracaibo fireship, and all the rest. Morgan would not have understood it; he wanted to be bound more closely to the king and the English empire that he loved. He was never a wild-eyed revolutionary; far from it. But the superoxygenated air that the pirates seemed to carry with them over the Atlantic, in which any act of barbarity or valor was possible at any given moment, stamped the image of the buccaneer indelibly on the imagination. The pirate can seem at times like the freest man who ever walked the Americas, freer even than the Carib or the Arawak.

If it’s a myth, and it partly is, the world will take the myth. But you can’t attempt to do what Morgan and his men did without seeing yourselves as a prince of the New World, deserving of every wonder it possesses. Men like that do not live very long, but they are not easily forgotten.