Port Royal Earthquake
On 7 June 1692, a powerful earthquake struck Jamaica and sent much of Port Royal, a bustling English port at the tip of the Palisadoes sandspit, sliding into Kingston Harbour. Thousands of people died, and a town that had been one of the richest in the English colonies was crippled almost overnight. The disaster has since become one of the most famous natural catastrophes of the early modern Atlantic world, and the drowned portion of the city has become an important archaeological site.
Port Royal's prominence grew after England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655. The harbor was deep and defensible, and the English authorities encouraged privateers, who held official permission to attack Spanish shipping, to base themselves there as a defense against Spanish counterattack. Plunder, trade, and the slave trade made the town wealthy, and it gained a reputation for taverns, taverns' rowdy customers, and loose morals. Henry Morgan, the best-known privateer of the era, later served as a colonial official on the island. The town was crowded onto a narrow strip of unstable, water-saturated sand, with heavy brick buildings, a vulnerability that would prove fatal.
The earthquake struck near midday. Contemporary accounts describe violent shaking followed by the ground giving way along the waterfront. Much of the town's northern and central portions were submerged, a process geologists attribute to liquefaction and submarine slumping, in which saturated sediments lose strength and flow. Tsunami-like waves and flooding added to the destruction. Ships in the harbor were tossed about, and one vessel was reportedly carried over sunken buildings. Estimates of the dead vary, but around two thousand are often cited for the immediate disaster, with perhaps another two thousand dying in the following weeks from injuries and disease amid crowded, unsanitary conditions.
Many contemporaries read the event as divine punishment for the town's wickedness, a view that shaped its later legend. Survivors rebuilt part of Port Royal, but a major fire in 1703 and later hurricanes, along with the rise of Kingston across the harbor, ended its commercial importance. Kingston eventually became Jamaica's capital and principal city.
The earthquake also left an unusual historical record. Because part of the town sank rapidly and was buried under sediment, buildings, tools, and household goods were preserved much as they stood. Underwater excavations in the twentieth century, including work led by Edwin Link and later by Texas A&M researchers, recovered everyday objects such as pewter, pottery, and clay pipes. Today Port Royal is often called the "sunken pirate city," though its archaeology shows a working port community more than a simple den of pirates.