At 11:43 on the morning of June 7, 1692, the ground beneath Port Royal, Jamaica liquefied and slid into the sea. In the space of a few minutes, roughly two-thirds of one of the richest and most notorious towns in the English colonies vanished under water — and it took much of its pirate history down with it.
The Wickedest City in the World
By the 1660s and 1670s, Port Royal had become the unofficial capital of Caribbean buccaneering, a boomtown of taverns, brothels, and gambling houses supported by privateering commissions, smuggled Spanish silver, and pirate plunder. Contemporaries called it the “storehouse and treasury of the West Indies”; moralists on both sides of the Atlantic called it the “wickedest city in the world.” Henry Morgan himself, knighted and made Jamaica’s lieutenant governor after his buccaneering career, lived out his final years there.
What Happened on June 7, 1692
Much of Port Royal was built on a narrow sand spit, and it was this loose, waterlogged ground that doomed the town when the earthquake struck. Contemporary accounts describe the wharves and streets appearing to “flow into the sea” as the sand liquefied beneath them; one witness wrote that nine-tenths of the town was underwater within about two minutes. More than twenty ships in the harbor were capsized or driven ashore, and a naval frigate was reportedly tossed over the rooftops of the collapsing town by the accompanying tsunami. Modern seismologists estimate the quake at roughly magnitude 7.5.
The Death Toll
Sources give the toll in different levels of detail, but the shape is consistent: roughly 2,000 people are thought to have died in the earthquake and tsunami themselves, with several thousand more dying in the weeks that followed from injuries, exposure, and the disease that spread through the survivors’ camps. Total estimates of the dead commonly run as high as several thousand, though exact figures were never systematically recorded.
Judgment Day for a Sinful City
Port Royal’s reputation for vice made the disaster easy to read as a moral lesson. Jamaica’s governing council formally declared the earthquake “an instance of God Almighty’s severe judgement,” and the Anglican rector who survived it wrote that he had seen what looked like Judgment Day and that there was “not a more ungodly people on the face of the earth” than the town’s inhabitants had been. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather, writing from Boston, drew the same conclusion at a safe distance. Whether or not Port Royal’s sins were exceptional by the standards of any 17th-century port city, the earthquake made it the go-to sermon illustration for decades.
What’s Left Beneath the Water
The submerged portion of Port Royal, including the ground traditionally said to hold the cemetery where Henry Morgan was buried, has made it one of the richest underwater archaeological sites in the Americas; divers have recovered pocket watches, ceramics, and building foundations remarkably intact beneath the silt. Above the waterline, a much smaller Port Royal survived and was rebuilt, but it never regained its role as the Caribbean’s pirate capital — that reputation, along with the town itself, had already gone under.
Sources consulted: the Wikipedia entry on the 1692 Jamaica earthquake; National Geographic History; and contemporary accounts collected by the Jamaican colonial council.
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