Port Royal, Jamaica

What was Port Royal before the earthquake?

England captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655. A town grew up at the end of the Palisadoes, a long, narrow sand spit that shelters one of the best harbours in the Caribbean. In the 1660s it was home to buccaneers, sea raiders who attacked Spanish ships and towns with permission from Jamaica’s governors. The most famous was Henry Morgan, who later became the island’s lieutenant governor.

By 1692 Port Royal was one of the largest and richest English towns in the Americas. Historians estimate 6,500 to 8,000 people lived there, crowded into about 2,000 brick and timber buildings on roughly 52 acres of loose sand. It was a busy market for sugar, for goods from Europe, and for enslaved Africans.

How much of Port Royal sank in the 1692 earthquake?

Just before noon on 7 June 1692 a powerful earthquake struck. The sandy ground turned almost to liquid, and about 33 of the town’s 52 acres slid into the harbour, nearly two-thirds of Port Royal. Around 2,000 people died that day, and many more died of injuries and disease in the weeks after.

The survivors did not rebuild in the same place. In July 1692 the government laid out a new town on the mainland across the harbour, called Kingston. Port Royal was partly rebuilt, but a great fire in 1703 burned most of it, and the remaining merchants moved to Kingston, which soon became Jamaica’s chief port.

What was Port Royal like in 1715?

By the time Silver & Sails begins, Port Royal was a smaller town of forts, taverns and sailors’ lodgings. Its real importance was the Royal Navy. Warships stationed at Jamaica were careened (tipped on their sides to clean and repair their hulls) at Port Royal, where the navy had used a wharf since the 1670s; from 1735 it built new wharves and storehouses there.

Merchant ships still sailed into the same harbour, but they did their business at Kingston. Then on 28 August 1722 a great hurricane drove the sea over the spit. Of about fifty ships in the harbour, only a handful survived, and about 400 people died. After that, Port Royal’s future lay with the navy, not with trade.

What did Jamaica trade in 1715?

Jamaica was becoming the richest sugar colony in the British Empire. Ships left its harbour loaded with sugar, rum and molasses, and came back with things the island did not grow or make: flour, salt fish, lumber and barrel staves from North America, and cloth, tools and guns from Britain.

Jamaica was also one of the largest slave markets in the Americas. In the 1720s alone, ships brought more than 75,000 enslaved Africans to the island. Many were forced to work on Jamaica’s sugar estates, where death rates were terribly high. Of these, more than 30,000 were sold on to Spanish colonies, partly under the asiento, a 1713 treaty right that let Britain’s South Sea Company sell enslaved people to Spain’s empire. Smuggling between Jamaica and the Spanish colonies was constant.

Were there pirates in Port Royal in 1715?

Not as welcome guests. The buccaneer days had ended long before, and by 1715 Jamaica tried and hanged pirates. In October 1720 Captain Jonathan Barnet surprised the pirate sloop of John “Calico Jack” Rackham off Negril Point at the west end of the island. According to the earliest account, only a few pirates stayed on deck to fight, among them two women, Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Rackham was tried at Spanish Town on 16 November 1720 and hanged at Gallows Point, Port Royal, two days later. His body was hung in chains at the harbour mouth as a warning to sailors; by tradition the little island where it hung is still called Rackham’s Cay. Bonny and Read were tried separately on 28 November and sentenced to death, but both said they were expecting babies, so their hangings were put off. Mary Read died in prison in 1721. No record of Anne Bonny’s release or execution has been found; some historians believe she went back to the Carolinas, married and lived to old age, but this is not certain.

The pirate Charles Vane, shipwrecked in the Bay of Honduras and recognised by an old acquaintance, was brought to Jamaica, held for many months and hanged at Gallows Point on 29 March 1721.

Who were the Maroons of Jamaica?

Not every free person on Jamaica was a colonist. In the island’s mountains lived the Maroons, communities of people who had escaped slavery, some of them going back to the Spanish years before 1655. The Windward Maroons held the Blue Mountains in the east, led by Quao and by a woman remembered as Nanny, who by tradition came from the Gold Coast of West Africa. The Leeward Maroons in the west were led by Cudjoe.

Through the 1720s and 1730s colonial soldiers fought the Maroons and could not defeat them. In 1739 the colony signed treaties that recognised the Maroons’ freedom and land, and in 1740 Nanny’s town received its own land grant. The treaties had a hard price: the Maroons agreed to send back people who escaped slavery in future. Nanny is today a National Hero of Jamaica, and she appears on the Jamaican $500 note.

What is left of Port Royal today?

Port Royal is now a small fishing village of about 2,000 people. Fort Charles, which survived the earthquake, still stands, along with an old naval hospital and church. Under the water lie the streets and buildings that sank in 1692. Archaeologists from Texas A&M University and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust excavated there from 1981 to 1990 and found houses, pewter plates, bottles, tools and cooking pots, the everyday objects of a town frozen in a moment. In July 2025 UNESCO made the archaeological remains of 17th-century Port Royal a World Heritage Site.