Port Royal Sinks: Earthquake Destroys Pirate Capital

Port Royal slid into the Caribbean Sea in three minutes. A massive earthquake struck the Jamaican city at 11:43 AM on June 7, 1692, liquefying the sand spit on which the wealthiest and most notorious settlement in the English-speaking Americas was built. Two-thirds of the town disappeared beneath the water. Buildings sank vertically into the ground, swallowing people alive. The harbor rose, then fell, then rose again, tossing ships into the streets. Approximately 2,000 people died in the earthquake itself, and another 3,000 perished in the disease and famine that followed. Port Royal had been called the "wickedest city on Earth," a reputation built on rum, prostitution, and piracy. Situated on the tip of a narrow sand spit at the entrance to Kingston Harbour, the city served as a haven for English buccaneers who raided Spanish shipping with tacit government approval. Henry Morgan had launched his attacks on Panama and Cuba from Port Royal’s docks. By the 1690s, the city had evolved from a pirate base into a thriving commercial port, with a population of roughly 6,500, brick warehouses, a church, four markets, and more bars per capita than any settlement in the hemisphere. The earthquake measured approximately 7.5 on the modern scale and produced a rare phenomenon called liquefaction, in which sandy soil saturated with water loses its structural integrity and behaves like a liquid. Entire blocks of buildings sank into the ground up to their rooflines. Eyewitness accounts describe people being swallowed by the earth, then crushed when the ground closed again. A tsunami followed, washing ships from the harbor across the submerged remains of the waterfront. Port Royal never recovered. A fire destroyed much of what remained in 1703, and the colonial government relocated to Kingston across the harbor. The sunken city lay preserved beneath the seafloor, and twentieth-century marine archaeologists have excavated it as one of the most complete snapshots of seventeenth-century Caribbean life, a Pompeii of the New World. Artifacts recovered from the ruins include intact buildings, personal belongings, and a pocket watch stopped at 11:43, the precise moment the ground gave way.