Patrick mulcahy new england revolution

Discussion Post 3: Mulcahy And Payton

For historians, putting evidence in context fundamentally means locating it in geographic space and historical time. But it often entails much more--thinking about the point of view of individual historical actors (shaped by economic standing, identity (gender, race, class, dis/ability, etc), available cultural and intellectual sources, larger transnational dynamics of power, etc.

Prompt: Hypothesis: As humans become more modern, they relinquish providentialism in favor of science in order to explain and understand natural disasters. Evaluate the validity of this hypothesis in light of your reading of Mulcahy and Payton.

Prepare a 150-200 word discussion post in response to the prompt above. If you prefer, you may offer your own prompt (include at the top of your post) and write a response to it.
At the end record a question you'd like your colleagues to weigh in on in relation to the readings.

The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica

Matthew Mulcahy

Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2008, pp. 391-421 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 28 Aug 2020 01:09 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz ]

https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.0.0009

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/250477

https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.0.0009
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/250477
The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders in Seventeenth-

Century Jamaica

M AT T H E W M U L C A H Y L o y o l a C o l l e g e i n M a r y l a n d

abstract This article examines the great Port Royal earthquake of 1692 in the context of other earthquakes that struck Jamaica in the seven- teenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that although most com- mentators viewed the tremendous devastation caused by the 1692 disaster as a divine judgment against Port Royal, a few observers suggested that the extent of damage also reflected geographic and architectural factors. It further argues that the frequent experience of earthquakes in Jamaica al- tered how colonists interpreted such events. Large-scale disasters like Port Royal retained providential meaning, but colonists dismissed numerous other earthquakes, even though similar minor tremors occasioned an out- pouring of sermons and moralizing in other parts of the British Atlantic world. As colonists in Jamaica gained more knowledge about the natural world in Jamaica, they learned that earthquakes were common occur- rences. As a result, most earthquakes gradually ceased to appear as extraor- dinary or providential events.

The Reverend Emmanuel Heath, the recently arrived rector of Port Royal, Jamaica, spent the morning of June 7, 1692, at church reading prayers, as he said, ‘‘to keep up some shew of Religion among a most Ungodly Debauched People.’’ After finishing prayers, he made his way to a tavern where merchants

I am very grateful to Philip Morgan, Douglas Winiarski, and Clint Conrad for their helpful comments and criticisms. I also received helpful comments from parti- cipants in sessions at the American Society for Environmental History annual meet- ing in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Association for Caribbean Historians annual meeting in Kingston, Jamaica. A Loyola College Summer Grant provided funding for some of the research.

Early American Studies (Fall 2008) Copyright � 2008 The McNeil Center for Early American Studies. All rights reserved.

392 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

and local officials congregated. He was soon joined by John White, the presi- dent of Jamaica’s council and acting governor of the island, for some worm- wood wine and tobacco before lunch. Around 11:40, Heath ‘‘found the ground rowling and moving under my feet,’’ and he asked White, ‘‘Lord, Sir, what’s this?’’ White replied, ‘‘very composedly, being a very Grave Man, It is an Earthquake, be not afraid, it will soon be over.’’ But rather than subsiding, the tremors increased, and Heath and White heard the steeple of nearby St. Paul’s Church collapse to the ground. They fled outside just in time to see the ‘‘Earth open and swallow up a multitude of People, and the Sea mounting in upon us over the Fortifications.’’ Within minutes more than half of Port Royal, ‘‘the fairest Town of all the English Plantations, the best Emporium and Mart of this part of the world, exceeding in its Riches, plentiful of all good things,’’ sank into the sea and roughly two thousand colonists—one- third of the town’s population—died in one of the great disasters of the early modern world.1

Heath had no doubt about the cause of such destruction. The earthquake was a ‘‘terrible Judgment of God’’ sent to punish the many pirates, prosti- tutes, and profaners who called Port Royal home. Contemporaries in Jamaica and elsewhere in the British Atlantic world agreed. According to Richard Dunn, ‘‘The symbolic importance of the 1692 earthquake was very clear to people at the time. An angry God had punished the city of sin for its de- bauchery.’’ Larry Gragg argued that interpretations of the disaster in Boston and London, as well as in Jamaica, fit into a ‘‘long and continuing tradition of explaining earthquakes as supernatural intrusions into everyday life, as God’s chastisement for sin, or as a portent of a greater punishment to come.’’ Most recently, Susan Scott Parrish suggested that ‘‘the literature written in the aftermath of the Jamaica earthquake of 1692 is thorough in its associa- tion of natural disorder with the moral declension of the English inhabi- tants.’’2

1. Rev. E. Heath, A Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica; Written in two Letters from the Minister of that Place (London, 1692), n.p. (emphasis in original).

2. Ibid.; Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 187; Larry Gragg, ‘‘The Port Royal Earthquake,’’ History Today 50 (Septem- ber 2000): 29; Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 99. See also Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line: The English in the West Indies, 1624–1690 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1972), 190, 184.

393Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

Historians have rightly emphasized this providential discourse in their discussions of the earthquake—it was the dominant interpretation of the disaster among English colonists in Jamaica and elsewhere. Nevertheless, at least some contemporary commentators who lived in Jamaica or had spent time on the island offered a somewhat different explanation for the great destruction caused by the earthquake. Although these writers did not doubt that the earthquake was an act of God, they suggested geography and archi- tecture—not just sin, debauchery, and moral declension—influenced the extent of damage in the town. Specifically, they argued that Port Royal’s location and its physical development in the decades following the English conquest in 1655 left the town vulnerable to earthquakes—a threat well known in Jamaica before 1692. This interpretation of the disaster, in turn, was reprinted in several eighteenth-century histories of the island.

The importance of these accounts is not that they challenged providential interpretations of the Port Royal disaster, although they do suggest that reactions were somewhat more complex than is often portrayed. Rather, they and other contemporary writings about earthquakes raise a series of larger questions about the physical environment of Jamaica, how English colonists responded to the new environmental realities they encountered in the West Indies, and the role that lived experience played in shaping their understanding of the natural world and natural phenomena in America.3

For most people in the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world, earth- quakes were ‘‘wonders,’’ unusual events ‘‘betokening the presence of the su- pernatural,’’ to quote David Hall.4 Such events were by definition rare, often

3. On the importance of experience and knowledge of the natural world, see Parrish, American Curiosity. For specific studies of English reactions to the Ameri- can environment that emphasize both the importance of experience in altering ideas and the persistence of older ways of understanding climate, see Karen Kupperman’s trilogy of essays, ‘‘The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Pe- riod,’’ American Historical Review 87 (December 1982): 1262–89; ‘‘Fear of Hot Cli- mates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,’’ William and Mary Quarterly 41 (April 1984): 213–41; ‘‘Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth- Century New England,’’ in David Allen and David Hall, eds., Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1985), 3–37. This article examines only the intellectual response among English colonists in Jamaica. Of course, by the end of the seventeenth century, African slaves constituted a majority of the population on the island, but I have thus far found little evidence of their response to earthquakes.

4. David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 71–72. Hall notes (76–77) that wonder culture drew from a variety of intellectual traditions, including ‘‘apocalypticism, astrology, natural history, and the meteorology of the

394 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

disastrous, and usually charged with moral significance. Although during the second half of the seventeenth century some learned elites began to distance themselves from traditional ideas about what constituted a wonder, earthquakes often retained their providential significance. Even as writers increasingly speculated on the natural causes of earthquakes, the shaking of the earth continued to represent some form of divine warning or judgment for many people in the British Atlantic world well into the eighteenth cen- tury.5

Greeks. . . . But the most crucial framework was the doctrine of God’s providence.’’ For his discussion of challenges to the wonder tradition, and its persistence, see 94–116.

5. A large literature exists that explores wonders in the early modern British Atlantic world—including numerous specific studies of earthquakes. These studies focus almost exclusively on England and New England, where earthquakes were infrequent events. For a discussion of wonders in England, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Wil- liam Burns, An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics, and Providence in England, 1657– 1727 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 55–77; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971; repr., New York: Penguin, 1991), 90–132. Michael Winship, Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), exam- ines New England in the context of developments in England. For other studies of New England, see Ross Beales Jr., ‘‘The Smiles and Frowns of Providence,’’ Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600–1900: Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklore 17 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1995), 86–96; Douglas Win- iarski, ‘‘ ‘Pale Blewish Light’ and a Dead Man’s Groan: Tales of the Supernatural from Eighteenth-Century Plymouth, Massachusetts,’’ William and Mary Quarterly 55 (October 1998): 497–530. Discussion of wonders in broader synthetic accounts of colonial America is usually limited to how New Englanders interpreted such events. See, for example, Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 183. There have been a few recent studies of the world of wonders in the Chesapeake. See Edward Bond, ‘‘Source of Knowledge, Source of Power: The Supernatural World of English Virginia, 1607–1624,’’ Vir- ginia Magazine of History and Biography 108 (2000): 105–38; Kathleen S. Murphy, ‘‘Prodigies and Portents: Providentialism in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake,’’ Maryland Historical Magazine 97 (Winter 2002): 397–421.

Many of the above include discussion of earthquakes, but for specific studies of earthquakes see Kenneth Minkema, ed., ‘‘The Lynn End ‘Earthquake’ Relations of 1727,’’ New England Quarterly 69 (September 1996): 473–99; Maxine Van de Wet- ering, ‘‘Moralizing in Puritan Natural Science: Mysteriousness in Earthquake Ser- mons,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 43 (July–September 1982): 417–38; William

395Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

But as English colonists who settled in Jamaica gradually discovered— and as John White’s initial comments to Reverend Heath indicated— earthquakes were not rare events on the island. They were common occurrences, and repeated experience with earthquakes during the second half of the seventeenth century presented a challenge to traditional won- drous interpretations. Put simply, minor earthquakes occurred frequently enough in Jamaica that they no longer appeared wondrous or unusual. As a result, as colonists slowly learned more about the physical environment of the region and gained more experience with earthquakes, many ceased viewing minor tremors as judgments or portents. Major disasters like Port Royal remained special providences, but colonists in Jamaica appeared to attach little significance to numerous other earthquakes, even as similar events in other parts of the British Atlantic occasioned an outpouring of sermons and moralizing. Reexamining the Port Royal earthquake within the context of other writings about earthquakes reveals that though seven- teenth-century colonists in Jamaica shared many of the attitudes and beliefs about the workings of the natural world with their counterparts in England and North America—in other words, they too lived in a ‘‘world of won- ders’’—the environmental realities they encountered in the West Indies re- shaped their understanding of wonders and the meaning they attached to particular natural phenomena.6� Port Royal sits at the end of a roughly ten-mile stretch of sand and gravel known as the Palisadoes. The Palisadoes creates a barrier between the Ca- ribbean Sea and Kingston Harbor, although at some points the distance between the two is surprisingly small, as visitors who arrive at Norman Manley International airport today soon discover. Often called a spit, the

Andrews, ‘‘The Literature of the 1727 New England Earthquake,’’ Early American Literature 7 (Winter 1973): 281–94; Charles Clark, ‘‘Science, Reason, and an Angry God: The Literature of an Earthquake,’’ New England Quarterly 38 (November 1965): 340–62. Eric Seeman and Peter Rumsey both have chapters dealing with earthquakes specifically. See Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eigh- teenth-Century Massachusetts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 146–79; Rumsey, Acts of God and the People, 1620–1730 (Ann Arbor: UMI Re- search Press, 1986), 117–42. Thanks to Doug Winiarski for both references.

6. For another discussion of the role of experience in shaping attitudes about natural phenomena in the region, see Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 33–64.

396 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

Palisadoes is technically a tombolo, formed by sediment from the moun- tains above Kingston that is carried to the coast by the Hope and Cane rivers and then pushed westward by the currents and winds.7 The sediment accumulated along a number of small cays, gradually extending the tombolo as far west as Port Royal cay. This sedimentary link, however, was often tenuous: one soldier who participated in the English conquest of Jamaica recalled that Port Royal was still something of an island in 1655, connected to the rest of the Palisadoes only by ‘‘a small Ridge of Sand, which then just appeared above Water.’’ The cay would be separated again at various points in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a period following the 1692 earthquake. Most of the sand and gravel pushed west accumulated on the southern side of the tombolo, but some accumulation also occurred on the north side of Port Royal cay, as water swirling around what became a point probably carried some sediment with it. Needless to say, such ground does not provide a particularly solid foundation for a town. As one English governor reported in the 1670s, ‘‘This neck of land is exceeding narrow & nothing but a loose Sand that has neither grass, Stone, water, nor trees.’’ Modern scientists have determined that much of the ground on which the town stands comprises little more than water-saturated sand for about sixty-five feet, at which point sand and gravel mix with coral reef.8

Taı́no Indians had probably used the area as a fishing point in the centu- ries before contact with Europeans, but they apparently did not establish a more permanent settlement there. The tombolo remained essentially unin- habited during the Spanish period of colonization as well. The Spanish

7. A spit is an extension of sand and debris from the mainland into the sea, whereas a tombolo is a stretch of sand that connects the mainland to islands, or islands to one another. Some scholars call the area a ‘‘spit complex.’’ See Edward Robinson and Deborah-Ann Rowe, ‘‘The Island of the Palisadoes?’’ (working paper MGU-WP/0001/040105, Marine Geology Unit, University of the West Indies, Mona, January 2005). My thanks to Thera Edwards for pointing out this distinction to me.

8. Ibid.; Michael Pawson and David Buisseret, Port Royal, Jamaica (1975; repr., Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 1–6; George R. Clark II, ‘‘The Quake That Swallowed a City,’’ Earth 4 (April 1995): 34–41; J. A. Steers, ‘‘The Cays and the Palisadoes, Port Royal, Jamaica,’’ Geographical Review 30 (April 1940): 279–96; Account VIII in ‘‘A Letter from Hans Sloane, M.D., and S.R.S. with Several Accounts of the Earthquakes in Peru October the 20th 1687. And at Jamaica, February 19th. 1687/88 and June the 7th, 1692,’’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 18 (1694): 90–91; ‘‘History and State of Jamaica under Lord Vaughan,’’ MS 159, f. 51, National Library of Jamaica, Kingston (hereafter NLJ).

397Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

established a small careenage on the last cay, but they otherwise left the area undeveloped.9

The social and economic geography of the area changed following the English conquest of Jamaica in 1655. Although the point had no immediate supply of water and no trees or other building materials, and it was situated on nothing but ‘‘a hot loose Sand,’’ the English valued its location at the entrance to an excellent deep-water harbor and its ‘‘bold’’ shoreline—the sea floor fell to thirty feet in many places only a few yards off the coast. Colonists soon fortified the site and began to construct a series of ware- houses for trade. The early settlers named the settlement Cagway, or Point Cagway. By 1657, one official wrote, ‘‘there is the faire beginning of a town upon the poynt of this harbour.’’ By 1664 the burgeoning settlement was renamed Port Royal.10

Port Royal grew quickly in the following decades, its expansion and de- velopment driven by profits from legitimate trade to England and the main- land colonies, illegal trade with Spanish America, and outright plundering of Spanish ports and treasure fleets. From about 300 houses and a popula- tion of 740, including 50 Africans, in 1662, the town grew to roughly 1,000 dwellings and a population of 2,086 whites and 845 Africans by 1680. By that date one of every six white colonists in Jamaica lived in Port Royal, and the town had become the ‘‘Storehouse or Treasury of the West-Indies . . . a continual Mart or Fair where all sorts of choice Merchandizes are daily imported.’’ Although no exact figures exist, by the time of the earthquake, the population of Port Royal had reached about 6,500, including roughly 2,500 African slaves. The town extended from Fort James and Fort Charles at the western tips of the Palisadoes point to Fort Rupert and a gate that marked the eastern entrance to the town, a distance of little more than a half a mile. Beyond the gate were a tavern and a graveyard, and beyond that were roughly 1,000 acres of commons that extended eastward close to where

9. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 179; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 314. Pawson and Buisseret note that Robert Marx suggests that natives had a town there, but they refrain from making that claim. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 6.

10. Richard Blome, A Description of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1672), 32; James Knight, ‘‘The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica,’’ British Li- brary, Additional Manuscripts 12418–19, 2:14; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 3, 7–13; ‘‘History and State of Jamaica under Lord Vaughan,’’ f. 51; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 179.

398 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

the tombolo intersected with the mainland. A remaining 300 acres were private land known as the ‘‘Goate Pens.’’11

Port Royal’s location at the end of the Palisadoes meant that land was limited, and as the town’s population expanded, colonists were forced to improvise to accommodate the demand for space. One solution was to create new land. Beginning in the 1670s, local officials began to grant indi- vidual colonists rights to ‘‘shoal water,’’ which they could reclaim for devel- opment. Benjamin Bathurst, for example, was granted ‘‘Ground . . . to be Restored out of the Sea for a Wharfe’’ in July 1680. Two years earlier, Peter Beckford received a grant for 1,748 square feet of ‘‘Shoal Water . . . to be recovered for Wharfe Ground’’ that extended 26 feet into the water. Water- side residents like Beckford then created a sort of landfill for the wharves by ‘‘driving down Timber and Wharfing, &c.’’ into the shoal water. One eighteenth-century historian noted that ‘‘all the Wharfs . . . were made with Piles drove into the Sea, and filled up with Stones and Earth.’’ Colonists then built warehouses and other structures on these wharfs. This artificial expansion occurred first on the harborside of town, and then later on the land bordering Chocolata Hole on the western side of the point. One writer observed in 1693, ‘‘All People know, that the part of Land whereon Port- Royal was built, was always encreasing since first inhabited.’’ Much of the new land had been slowly ‘‘gained in time out of the Sea.’’ Hans Sloane likewise stated that a good part of the land on which the town was built was nothing but ‘‘Sand kept up by Palisadoes and Wharfs.’’12

11. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 135–36, 127–29; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 179; Francis Hanson, The Laws of Jamaica . . . to which is added a Short Account of the Island and Government thereof (London, 1683), preface; Bridenbaugh and Bride- nbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line, 315–16. The Bridenbaughs claim a population of between 7,500 and 10,000, which would have made Port Royal the most populous town in English America, but that figure is too high. On Port Royal’s (and Jamai- ca’s) economic development, see a series of essays by Nuala Zahedieh: ‘‘Trade, Plun- der, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–1689,’’ Economic History Review 39 (1986): 205–22; ‘‘The Merchants of Port Royal Jamaica and the Spanish Contraband Trade, 1655–1692,’’ William and Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986): 570–93; ‘‘ ‘The Wickedest City in the World’: Port Royal, Commercial Hub of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean,’’ in Verene Shepherd, ed., Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3–20.

12. Bathurst and Beckford grants are found in Real Estate Transactions before the 1692 Earthquake, City of Port Royal, Jamaica (Washington, D.C.: National Geo- graphic Society, 1960), cards 78, 84; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 109, 115; ‘‘A Letter from Hans Sloane,’’ Account VIII, 90–91; Knight, ‘‘The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica,’’ 1:146; 2:15. By contrast, Knight noted that

399Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

Another solution to the limited supply of land was to build taller structures to accommodate the town’s growing population. By 1683, Francis Hanson explained, ‘‘the ground it [Port Royal] stands on is but 53 Acres, and cannot be inlarged in its buildings otherwise then what the Inhabitants gain by the height of their Houses.’’ Again beginning in the 1670s, colonists began to replace single-story structures with taller buildings. At some point in that decade a building code of sorts emerged that laid out requirements for the foundations of single-story structures (‘‘two bricks thick to the water-table and then one-and-a-half bricks to the wall plates’’) and for taller buildings (‘‘two and a half bricks thick to the water-table (or sometimes stone in the place of brick), and then two bricks thick to the first floor’’). As this code suggests, in addition to building taller buildings, colonists also began to build heavier structures. Use of brick became more common, reflecting both the increasing wealth of the town’s inhabitants and their desire to live in dwellings that resembled urban structures in England. Hanson wrote that many houses in Port Royal were ‘‘built with Bricks, and beautified with Balconies, after the modern way of building in London.’’ Hans Sloane found that the dwellings in Port Royal and elsewhere on the island were increasingly built with brick and ‘‘after the English manner.’’ On his visit to the port town in the 1680s, John Taylor found numerous four-story brick houses. The only thing missing, Taylor commented, were chimneys, unnecessary in tropical Jamaica.13

Thus, on the eve of the earthquake, Port Royal’s population of 6,500 was living and working in roughly two thousand structures, many of them made of brick, crammed onto little more than fifty acres of land. After subtracting eight acres for fortifications, religious structures, and other public buildings, one scholar has estimated that by 1692, Port Royal’s ‘‘net residential density would have been about 47 dwellings or 150 persons to the acre’’—a density similar to central London in the 1930s.14

wharves in eighteenth-century Kingston were simply extensions into the harbor: they were built with ‘‘Piles, drove into Sea, and covered with Plank’’ (2:13); Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica (London, 1707–25), 1:lix.

13. Hanson, The Laws of Jamaica, ‘‘to the reader’’; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 120–21; Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, xlvii, lviii; John Taylor, ‘‘Multum in Parvo, or Taylor’s History of his Life and Travells in America,’’ MS 105, NLJ, 2:492. The best discussion of buildings in the pre-earthquake period is James Rob- ertson, ‘‘Jamaican Architectures before Georgian,’’ Winterthur Portfolio 36 (Spring– Summer 2001): 73–95.

14. Oliver Cox, ‘‘17th Century Port Royal Jamaica: Its Urban Form and Archi- tectural Character’’ (unpublished typescript, 1992), 11, NLJ. My thanks to Mr. Cox for permission to quote his article.

400 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

Port Royal’s sandy—and in some places artificial—foundation and the density of development on it left the town vulnerable to a number of natural hazards, including storms and earthquakes. Colonists were well aware of these vulnerabilities before 1692. In 1683 a storm washed away a good deal of sand and ‘‘much damnified the edifices and buildings towards the sea by washing and spoyling their foundations.’’ The next year another storm flooded the town and cut a channel deep enough for a ferryboat to traverse. Colonists, however, recovered quickly, rebuilding damaged buildings and constructing a bridge across the channel.15

Colonists also knew that tall brick buildings were vulnerable to earth- quakes. Hans Sloane feared being caught in an upper story of a brick house when the ground began to shake in February 1688, during his sojourn on the island. Sloane contrasted the vulnerability of English structures with those built by the Spanish before 1655. To minimize the danger from earth- quakes, Sloane wrote, the Spanish had purposefully built their houses ‘‘very low,’’ with posts buried deeply into the ground, and he implied that English colonists should employ such designs as well. Seventeenth-century English colonists, however, remained committed both to their wealthy and flour- ishing port city and to familiar English building practices.16

The consequences of those decisions became tragically evident on the morning of June 7, 1692. A watch discovered by underwater archeologists during a 1950s excavation of the sunken remains of Port Royal suggests that the earthquake began shortly before 11:43 a.m.17 Some observers claimed the earthquake shook the ground for fifteen minutes, but most thought it lasted about three minutes.18 Regardless, those few minutes de-

15. Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 112. A law was passed in 1684 attempting to regulate waterside development. See The Laws of Jamaica (London, 1684), 49–52.

16. ‘‘A Letter from Hans Sloane,’’ Account II, 81–82; see also Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands, 1:xliv–xlv. On English building practices and the desire to maintain English standards, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 287–99; Robertson, ‘‘Jamaican Ar- chitectures before Georgian,’’ 73–95. Colonists ultimately did learn to make adjust- ments to the environmental realities of the region. For a discussion of the role of hurricanes and earthquakes in that process, see Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society, 117–40.

17. Marion Link, ‘‘Exploring the Drowned City of Port Royal,’’ National Geo- graphic Magazine 117 (February 1960): 178–81.

18. There are numerous firsthand accounts of the disaster. They include Heath’s Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake; the Vere Parish minister’s Truest and Largest Account of the Late Earthquake in Jamaica, June the 7th, 1692 (London, 1693), 1–2; [Captain Crockett], A True and Perfect Relation of that Most Sad and Terrible Earthquake at Port Royal in Jamaica (London, 1792 [1692]); a letter from John Pike

401Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

stroyed what had been the second most populous—and arguably most im- portant—town in seventeenth-century British America. As the tremors intensified, houses began to crack and fall, the earth opened up, and on the harborside of the town, whole streets sank into the water. Thames Street, which ran the length of the harbor and was lined with wharves, warehouses, stores, and ‘‘brave stately Buildings, where the Chief Men of the Place liv’d,’’ was the first to sink. Fort James, at the western point of Thames Street, and Fort Carlisle toward the eastern end, sank with the rest of the street. Moments later, as people watched in ‘‘Horror and Consternation,’’ the streets behind Thames—Queen Street and High Street—also collapsed, sinking St. Paul’s Church, among other buildings. Sections of Fisher’s Row and Lime Street also collapsed (figure 1). In addition, the land around Fort Rupert and the eastern end of the town sank, which cut the connection to the rest of the Palisadoes and rendered what remained of Port Royal an island.19

The June 7 disaster is often referred to as the Port Royal earthquake, but all Jamaica suffered damage. At Passage Fort no houses remained standing. At Liganee, across the harbor from Port Royal, only one building survived,

printed in The Widow Whiterow’s Humble Thanksgiving (London, 1694), 39–40; Edmund Edlyne to William Blathwayt, June 20, 1692, reprinted in Jamaican Histor- ical Review 8 (1971): 60–61; a series of letters from Quakers on the island, reprinted in H. J. Cadbury, ‘‘Quakers and the Earthquake at Port Royal, 1692,’’ in Jamaican Historical Review 8 (1971): 20–21; a series of letters collected by Sloane and pub- lished as ‘‘A Letter from Hans Sloane’’ in Philosophical Transactions; President and Council to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, June 20, 1692, CO 138/7/47–50, extracts in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies (Lon- don, 1860–), 651–52, hereafter cited as CSPC; the recollections of Mrs. Akers, published in William Smith, A Natural History of Nevis, and the rest of the English Leeward Charibee Islands in America (Cambridge, 1745), 62–63. Less well-known accounts are ‘‘Letter from T.L.,’’ June 27, 1692, Royal Society Archives, EL/L5/ 117; and James Wale[s] to Richard Ruding, received February 2, 1693, reprinted in Thomas Foster, The Postal History of Jamaica, 1662–1860 (London: Robson Lowe, 1968), 3–4.

19. ‘‘Letter from Hans Sloane,’’ Account VIII, 90–91. The author of the Truest and Largest wrote that the street ‘‘which we call the Wharf, where most of the noted Merchants lived, and where much of the Planters Goods was Landed for convenience of Sail and Shipping,’’ fell first, and that while people were watching ‘‘two or three more streets in their whole length tottered and fell . . . as far as the Jews Street [New Street].’’ Truest and Largest Account, 3–4; Edmund Edlyne to William Blathwayt, June 20, 1692, 60–61; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 166; President and Council to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, June 20, 1692, 651–52; Heath, Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake.

402 Early American Studies • Fall 2008

Fi gu

re 1.

P at

ri ck

B ro

w ne

,A N

ew M

ap of

Ja m

ai ca

([ L

on do

n] ,1

75 5)

.T he

da rk

es ta

re a

re pr

es en

ts th

e la

nd re

m ai

ni ng

ab ov

e w

at er

af te

r th

e di

sa st

er .J

oh n

C ar

te r

B ro

w n

L ib

ra ry

,B ro

w n

U ni

ve rs

ity .

403Mulcahy • The Port Royal Earthquake and the World of Wonders

except for slave dwellings, some of which remained standing and were quickly commandeered by surviving planters and merchants. In Spanish Town all the houses were leveled except those built by the Spanish before 1655. Plantations throughout the island were ‘‘throwne downe’’ by the tremors. According to one observer, the earthquake ‘‘scarce left a Planters House or Sugar-work standing all over the island.’’ At Yallows, east of Port Royal, a mountainslide covered several settlements and killed nineteen peo- ple. On the north side of the island, one thousand acres of woodland in St. Ann’s Parish reportedly slid into the sea, along with several plantations.20

Nevertheless, it was in Port Royal that the earthquake caused the most dramatic destruction. More than half of the town’s roughly fifty-three acres sank to the bottom of the harbor, quickly covered by twenty or thirty feet of water. Even the part of town that remained above water—roughly twenty- five acres—experienced great damage. Some houses were partially sub- merged, so that their upper-story balconies became ground-level entrances. Others had collapsed into piles of bricks, or were in danger of doing so. Indeed, some of buildings that remained standing after June 7 succumbed to the numerous aftershocks that rattled the town in the followings days and weeks. Heath wrote on June 28 that he had preached a sermon the previous Sunday in a tent because he was wary of entering any of the ‘‘shatter’d’’ structures. Other buildings sank into ground softened by the ‘‘daily in- croaches’’ of the sea on what land remained above water. Heath and others worried that the whole town soon would be ‘‘wholly eaten up’’ by the sea.21

A number of accounts estimated that between 1,500 and 2,200 people perished, of whom roughly 600 to 700 were enslaved Africans. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of survivors were ‘‘covered with bruises, blood and wounds.’’ Most of the deaths occurred in densely populated Port Royal. One survivor wrote that no more than fifty people were killed in the rest of the island. Considering some of the specific numbers noted in other ac- counts, that estimate seems a bit low, but it is clear that most deaths oc- curred in the port town, where roughly one-third of the population died.

20. ‘‘Letter from Hans Sloane,’’ Account VIII, 94, Account III, 83, Account V, 84; Cadbury, ‘‘Quakers and the Earthquake,’’ 21; letter from Gilbert Heathcote, September 26, 1693 (Helyar Manuscripts, microfilm, J. Harry Bennett Collection, University of Texas); Heath, Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake; [Crock- ett], True and Perfect Relation.

21. Edlyne to Blathwayt, June 20, 1692, 60, says the structures along the wharf sank to ‘‘a depth of three to five fathoms’’ (eighteen to thirty feet); Truest and Largest Account, 4; Heath, Full Account of the Late Dreadful Earthquake; Pike letter, Widow Whiterow’s Humble Thanksgiving, 39–40; Pawson and Buisseret, Port Royal, 169.