by Ben Hughes
On June 14, the Council reconvened. As most of Port Royal remained underwater and the frequent aftershocks, as many as twenty per day according to various accounts, meant that further damage was likely, the meeting was held aboard the Richard and Sarah, the 150-ton merchantman formerly commanded by Captain Conning. The first order of business was to formally requisition the ship as the Council’s floating headquarters and as a guardship for Port Royal in case of attack by the French. Next, a successor for Reginald Wilson, the port captain, was chosen. John White nominated Thomas Lamb, “collector of the outbound customs,” as “a fit person for the execution thereof” and, with his nomination approved by the other eight councilors to attend that morning, Lamb was sworn in. The councilors then turned their attention to the looting and general disorder that continued in Port Royal and around the island as a whole. A proclamation was drawn up warning that any person “privately to hide detaine or secretly convey away any goods moneys negroes plate and gold shall be deemed and taken as thieves . . . and shall be prosecuted with all imaginable severity.” Assemblymen and councilors were appointed to each parish to act as adjudicators in the many cases of disputed ownership of salvaged property which had already arisen, while others were charged with organizing for “ten half barrels of flower, four barrels of beefe and six hundred weight of biscuit . . . to be distributed amongst the poor and necessitious people occasioned by the late dreadful calamity.”60
The Council convened on a further three occasions on the Richard and Sarah in the following week. On June 16, the Swan was surveyed and was found to be so badly damaged that it was laid up and all its crew transferred to other vessels. Among them was the Neptune sloop, pressed into service to carry word of the recent disaster to London along with a request for reinforcements to help defend the island from the French. “We have in the midst of this confusion applied ourselves with all vigour to the restoring of things,” the letter informed the Lords of Trade. As well as “protecting the merchants in their fishing on the ruins of their owne houses,” the Council assured the Lords that they had been busy “preventing robberies and stealing amongst the ruins, deciding controversies and punishing quarrels . . . sinking floating carcasses . . . takeing care of the sick and wounded . . . [and] feeding and sustaining the necessitious.” The Council also ordered the masters of the merchant ships remaining in the roads to sound out a channel from the open sea to the harbor as the earthquake had transformed the underwater geography of the bay. Blame for the loss of the Swan was placed on Captain Neville. “We must inform their lordships that could repeated persuasions and even threats have prevailed on . . . [him] to any degree of diligence the Swan . . . [would have] long before been refitted and at Sea against their majesties enemies.” The letter ended with a warning that the island was particularly vulnerable to slave uprisings as well as foreign attack. As “many of the great gunns of the fortifications are two fathoms under water and . . . the small arms of the country are generally broake by the fallen houses,” a request was made for at least “three fifth rates with one or two good forth rates . . . together with four or five hundred land soldiers and all sorts of arms and ammunition.”61
THERE WAS ONE PIECE of good news for the Jamaicans that June. The mission to intercept the French privateers who had landed on the north coast in May had been a resounding success. On June 21, the five-ship flotilla, led by Captain Oakley of HMS Guernsey who had set out on his mission sixteen days before, returned to Port Royal. The Guernsey and the hired sloop Pembroke, under command of Oakley’s former second, the heroic lieutenant Edward Moses, were laden with prisoners. Most were French privateers, but there was also a smattering of English turncoats. Former residents of Jamaica who had sided with the French on the outbreak of war, in some cases due to their mutual “Papism,” they were destined for a brief trial before being hung at Gallows Point. Their former comrades in arms were to be repatriated. The San Antonio, the Spanish ship which had accompanied the expedition, was filled with wounded, both French and English, a testament to the hard fighting that Oakley’s command had endured. Also present were the Caesar and True Love sloops. Both bore the scars of a severe ship-to-ship engagement which had cost them at least sixteen dead. Topping the butcher’s bill was Captain John Griffin. A part-time wrecker and the True Love’s commander, Griffin had received a mortal wound in the fight.
Captain Oakley’s report, delivered to the Council on board the Richard and Sarah the morning after his arrival, began with the events of June 6. Having “spied” a strange sail fleeing into the shallows off Galina Point in St. Mary’s Parish, he had ordered Captain Updick of the Caesar, Captain Griffin of the True Love, and Lieutenant Moses commanding the Pembroke sloop into shore in pursuit. Although the stranger had evaded them, Updick, Griffin, and Moses learned from a resident named Clarke that eighty-five of the enemy had recently landed in Saint Ann’s Parish from a 12-gun ship which had then sailed for Cape Cruz in Cuba to lie in ambush near the shipping lanes for any wayward English merchantmen who happened to pass that way. Oakley arrived at St. Ann’s Bay two days later, the master of the Guernsey having noted the reverberations of the earthquake of June 7 had lasted a full four minutes before subsiding. Landing a party of armed men equipped with a number of small cannon to deal with the invaders, Oakley dispatched captains Griffin and Updick of the True Love and Caesar to pursue the French ship to the north, while remaining offshore with Moses and the Pembroke.
At dawn on June 11, Oakley’s landing party came up with the enemy in the hills above St. Ann’s Bay. At anchor offshore, the crews of the Guernsey and Pembroke watched as cannon and small arms fire were exchanged. Oakley and Moses “made all ye saile . . . [they] could,” but before they were able to arrive, the French had surrendered. Seven of the enemy had been killed and seventy-eight captured. The prisoners were taken aboard the Guernsey and Pembroke for transportation to the jails of Port Royal. The next day, while Oakley and Moses were watering their ships in preparation for departure, the True Love and Caesar sloops rejoined them. “At 12 of ye clock they came to an anchor and came a bord of us & gave us an account of thaire meeting with the French ship,” the Guernsey’s master recorded. As it transpired, the sloops had endured a “hot ingagement” with the French ship off the southern shore of Cuba. Despite being outgunned, the French commander refused to surrender. After a furious exchange of broadsides which saw sixteen Englishmen killed and Captain Griffin receive a “mortal wound,” the French ship caught on fire. The survivors were unable to douse the flames and all eighty-five men aboard were killed. Oakley spent the next six days off St. Ann’s Bay while Lieutenant Moses searched the mountains inland for French stragglers. On June 18, Moses returned with eight more prisoners, and the next day the fleet had set sail for Port Royal.62
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, several salvage operations got under way at Port Royal. On June 28, part of the long-awaited naval reinforcement arrived in the shape of HMS Mordaunt, a 46-gun fourth rate. Her captain, Francis Maynard, was put to work raising “six of the guns that was sunke in Walker’s Forth.”63 Elsewhere, the Reverend Thomas Scrambler, “a beneficed minister” who had been arrested in May for refusing to swear allegiance to William and Mary, had hired a diver “to take up Money and Goods he had lost in the great earthquake.” Among the objects Scrambler’s man salvaged was “a common glass bottle” covered in seaweed, which eventually made its way into the possession of Doctor Hans Sloane.64 The merchant James Wale was also engaged in a salvaging operation. Fishing the ruins of the house that had previously belonged to his “Dear bro.”-in-law, neighbor, and former business associate, the recently deceased RAC factor Walter Ruding, Wale snagged an iron chest in a fathom of water and hauled it to the surface. Inside was “some gould and some broken plate . . . to ye value of about 200s.” Wale was soon to be disappointed. Rather than being allowed to keep the chest and its contents as well as a number of Ruding’s domestic slaves whom he had rounded up in the aftermath of the earthquake, all were confiscated by
the chief justice Samuel Bernard to cover the debts that Ruding had left behind him. Whether or not Wale was legally entitled to the goods is unclear from the surviving documentation. What is apparent is that Wale believed that Bernard, whom he referred to as “a very cunning man,” was less interested in justice than feathering his own nest.65
One of the consequences of the earthquake was a resurgence in religious devotion. In an attempt to make sense of the tragedy, a widespread belief arose that the disaster had been inflicted by a wrathful God intent on punishing the sinners of Port Royal. On June 28, the Council issued the following proclamation.
Nothing but a generall reformation of manners will stop . . . God Almightys . . . avenging hand, and make us fitt for the divine pardon and blessing . . . we doe therefore strictly command & require all military officers vigorously and impartially to put in execution all those articles of warr that relates to piety to almighty god or to the preventing the dishonouring him, either by comon swearing prophanety blashphemey or otherwise and we doe hereby declare we will severly punish all contempters of this proclomation and will hereafter heartily endeavour that no person shall have any commission civil or military that shall so little regard the welfaire of this island as to live in the open habit of any known sin.
The Council also ordered that July 13 was to be “a day of publick fast and humiliation throughout the whole island in respect of God almightys severe judgement.” The highest-ranking militia officers in each parish were charged with ensuring that the fast “was strictly observed.”66
The Quakers were also moved to contemplate the religious significance of the earthquake. Joseph Norris was profoundly affected. Having spent the second half of June attempting to converse with the Lord but finding himself unable, Norris began an extreme fast, “not suffering meat or drink to go into [his] body,” and “went forth into the fields to pour out . . . [his] spirit.” Eventually, the Lord broke his silence and commanded Norris to go to Port Royal “and in three several places to warn those people to repentance, and to show them the Lord was yet angry and his hand was stretched forth still to destroy all those who would not repent.” On July 13, Norris preached at Halfway Tree on the road to Spanish Town where he came to the following conclusion. “I believe and am assured,” he wrote to his brother Isaac, then on his way to Port Royal from Philadelphia, “the Lord hath a very large controversy with this island, which a short time may manifest. For he must and will be feared and acknowledged by the whole creation and happy will they be who find a place in him, to hide them in this day of his wrath, be not thou troubled at anything that may happen, but learn to be truly quieted and resigned up to the blessed will of God. Prize his judgments and fly not from them, they are sweet to all those that love and fear him, and only terrible to the wicked and rebellious.” By this stage, Norris was dying. Whether this was as a result of an illness or as a consequence of his fast is unclear. “Farewell (but not forever),” he ended his letter, “for I hope in the Lord we may and shall meet in the everlasting Kingdom of righteousness where our love will be much more abound.” As it transpired, Joseph was to see his brother one last time. Isaac arrived in Jamaica on September 13. Joseph died the next day.67
CHAPTER 8
Inhuman Barbarities
THE FRENCH INVASION OF 1694
June 1692–August 1694
Some of the straggling people that were left behind they tortured, some, and in particular two, they murdered in cold blood, some women they suffered the negroes to violate, some they dug out of their graves, so that more inhuman barbarities were never committed by Turk or infidel.
—Governor Beeston to the Duke of Shrewsbury, August 18, 1694
ALTHOUGH THE EARTHQUAKE of June 1692 did not signal the end of Port Royal’s history, the town was never to regain its former glory. As early as June 28, 1692, a proposal put before the Council to replace Port Royal with a new town to be built on the far side of Kingston Bay was approved, and £1,000 was allocated for the purchase of a plot of two hundred acres of land.1 The site belonged to Colonel William Beeston, a planter, former speaker of the Assembly, judge of the court of common pleas, and militia officer, who had been resident in Jamaica for nineteen years before being exiled to England by Governor Carlisle in 1679 for leading the Assembly’s refusal to vote for a bill to grant perpetual revenue to the crown. Beeston had remained in correspondence with his friends and allies in Jamaica over the next fourteen years and had used his wealth and influence to lobby for the plantocracies’ interests in Westminster. In 1692, this led to his appointment as Inchiquin’s successor as governor of Jamaica. Beeston’s commission was passed before Queen Mary in August and approved that September. On March 9, 1693, he returned to Jamaica.2
On his arrival, Beeston found that little had been done to develop the land the Council had purchased from him. Although John Goffe had drafted a street layout in August 1692, few residents had taken up the Council’s offer to buy lots of land on the coastal strip at a rent of 10 shillings per year. The site remained little more than a refugee camp, diminishing in size as many of those who had fled Port Royal in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake returned home.3 “The Island is in a ruinous condition,” Beeston reported to the Lords of Trade two weeks after taking up his new post; “the people have been very sickly, but health is perfectly recovered, and our arrival has put new life into them.”4 Beeston proved an energetic and dynamic leader: Fort Charles was rebuilt, plans for a new tower to replace Fort Rupert were approved, the embargo on outgoing vessels was lifted, trade revived, and the merchants who had been the lifeblood of the old town returned to construct new houses. Perched on the ruins, the new builds were crammed precariously onto the twenty-five acres of the spit which remained above water—now separated from the mainland by a channel which cut across the area formerly known as the Pallisadoes. The arrival at Barbados of a new fleet from England under Rear Admiral Francis Wheeler, on March 10, 1693, further boosted the islanders’ morale. Although Wheeler’s attack on Martinique that April ended in failure and a thousand of his men died of sickness and disease, the threat of an immediate assault on Jamaica by the French appeared to have diminished.5
In May 1693 the Mordaunt raised the wreck of HMS Swan from the sunken ruins of old Port Royal. Little remained to salvage. A few guns were hauled up and transferred to the battlements of the town’s forts. The frigate’s crew had long since dispersed. Most had ended up on HMS Mordaunt or Guernsey; a lucky few had sailed for London soon after the earthquake in a fast yacht named the Neptune, their mission to bring word of the disaster home.6 On October 8, 1692, they were discharged and paid off at Broadstreet. Among the fortunate was Able Seaman Jonathon Hodge, one of the two brothers pressed aboard the Swan at the Nore in December 1689—the genesis of the frigate’s ill-fated Caribbean adventure. While Jonathon’s brother, Andrew, had been killed in the earthquake along with eleven other crew members, Jonathon had survived. At Broadstreet, he received over £70: the £36, 11s. he was due for two and a half years’ service once deductions had been made for the food, clothes, and tobacco he had purchased from the purser, and the £34, 13s. owed to his brother.7
Despite being blamed for the loss of the Swan by the island Council, the Hodges’ former captain, Edward Neville, was cleared of responsibility in February 1694 and awarded the back pay he had accumulated.8 Nevertheless, Neville spent the next six years out of the Admiralty’s favor, until being given the captaincy of HMS Lincoln in 1700. A 50-gun fourth rate built at Woolwich five years earlier, the Lincoln was being fitted out for a voyage to Virginia. The transatlantic crossing was a difficult one. Having lost one of its masts in a storm on the high seas, it limped into the Bermudas in May 1701, there to refit for several months before pushing on to Williamsburg, where it arrived on September 14. According to a deposition later penned by Captain James Moodie of HMS Southampton, also on the North American station, Captain Neville had died four days before the Lincoln arrived. The thirty-six-year-old’s funeral, held
at York on September 15, was attended by a “a great Concourse of people, and a great many of the Militia, on horse and foot.” It was somewhat more, perhaps, than the high-born idler deserved.9
THE LONG-ANTICIPATED French invasion of Jamaica finally occurred in 1694.10 The war in the Caribbean had been simmering ever since Rear Admiral Wheeler’s departure the year before: French raids against Jamaica had continued, principally against the north coast parishes of St. Ann’s and St. Mary’s, and the sparsely populated St. Elizabeth’s to the southwest. Turncoats continued to play a leading role. Nathaniel Grubbing remained active, as did two others named Lynch and Stapleton. The latter, whom Beeston identified as a Roman Catholic, stole £1,000 and an island sloop one night in March 1694 and sailed off to join the French. In April, Grubbing attacked the plantation of Mrs. Barrow, a minister’s widow, in St. Elizabeth’s. Not content with plundering “all her negroes, household goods, and all she had,” Grubbing tortured Barrow to ensure she was not hiding anything, then sailed back to Petit Guavos with the widow’s “maiden daughter, Miss Rachael Barrow, of about fourteen years old.” Meanwhile, other privateers led by Lynch and Stapleton raided the north coast. As well as capturing two sloops at anchor, they kidnapped the wife of a local planter named Major Terry and stripped and beat her until Terry agreed to pay a ransom. Several other Jamaican sloops were captured at sea, among them the Pembroke, then under the command of Captain Stephen Elliot. Taken while conducting illegal trade with the Spanish in a small bay near Portobelo, the Pembroke was carried back to Petit Guavos with a cargo of manufactured goods worth £10,000.11