Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  The echo of the original, enormous boom faded away, and soon the sound of seabirds could be heard above “the wailing and the screaming.” The quake had lasted approximately six minutes. In that time 90 percent of the town’s homes, its warehouses stuffed with goods, and the main pier for the city had been destroyed or simply vanished into the sea. Two thousand people died from the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami; another two thousand would die in the coming weeks from injuries and disease. The death toll was twice that of the San Francisco calamity of 1906, but that had occurred in a city of hundreds of thousands. The Great Earthquake of 1692 took more than 70 percent of Port Royal’s 6,500 residents; it would stand as the most lethal quake until the 1868 Peru-Ecuador disaster.

  Professor George R. Clark of Kansas State University, who has studied the 1692 quake intensively, has rated it between values X and XI over the majority of Jamaica, with spots of Value XII intensity in isolated spots. A Value X earthquake involves the destruction of most buildings and foundations; in a Value XII, objects are thrown into the air and the ground moves in waves. The Port Royal was one of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the Western Hemisphere. It was accentuated by the formation of the land beneath the city. The sand that Port Royal stood on was loosely packed and saturated with water before the tremors struck. As the earthquake hit, violent seismic waves rippled through the sand and literally changed the granular structure of the soil. The shaking caused the sand molecules to sink downward, where they were met by water rushing up to fill the empty space; this caused the layers of sand to lose their stiffness and strength. Very quickly the sand stopped acting as a solid and began behaving as a viscous liquid, and the ground beneath the residents’ feet changed from solid earth to quicksand in an instant. People and buildings dropped down into the watery mush and were lost. As to the tsunamis that Heath and others reported seeing, they may have been classic tidal waves caused by the violent buckling of a tectonic plate offshore or simply the result of the ocean’s flowing in to fill the space once occupied by the plunging surface of sand. Only those buildings, such as Heath’s home, which happened to sit on a solid base of limestone or gravel, were saved.

  Looking over the ruined city, one of Hans Sloane’s correspondents grew somber:

  Indeed, ’tis enough to raise melancholy thoughts in a Man now, to see the Chimneys and Tops of some Houses, and the Masts of Ships and Sloops, which partak’d of the same Fate, appear above Water; and when one first comes ashore, to see so many Heaps of Ruines, many whereof by their largeness shew, that once there had stood a brave House; to see so many Houses shatter’d, some half fallen down, the rest desolate and without Inhabitants,…there, where once stood brave Streets of stately Houses stood, appearing now nothing but Water, except here and there a Chimney, and some parts and pieces of Houses, surviving only to mind us of their sad Misfortune, Habitations for Fish, contrary to the Intent of the first Builders.

  Sometime during the six minutes, Henry Morgan’s coffin erupted from the sandy ground of the cemetery and was spewed out into the churning waters of the Port Royal harbor, never to be found again. At 11:49 the great pirate city that he’d helped create ceased to exist.

  In Port Royal the geological quake triggered a social one. The richest survivors were set upon by looters and, in some rare cases, slaves who had seen their chance for freedom. Men died in revenge attacks or simple robberies; in fact, what happened after the disaster might be described as a class war: A minority of the town’s despised lower orders, including those pirates who remained in Port Royal, rose and began robbing the upper-crust stalwarts who had tried to banish them from the town. “No man could call any thing his own,” a minister wrote. “The richest are now the poorest…. The strongest and the most wicked seized what they pleased, and where they pleased and when they pleased.” The old nightmare of the rebellious buccaneers had finally come true. Poor men and criminals broke into shops and battered down the doors of rich men’s homes, carrying away gold and jewels and plate pillaged in Morgan’s raids. Roderick was among them. Asleep on the beach, he’d awoken during the earthquake from a rum-induced sleep, turned over, and grabbed at the earth as it rolled beneath him. When the quake had passed, he’d run into his mates and formed a plan. They began breaking into the warehouses that had not sunk underwater and pilfered whatever they found. When one roof collapsed, he saw two of his friends crushed beneath the falling timbers, but he didn’t stay to pull them out. Slaves joined in, since, according to one writer, they “thought it their time of Liberty, wherein they committed many barbarous Insolencies and Robberies,” until arrests of some and the killing of others quelled the revolt. Traders who had for so long depended on the buccaneers’ violent natures when they were unleashed on Spanish cities now found the same hands raised toward them. If the irony of Port Royal was that it had grown fabulously wealthy on the backs of the men it at least in part despised, there was a measure of divine justice in what happened.

  The receiver general of Jamaica, Edward Ellyn, wrote to a colleague about the behavior of the local sailors, a significant portion of whom would likely have been ex-buccaneers:

  That afternoon most of the seamen, English and Spaniards, contented themselves with what was floating on the water, tho’ some instantly entered and riffled standing houses. But the following nights and dayes those villains, more savage and cruel than any Indians and Negroes, robbed all houses, broke in pieces all scriptores, boxes, trunks, chests of drawers, cabinets and made spoil of all of value in the town, threatening to kill several inhabitants, if any durst be so hardy as to say, “This house is mine.” Our enemies could not have treated us worse than the seamen.

  Dr. Heath was more precise. He called the marauders “a company of lewd rogues whom they called Privateers” and reported that they had proceeded to pillage their own town even while the earthquake was shaking the ground. Roderick took the loot he’d gathered and began celebrating among the ruins with the local whores, who were just as “Impudent and Drunken as ever.” As slaves said after the American Civil War, the bottom rail was now on top. Some of that old feeling, of being one of the great men of Port Royal, came back to Roderick that day. He drank and danced with his friends, robbed any civilian who happened past, while the scene around him prompted him to tell stories of old Panama and how they had left it. He departed the town the next day and was sighted in Nassau two years later. In 1695 he was lost at sea while chasing a French trader with a crew of Dutch and English pirates off Hispaniola. He left nothing to anyone.

  With law and order vanished, the poor sold the goods they had managed to extract from the sunken buildings, most of Port Royal now resembling a kind of Atlantis, with streetlamps, benches, and shops sunk to between eighteen and thirty feet of seawater. The survivors dived down like pearl fishers and extracted the good Spanish silver that had been displayed in every respectable home. Some of the former owners of the brick homes were still trapped in their rooms, their eyes goggling, their hair waving gently in the current. Heath reported that many of the town’s most wretched citizens, “by watching opportunities,” had grown rich. A Quaker citizen, John Pike, wrote a sibling:

  Ah, brother, if thou didst see those great persons that are now dead upon the water, thou couldst never forget it. Great men who were so swallowed up with pride, that a man could not be admitted to speak with them, and women whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds, now lie stinking upon the water, and are made meat for fish and fowls of the air.

  Port Royal was forced to relive the fate that had come to Panama after Morgan’s raids. With only a tenth of the houses remaining habitable, the wealthy traders returned to their homes to find them heaps of brick and mortar, and so they were forced to seek accommodation in the thatched huts of the black slaves. “Here you see colonels and great men bowing their bodies to creep into this little hutch,” wrote John Pike, “who before had houses fit not only to receive but to feast in an extraordinary manner a prince or King, as great as England’
s monarch….” Although some slave owners did rent “Negro quarters” instead of evicting their servants, others threw their slaves out of their huts and moved their families in. The gentry had always feared a slave uprising more than an earthquake; their dreams were filled with Negro butcheries and rapes, and as they surveyed the ruined city, their thoughts quickly turned to rebellion. “Our first fears were concerning our slaves,” wrote one merchant. “Those irreconcilable enemies of ours…who seeing our strongest houses demolished, our Arms broken…might in hopes of liberty be stirred up to rise.” There were some incidents of slaves’ joining in the robberies, but in the end it was the gentry who turned on the Negroes and cast them out of their humble shacks.

  The most immediate problems for the townspeople were disease and supplies. One observer recalled looking out into the harbor and seeing corpses packing the water’s surface from one end of the harbor to another, like logs on a Wisconsin river. The bodies “caused such an intolerable stench, that the Dead were like to destroy the Living.” The corpses that had been expelled from the graveyard mixed with the cadavers of the newly dead, and in the heat their flesh roasted and blistered. Inevitably they became carriers of diseases that struck the survivors with shocking force.

  To get away from the spreading plague, some Port Royalists moved their shelters across the bay, thereby founding the city of Kingston. Others began to rebuild on the narrow strip of land where the old town had stood. A year later the survivors were still struggling to reestablish their society. “The island is in a very mean condition,” wrote Sir William Beeston nine months after the calamity. “The earthquake, sickness and desertion of discontented people have carried off so many as to leave the island very thin of people.”

  In the face of the disaster, people ignored faddish scientific theories and thought only of God. Natural disasters were seen as divine warnings by the vast majority of people. The London earthquake of 1580 prompted the writer Thomas Twynne to publish his Discourses of the Earthquake, in which he stated that each man was being warned to “call himself to an accompt, and look narrowly into his own life.” Another treatise linked the severity of the earthquake to debauched living: The quake had been a reaction to “the horrid Enormities that are boldly committed amongst us.” This was the dominant theme of the commentaries on the Port Royal catastrophe the world over. The news of the earthquake reached London, Boston, and New York within weeks. The disaster had immediate ramifications for the English empire, and especially the colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts; in the short term the lucrative trade with Port Royal was completely disrupted, and in the long term the Americas vaulted ahead of their West Indies neighbor. “Never again before American independence,” wrote one historian, “did any Caribbean community rival the five cities on the continent of America.” The events in Jamaica seemed to inaugurate a series of disasters around the world: There was a strong quake in England on September 8 that, according to John Evelyn, “greatly affrighted” the people and led to rumors of the coming Armageddon; hoping to defray the Lord’s anger, authorities began cracking down on drunkenness and other public vices immediately afterward. Along with the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts colony, the quake spread a mood of divine retribution throughout the English-speaking world. Pamphlets and books were published warning that the destruction of the Sodom of Jamaica was a message from above. “Behold an accident speaking to all our English America,” wrote Boston’s famous preacher, Cotton Mather, of the quake. Priests and ministers through the civilized world spoke of Port Royal as an omen. “To the inhabitants of that Isle,” wrote one commentator, “has the Lord spoken terrible things in righteousness.” Even the people of the island accepted the quake as a sign of their own sinfulness. “I shall only instance myself for one,” wrote one resident, “who have lost my ship, and very considerably other ways but I am very well satisfied because it is the Lord’s Doings.” Of course, if it was a sign of divine punishment, in retrospect men insisted on reading it selectively. The slave empire was just beginning to take hold in places like Port Royal, but it was the venal sins that obsessed the chattering classes: Port Royal had surely been struck down because of whoring and booze. The possibility that it was the sugar plantations where Africans were burned alive for attempting to escape that was the source of God’s displeasure was not mentioned in a single letter or sermon.

  The calamity put a hard stop to the golden era that Port Royal had embodied. The city was rebuilt, but it never again rose to the heights of the glory days. Pirates continued to cruise the waters off the city, and some were occasionally hung on Gallows Point during fits of law and order, including the randy and dashing “Calico Jack” Rackham, in 1720. His lover, the rare female pirate Anne Bonny, and her widely feared friend Mary Read, escaped the noose by “pleading their bellies” (both were pregnant). Bonny’s reprieve was short; she died of a fever in a Port Royal jail, while Read disappeared off the face of the earth. Officials in Jamaica and Tortuga often looked the other way when pirates strolled through town, as many of the locals had a soft spot in their hearts for the old Brethren, but the pirates no longer ruled the town and the entire region as they once had. Those privateers who had earned enough pieces of eight from Morgan’s raids and managed not to relinquish them to the Port Royal vice economy settled onto their estates and emulated the admiral’s final years. Jamaica, however, no longer belonged to them.

  No longer would the city shelter large numbers of the men who had made it rich and infamous the world over. No longer could a buccaneer organize the largest army in the Western Hemisphere, made up of trash tossed out of half a dozen European countries, plus runaway slaves and restless servants, and roam far and wide over half a continent, facing down an empire and stealing its riches. The Royal Navy stationed warships at Port Royal; Admiral Lord Nelson did a tour of duty at Fort Charles, and the English fleet took over from the Brethren the role of naval enforcers. The remaining pirates often restricted themselves to small lightning attacks on merchant vessels, instead of the audacious land attacks on major cities that Morgan had perfected. In the 1700s the sugar-and-slave economy came into its own, and more and more Port Royal became a traders’ town where it paid to be good with an abacus and not a musket. Not long after Morgan’s death, young men clambered out of ships arriving in Port Royal no longer dreaming of pirates. They wanted to own plantations and as many Africans as possible to work them. A different kind of cruelty won out.

  But somehow over the years, the exquisite cruelties of the pirates’ expeditions were forgotten, their exploits resonated louder, and they became romantic figures. Crazy, yes, but romantic. Perhaps the traders’ world was simply too boring and too successful to compete with the story of the flaming arrow at San Lorenzo, the Maracaibo fireship, and all the rest. Morgan would not have understood it; he wanted to be bound more closely to the king and the English empire that he loved. He was never a wild-eyed revolutionary; far from it. But the superoxygenated air that the pirates seemed to carry with them over the Atlantic, in which any act of barbarity or valor was possible at any given moment, stamped the image of the buccaneer indelibly on the imagination. The pirate can seem at times like the freest man who ever walked the Americas, freer even than the Carib or the Arawak.

  If it’s a myth, and it partly is, the world will take the myth. But you can’t attempt to do what Morgan and his men did without seeing yourselves as a prince of the New World, deserving of every wonder it possesses. Men like that do not live very long, but they are not easily forgotten.

  Glossary

  Ambuscade: An ambush launched from a concealed fortification.

  Arquebus: A heavy, notoriously inaccurate matchlock gun that first came into use during the fifteenth century. Also spelled harquebus.

  Ball: A bullet.

  Boucan: The tangy smoked meat produced and traded by the buccaneers of Hispaniola.

  Buccaneer: A pirate, especially one who operated against Spanish shipping and settlements in the West Indies
during the seventeenth century.

  Castellan: The military officer in charge of a castle or fort.

  Colors: A flag.

  Commission: Also known as a letter of marque, this was a document authorizing a private citizen to wage war on a nation’s enemy.

  Corsaro: A pirate.

  Doubloon: A gold coin used in Spain and Spanish America.

  Galleon: A large three-or four-masted sailing ship used from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, especially by Spain, as a war and treasure ship.

  Grandee: The highest-ranking noble in the Spanish hierarchy.

  Hispaniola: The Caribbean island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

  Logwood: A spiny tropical American tree whose heartwood was used to make a purplish red dye.

  Low Countries: A region in northwestern Europe consisting of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

  Maroon: A fugitive black slave in the West Indies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; also, the descendant of such a slave.

  Matelot: Literally, “bedmate,” but most often used to mean companion, or friend. Used by the early buccaneers to describe the man they paired up with in the jungles of Hispaniola.

  Mestizo: A person of mixed race, especially of mixed Native American and European ancestry.

  New Spain: Present-day Mexico.

  New World: The lands of the Western Hemisphere.

  North Sea: The present-day Caribbean Sea.

  Piece of eight: A common Spanish silver coin used widely in the New World. Also known as a peso or a cob.

  Purchase: All monies and goods obtained during a raid. The commonly used phrase “no purchase, no pay” meant that the buccaneers would depend solely on the booty they recovered on an expedition for their pay.