Port Royal sat at the mouth of what is now Kingston Harbour, on the tip of a long spit of sand called the Palisadoes. By 1692 roughly six and a half thousand people were living in about two thousand buildings crammed into some fifty-one acres, many of them brick houses of two to four storeys, at a density comparable to London. It was the largest and richest English town in the Americas, assembled in one generation on ground that was not really ground at all.
Its money came from two things, and neither was sugar. The first was what historians call forced trade: Port Royal merchants financed privateers who sailed under letters of marque from the governor of Jamaica and took Spanish shipping and Spanish ports. Nuala Zahedieh’s figures for the 1668 raid on Portobello put the plunder at £75,000, seven times the annual value of the island’s entire sugar export, and by the 1660s virtually every propertied man had a stake in it. The second was slavery. Port Royal was a slaving port, and the traffic in enslaved people grew steadily more central to its economy through the 1670s and 1680s as official tolerance for privateering cooled. The merchants on Lime Street dealt in wine, cocoa and human beings, often in the same ledger.
The reputation followed the money. Contemporaries called the place the Sodom of the New World and, in one Catholic formulation, the wickedest town in Christendom. There is a real basis for it: forty tavern licences were issued in July 1661 alone, and at its height the town is reckoned to have had one drinking house for every ten residents. That is the defensible version of the famous statistic, and the claim that one building in ten was a brothel or tavern is a garbling of it that no record supports. The moral framing deserves the same scepticism. Port Royal as a city so sinful the earth refused to carry it is a thing said about the town, first by churchmen in 1692 and then enthusiastically by Victorian writers.
Sir Henry Morgan, knighted in 1674 and lieutenant governor of Jamaica from 1675, was not there when it sank. He had died on 25 August 1688, four years earlier, and been buried in the cemetery out on the Palisadoes. The earthquake took the cemetery.
The Horror
The rector of St Paul’s, Emmanuel Heath, left the closest thing to a clock. He was taking a glass of wormwood wine with the President of the Council before dinner when the floor began, in his words, “rowling and moving”. He put the time at “about half an Hour after Eleven in the Morning” and the whole event at about three minutes. The famous figure of 11:43 comes from somewhere else: a corroded pocket watch raised from the harbour floor in the mid twentieth century, its seized hands read by X-ray, usually credited to Edwin Link’s 1959 expedition but dated 1969 elsewhere. The watch is a good story and a poor clock. The only contemporary witness says half past eleven.
The mechanism is better understood than the timing. Modern estimates put the earthquake at around magnitude 7.5, reconstructed from the written record rather than measured, and the Palisadoes is a spit of water-saturated sand. Shaken hard enough, that sand loses its strength and briefly behaves as a liquid. Buildings on it do not topple so much as settle, sinking through ground that has stopped supporting them, and parts of the spit flowed away. Around thirty-three of the fifty-one acres went under, close enough to two thirds. Heath saw “the Earth open and swallow up a Multitude of People, and the Sea mounting in upon us”. The sea withdrew several hundred metres before returning as a wave of roughly two metres, capsizing more than twenty ships. Contemporary accounts also have the frigate Swan, careened at the time, carried bodily over the rooftops and used as a refuge, a detail repeated in every retelling but resting on a thin documentary base.
Out on the spit the cemetery opened and slid into the water, and for days the harbour held the long dead alongside the newly dead. Heath reckoned around fifteen hundred killed by “falling of the Houses, opening of the Earth, and the Inundation of the Waters”, and later estimates settle near two thousand in the first minutes. The larger killer came afterwards: roughly three thousand more died in the following weeks of injuries and of what Heath called a malignant fever, sweeping through the survivors camped in the ruins, almost half of those who had escaped by his account. He was blunt about the looting, describing “a Company of lewd Rogues whom they call Privateers” breaking open the abandoned warehouses. The Jamaica Council recorded the disaster as “an instance of God Almighty’s severe judgement”, which is how the colony chose to read it: a fact about 1692, not an explanation of the geology.
One survivor got a tombstone out of it. Lewis Galdy, a Huguenot merchant from Montpellier, lies in the churchyard at St Peter’s under an epitaph saying he “was swallowed up in the Great Earthquake in the year 1692 and by the providence of God was by another shock thrown into the sea and miraculously saved by swimming until a boat took him up”. The stone is real and still legible. The story on it is attested by nothing else, and Galdy, who lived until 1739 and served as churchwarden, had every opportunity to approve the wording.
The Modern Relic
The sunken two thirds is still where it went, under as much as forty feet of water and sediment, and the sediment is why it matters: starved of oxygen, the site preserved organic material that almost never survives on land, so the excavations recovered not only bottles, pipes and coins but wood, leather and food remains. Edwin Link dug at Fort James, Littleton’s Tavern and the King’s Warehouse in 1959, and Robert Marx ran a larger and far less careful excavation along Fisher’s Row from 1965 to 1967. Then from 1981 to 1991 the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Texas A&M University, working with the Jamaica National Heritage Trust under Donny Hamilton, excavated the buildings at the Lime Street intersections, and that is where the site earned its comparison with Pompeii. Five structures were opened, including a work complex containing a pipe shop, a tavern and a cobbler’s, with artefacts still in place, human remains beneath fallen brickwork and the wreckage of a ship under one building. Because the town sank rather than collapsed, its plan survived, and the excavators could reconstruct the architecture, diet and street layout of a late seventeenth-century English colonial port in detail available nowhere else.
Above water, Port Royal is a fishing village of under two thousand people, and has had a bad three hundred years: fires in 1703, 1750 and 1815, flood in 1722, a hurricane in 1774, and the 1907 Kingston earthquake, which liquefied the spit a second time and took more of it. St Peter’s Church, rebuilt in the 1720s under Galdy’s churchwardenship, still stands with his stone outside it. The Jamaica National Heritage Trust declared the town a national heritage site in 1999, and in 2025 UNESCO inscribed the whole ensemble, terrestrial and submerged, on the World Heritage List. Diving the ruins requires government permission. Artefacts are held at the Museums of History and Ethnography at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston, and at Port Royal itself.
What is on the seabed is not a drowned city of legend but a street plan that stopped one morning and was covered over, and the reason it can still be read is the thing the sermons of 1692 mistook for a verdict: the ground did not break the town apart, it swallowed it whole.
