Jamaica - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 205

their ears were adorned with heavy gold rings studded with gems. Dagger thrusts were so common that
if a man were stabbed, his body would remain on the floor until the dancing was finished. Pirates were
hanged on a promontory near by, now overgrown with mangroves. As many as two dozen were some-
times strung up at the same time, and left there as a warning.
A retribution worthy of Babylon was in store for the town, for on the 7th of June, 1692, three earth-
quake shocks, breaking under Port Royal with a noise like thunder, shook down, sank and overwhelmed
almost the whole town. Wharves, warehouses, the sumptuous residences of the planters and traders, the
taverns and the stews disappeared in the space of a few seconds. Of the houses and churches, 'the spires
only of the latter,' writes Dallas, 'were visible, intermingled with the masts of the ships….' A frigate,
hove down to careen, was righted in a moment by the sudden rush of water and driven over the tops of
the drowned houses. The rector [1] describes 'whole streets being swallowed up by the opening of the
earth, which, when they shut upon them, squeezed the people to death.' A number were left with their
whole bodies enclosed in this sudden matrix and only their heads projecting above the ground. The scene
closely resembles the frescoes of Luca Signorelli at Orvieto. The harbour was afloat with the bodies of
people 'of all conditions,' rubbing shoulders with the corpses of English and Spanish burghers long dead,
who, as though summoned from their shattered graves by the Trump of Doom, had sailed buoyantly to
the surface … Quantus tremor est futurus! The descriptions of this, more than those of any other disaster,
sound like a hideous rehearsal for the Resurrection. Oddly enough, exactly the reverse occurred in anoth-
er part of the island where an upheaval of the earth in a few minutes drained the River Cobre of its waters
and left vast quantities of the fish to flail their lives out on the slimy soil.
As though this sharp admonition had not been enough, the partly reconstructed town was burnt to the
ground a few years later, every single house. A hurricane demolished it again in 1722, and another fire in
1816. But the inhabitants had at last abandoned it for Kingston, and the ruins only survived as a base for
the Navy. Long before, Admiral Benbow, after his fight with Du Casse on the Spanish Main, had sailed
back here to die of his wounds. The town was a haunt of Sir Henry Morgan, and it was to Port Royal that
the triumphant fleet of Rodney repaired, escorting their prizes and the captive de Grasse after the Battle
of the Saints. The arms of Nelson surmount one of the doorways of Fort Charles, and a nearby inscription
enjoins the traveller that should tread in his footsteps here to remember his glory.
To Kingston, then, flowed all the trade of the old port, and the town grew at such speed in prosperity,
size and importance, that, during the nineteenth century, the seat of government was shifted here from
Spanish Town, and Kingston became and has remained the political as well as the maritime and commer-
cial capital of the island. The benighted planters who ruled the country were too breathless keeping pace
with their growing fortunes to bother about anything so unprofitable as decent public architecture. Some
of them, no doubt, were people of discrimination and taste; but the others, perhaps the bulk of them,
sound pretty terrible. Lady Nugent, the Governor's wife in the first decade of the last century, talks of
them slightingly. Halting at the inn half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town, she observed 'a host
of gentlemen who were taking their sangaree in the Piazza; and their vulgar buckism amused me very
much. Some of them got half tipsy, and then began petitioning me for my interest with his Honour —to
redress the grievance of one, to give a place to another, and so on. In short it was a picture of Hogarth.'
Too supercilious and metropolitan, perhaps, but from this and other sources one gathers that quick returns
through slave labour, followed by a splash in London, a multiplicity of coaches, and a smart marriage for
their daughters were, at this period, nearer their hearts than cultivating the humanities in Jamaica. Only
the Nabobs could compete with them in riches. It was to one of these immensely wealthy West Indian