Message in a Bottle Fifth Edition
PAGES
- Front Page - Message from the Editor
Page 2 - Portside Perusal - Global Events Round Up
Page 3 - PG Technical Advisor - “First Fleets Guide”
Page 4 - Historical Lookback - Port Royal
Page 5 - Meet The Crew - Sir Henry Morgan
Historical Lookback: Port Royal
Port Royal is a town on the southern coast of Jamaica. It was initially colonized by the Spanish but was attacked and captured by the English in 1655.
Because of its excellent natural harbor and critical position, Port Royal quickly became a significant haven for pirates and buccaneers, who were made welcome because of the need for defenders. Port Royal was never the same after a 1692 earthquake, but there is still a town there today.
The 1655 Invasion of Jamaica
In 1655, England sent a fleet to the Caribbean under the command of Admirals Penn and Venables to capture Hispaniola and the town of Santo Domingo.
The Spanish defenses there proved too formidable, but the invaders did not want to return to England empty-handed, so they attacked and captured the lightly fortified and sparsely populated island of Jamaica instead.
The English began construction of a fort on a natural harbor on the southern shores of Jamaica. A town sprang up near the fort: at first known as Point Cagway, it was renamed Port Royal in 1660.
Pirates in Defense of Port Royal
The administrators of the town were concerned that the Spanish could re-take Jamaica.
Fort Charles on the harbor was operational and formidable, and there were four other smaller forts spread around the town, but there was little manpower to defend the city in the event of an attack.
They began inviting pirates and buccaneers to come and set up shop there, thus assuring that there would be a constant supply of ships and veteran fighting men on hand.
They even contacted the infamous Brethren of the Coast, an organization of pirates and Buccaneers.
The arrangement was beneficial for both the pirates and the town, which no longer feared attacks from the Spanish or other naval powers.
A Perfect Place for Pirates
It soon became apparent that Port Royal was the perfect place for privates and privateers. It had a large deepwater natural harbor for protecting ships at anchor, and it was close to Spanish shipping lanes and ports. Once it started to gain fame as a pirate haven, the town quickly changed: it filled up brothels, taverns and drinking halls. Merchants who were willing to buy goods from pirates soon set up shop. Before long, Port Royal was the busiest port in the Americas, primarily run and operated by pirates and Buccaneers.
Port Royal had become a literal port of call that had protected some of the biggest names from the age of piracy, including Captain Morgan, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, Calico Jack, and Blackbeard himself.
In the glory days of the pirate city, Port Royal had developed into the second largest English city in the world, behind Boston.
But by 1692, Port Royal had also become the most corrupt. The city was overrun with brothels, taverns, and drinking halls, and filled with slavers and pirates alike.
It was a common sight, in Port Royal’s heyday, to see a drunken pirate stumbling through the city streets supported by a girl at each arm. His pockets would be overflowing with plundered gold. It’s said that, in a single night, some pirates would spend more money on drinks and women than a plantation worker earned in a year.
Pirate captain Henry Morgan became the Lieutenant Governor of the city and himself was dissatisfied with the chaos of the port. He tried to crack down on the pirateering, but his efforts proved useless.
He died some four years before the great tidal wave.
The city’s trademark drink was Kill Devil Rum. Pirates would carry the flagons down the street, forcing them into the hands they passed by.
It was much a curse as a gift as the drink was so strong that it had killed thousands through alcohol poisoning.
With a drink burning in their bellies, the pirates became deadly. Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, an expert on piracy in the Americas, wrote of one Port Royal pirate Roche Brasiliano: “When he was drunk, he would roam the town like a madman. The first person he came across, he would chop off his arm or leg, without anyone daring to intervene. … Some of them he tied or spitted on wooden stakes and roasted them alive between two fires, like killing a pig.”
When Port Royal was hit by a disaster so horrible, those who witnessed it could only have described it as divine wrath.
A 7.5 magnitude hit the city just before noon on June 7, 1692. It was the Sabbath. A watch discovered in 1969 showed that it had been stopped at 11:43 a.m.
The houses of Port Royal, in a folly straight out of the gospel, had been built on sand. When the earthquake hit, it liquefied what little supported them, and whole building, roads, and people were sucked straight into the ground. As the people panicked, a great tidal wave crashed through the docks and over the city walls and consequently brought down what still stood.
Even Captain Morgan, who had been buried on the peninsula, was pulled out of his grave and dragged out into the sea.
33 acres of the city disappeared in a few hours. Four of the five forts the British built had been crushed. 2,000 people – one-fifth of the population of Port Royal – was wiped out in a single day.
It wasn’t over. In the days to follow, as the bodies of the dead rotted under the sun and were devoured by animals and insects as they polluted the city streets, disease spread through the city. Within a few weeks, another 3,000 died.
Just like that, the population of one of the largest — and most raucous — cities on earth had been cut in half.
The destruction of Port Royal, in most parts of the world, was seen as nothing short of divine wrath. To have a city so full of wickedness and evil be sucked into the water seemed, to most, like something straight out of the Old Testament, and the orgy of looting and violence that followed seemed like hard proof that these people deserved what God had given them.
One survivor wrote that as soon as the earthquake had ended the town went mad:
“Immediately upon the cessation of the extremity of the earthquake, your heart would abhor to hear of the depredations, robberies and violences that were in an instant committed upon the place by the vilest and basest of the people; no man could call anything his own, for they that were the strongest and most wicked seized what they pleased….”
The vengeance against Port Royal didn’t end with the quake, the tidal wave, and the looting. Just a few years later in 1703 the city became engulfed in flames. A series of hurricanes in 1712, 1722, 1726 and 1744 further devastated the city, and by that time the English had decided to move their Caribbean port of commerce to Kingston. Port Royal had been all but deserted.
The last wrath finally came in 1951, when Hurricane Charlie destroyed what little was left of old Port Royal.
Today, Port Royal is a small coastal village and bears no resemblance to the city of sin it once had been. But the 17th-century Sodom has been revitalized by archaeological efforts on behalf of the Nautical Archaeology Program at Texas A&M University and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust.
This excavation of the late 80s and early 90s yielded the largest collection of in situ artifacts — and much of the city remains underwater today as a real-life Atlantis.
It was designated a UNESCO Heritage Site in 1999 and is often considered the Pompeii of the sea.
Locals, therefore, hope that a revitalization of the ruins will inspire eco-tourism and an increase in the small city’s revenue — perhaps restoring it to the wealthy glory it once knew in the 17th-century.
But hopefully, this time, with less crime.
