A pocket watch ticked its last at 11:43 in the morning. For 267 years it lay on the harbor floor, its hands frozen at the exact moment Port Royal ceased to exist. When divers recovered the timepiece during a 1959 expedition led by Edwin Link, they held in their hands the most precise archaeological timestamp of any disaster in colonial history. The watch, made by the French craftsman Blondel around 1686, had been keeping time in a city that called itself the storehouse and treasury of the West Indies. It stopped keeping time when the sand beneath that city turned to liquid and poured everything built upon it into the Caribbean Sea.
Before the earthquake, Port Royal was the commercial capital of the English Caribbean and, by contemporary accounts, the most sinful. Some 6,500 people lived in roughly 2,000 buildings, many of them multi-story brick structures that would have looked at home in London. Taverns, brothels, and counting houses stood side by side. Pirates spent their plunder here. Merchants laundered it. The harbor could shelter 500 ships. Among the city's notable residents was Sir Henry Morgan, the privateer-turned-lieutenant-governor who had sacked Panama City two decades earlier. Morgan died in 1688, and his grave in the Palisadoes cemetery would soon join him beneath the waves.
Three shocks struck in rapid succession on June 7, 1692, each more violent than the last. Port Royal was built entirely on loose sand, a geological fact that sealed its fate. During the main shock, the sand liquefied. Witnesses described it forming waves, rolling like the sea it was about to become. Buildings did not simply collapse; they flowed, sliding with their occupants into the harbor as if the ground had opened its mouth. Fissures cracked open, swallowed people whole, then snapped shut again, crushing those trapped inside. When the shaking stopped, the sand re-solidified around its victims, entombing them upright. At Liguanea, the site of present-day Kingston, water erupted from wells 40 feet deep. Nearly every structure in Spanish Town was flattened. Landslides scarred the mountains across the island.
As the shaking continued, the sea behaved strangely. At Liguanea the water pulled back roughly 300 yards from shore. At Yallahs, a full mile of seabed lay exposed. Then the water returned as a six-foot wall that swept across the coastal lowlands. Scientists now believe the tsunami was caused partly by the underwater collapse of Port Royal itself. As the liquefied sand flowed seaward, it created a submarine landslide that displaced the harbor water. Farther from the epicenter, at Saint Ann's Bay on the north coast, larger waves arrived from a separate undersea slide triggered by the same earthquake. The Plantain Garden fault, running along Jamaica's southern coast, is now understood to have been the source of the rupture.
Port Royal was partially rebuilt in the years after the earthquake, but the damage went deeper than rubble. The colonial government relocated to Spanish Town, which had served as capital under Spanish rule. In 1703, fire swept through what remained of Port Royal. A hurricane battered it again in 1722. Sea trade migrated to Kingston, which grew on the ruins of Port Royal's ambitions. By the late eighteenth century, the once-great pirate city was largely abandoned, its submerged streets visible only to fishermen who knew where to look. Today, the underwater ruins constitute one of the most significant archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere, a Caribbean Pompeii preserved in sand and saltwater.
The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system that destroyed Port Royal has not gone quiet. It has simply been storing energy. Modern GPS measurements of Jamaica's deformation suggest that enough strain has accumulated along the fault to produce another earthquake of magnitude 7.0 to 7.3, comparable to the 1692 event. Kingston, a metropolitan area of over 600,000 people, now sits where Port Royal's refugees once fled. Whether the next rupture comes tomorrow or in a century, the geology that swallowed the wickedest city on earth remains active beneath the streets of its successor.
Port Royal sits at the tip of the Palisadoes, a narrow sand spit extending southeast from Kingston at 18.00N, 76.50W. From the air, the spit is unmistakable: a thin ribbon of land separating Kingston Harbour from the Caribbean. The submerged ruins of the old city lie just offshore to the south. Norman Manley International Airport (MKJP) occupies the Palisadoes itself. Approach from the south at 3,000-5,000 feet for the best view of the harbor and the sand spit's precarious geography.