Port Royal

One of the first European ports in the Caribbean, and for a time the foremost port in colonial Jamaica, Port Royal was founded in 1494 by the Spanish, who killed and enslaved many of the island's Taino natives. Captured by the English when they conquered Jamaica in 1655, Port Royal became one of the foremost ports for privateers and privateers to shelter, and was known for ostentatious displays of wealth. In 1692, the port was destroyed by an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, prompting Kingston to be founded nearby. Port Royal now lies beneath the waves on the outskirts of Kingston harbor.

Christopher Columbus landed on Jamaica during his second voyage, in 1494. Prior to this its inhabitants had been the Indigenous Taino people, a group living in much of the Caribbean, though their population would be greatly reduced at the hands of both Spanish colonists and disease. The first Spanish settlement of the island came in 1509, under its first Spanish governor, Juan De Esquivel, who, upon finding no gold or silver, began to grow sugar cane. Jamaica, like the rest of the Caribbean, had a year-round frost-free climate suitable for growth of the plant, which had previously been limited to the Middle East, Mediterranean, and islands off the coast of West Africa.

Yet Jamaica did not develop into a major hub of slavery and sugar plantations under the Spanish. While these were not absent from the island, Jamaica was simply not the most lucrative destination for Spanish settlers, who preferred the slave-fueled silver and gold mines of Mexico and Peru. Jamaica was little more than an afterthought, its beneficial climate not enough to differentiate it from other Spanish colonies. It wasn’t until English privateers began attacking the island in the 16th century that it began to gain more relevance. 

Jamaica was seized by the English in 1655, though they had been raiding the island for close to a century before that. It is with this seizure of the island that Port Royal truly came into prominence. 

The British, who had experience growing sugar on smaller islands such as Barbados, now had a sizable Caribbean colony on which to grow this and other tropical cash crops. By 1691, the height of wealth in Port Royal, Jamaica was exporting more indigo to London than every other English colony and the Spanish East Indies combined, in addition to sugar and coffee. While the exact number of enslaved people who grew these crops were not reported, it was a substantial number.

Nonetheless, the most lucrative activity based in Port Royal was piracy. There is little understating how much the economy of Port Royal depended on Spanish plunder. One raid alone, the sack of Porto Bello in Spanish Peru, the Jamaca-based pirate Henry Morgan brought in “more than seven times the annual value of the island’s sugar exports.”

Port Royal had a reputation for gaudy displays of stolen wealth. Raids against Spanish ships quickly ballooned Port Royal into a critical trading hub for the English. The English population came to outnumber the Spanish on the island as more people saw opportunities for economic opportunities.

In 1692, on June 7th at 11:43am, an earthquake struck Jamaica. Much of Port Royal, which had grown very rapidly, was shoddily built, with new buildings being built into the bay on sandy embankments, and with existing buildings simply being built taller than was safe. Numerous buildings collapsed, killing many. Soon after, a tsunami struck the port, killing thousands more and sinking much of what hadn’t already been destroyed. 

The merchants of Port Royal who had had all of their assets destroyed. With so much of the infrastructure destroyed and many now homeless, disease ran rampant, killing many of those who survived over the course of the next few weeks. Port Royal would never recover, with Kingston, the current capital of Jamaica later being founded at a safer location nearby.

The United Kingdom, Board of Trade. Section Details: Despatches, 1692. London, 1689-1692. P. 344. https://www.colonialcaribbean.amdigital.co.uk/

Nuala Zahedieh, "Trade, Plunder, and Economic Development in Early English Jamaica, 1655–89," The Economic History Review 39, no. 2 (1986): 205–222.

The United Kingdom, Board of Trade. Section Details: Despatches, 1692. London, 1689-1692. P. 355. https://www.colonialcaribbean.amdigital.co.uk/