Apocalypse 1692

by Ben Hughes

  CHAPTER 7

  A Dismal Calamity

  THE EARTHQUAKE

  June 7, 1692

  Sir . . . give me leave to present you with an Account of a late dismal Calamity and Judgement, which hath befallen us here . . . by a Terrible Earthquake, which a just God hath sent upon us on Tuesday the 7th, of June.

  —Account of the Late Earthquake, 1693

  LYING ONE HUNDRED MILES south of the junction of the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates and directly on top of the Walton and Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault lines, Jamaica is prone to seismic activity. It was a danger of which the Spanish colonists were fully aware. In their century and a half as masters of the island, they had learned to construct their homes low to the ground with deep, central foundations and to avoid building on the shifting soils and loose sand masses which characterized many of Jamaica’s coastal areas, notably Point Cagway, the site on which Port Royal was built. In geological terms, this area is a disaster waiting to happen. Made up of a number of independent coral cays or islets linked by a hundred-foot-deep layer of sand, silt, gravel, and sediment deposited by the waves and tides over the previous four hundred years, the spit was extremely unstable, particularly as the water surrounding it deepened rapidly only a few feet from shore. Exposed to earthquake, the areas of sand, silt, and gravel were prone to liquefaction, a phenomenon associated with landslides where a layer fluidizes causing a general collapse. It was a lesson that the English, with their contempt for foreign know-how and propensity for building precarious multi-story brick edifices in the northern European style, had failed to appreciate.1 In 1688 Hans Sloane noted that major seismic events were expected each year, yet only two, those of 1673 and 1684, had occurred during English governance.2 By 1692 a cataclysmic earthquake was long overdue.

  In Port Royal the morning of Tuesday, June 7, began much like any other. Following the strong winds and heavy rains of May, the weather had turned “excessive hot, calm and dry.”3 The sky was beautifully clear. As the sun climbed over the hills of Port Morant, the temperature increased steadily to a debilitating eighty-six degrees. On the battlements of the town’s five forts, dozens of scarlet-coated militia kept a watchful eye on the signal pyres to the east and on the southern sea approaches for any sign of French invasion. Due to the Council’s prohibition on merchantmen leaving the port unescorted, the roads were particularly busy with shipping. Although HMS Guernsey, Captain Updick’s Caesar broad stern, John Griffin’s True Love sloop, the hired sloop Pembroke, and the San Antonio, a Spanish vessel of twenty-two guns which had previously been involved in the asiento, had set sail for the north coast some five days earlier to protect the plantations of St. Mary’s and St. Ann’s from a rumored descent by dozens of French privateers, HMS Swan had remained behind to be careened.4 With one side of its hull hard up against the wharf, the keel lay exposed. Captain Neville and most of the crew, as was their custom, were sleeping off the previous night’s excesses in town, while a few stalwarts, mercifully cooled by the sea breeze which had sprung up from the south at 8 A.M., scraped away the sea life that had accumulated over the past two years that the frigate had been engaged on its Caribbean sojourn.5 At anchor nearby were dozens of merchantmen. Amid numerous island sloops of twenty to fifty tons were Captain Richard Conning’s 150-ton Richard and Sarah broad stern of twenty-two guns, the 200-ton Syam Merchant, heavily laden with sugar belonging to the Royal African Company, the Mainyard broad stern, and the swift-sailing Barclay frigate.6 There were also at least two foreign ships in Port Royal that June. As well as a French prize recently captured off Hispaniola, there was a Spanish merchantman, presumably in town to purchase slaves for the asiento.7

  At 9 A.M. the Council met at Port Royal. Having made their way through the crowds heading for the morning markets, John White, Peter Beckford, Nicholas Lawes, Andrew Orgill, and Charles Knight were all present, each no doubt accompanied by a gang of liveried slaves. The order of business that morning was routine. First, it was decided that the embargo on ships leaving port unescorted should be lifted for “sloops and boats which trade about this island and noe other.” All vessels bound for England would have to wait until June 10 before being convoyed home. The second point raised that morning concerned the cargo of the recently departed Seahorse. According to the minutes, Captain Gaines had failed to pay duty on a number of barrels of wine and brandy which he had imported from Carolina. It was decided that a letter should be sent to Governor Phillip Ludwell in Charles Town to find out more details about the affair. The final order of business concerned a new protocol imposed on every ship arriving at the harbor. In future none was to be permitted to pass Fort Charles between sunset and sunrise without sending a boat ashore announcing its arrival, “from whence they came and who they are.” By 10 A.M., the Council’s business had concluded. John White adjourned the meeting and the members dispersed around town.8

  Several other residents were also on the move that morning. Keen to take care of business on his estate, Chief Justice Samuel Bernard had risen early to take a boat with his son to Liguanea on the far side of the bay. Leaving his wife and five servants at their home, a towering townhouse built on the quayside, Bernard had finished his business by mid-morning and had boarded a boat with his boy to return.9 Other residents were engaged in less businesslike pursuits. The merchant John Uffgress had left his wife and domestic slaves at home to enjoy a morning drink in one of Port Royal’s many taverns.10 June 7 also saw the Quakers’ monthly meeting held at Spanish Town. Dozens of Port Royal’s Friends traveled across the bay as a result. The merchant Joseph Norris and his wife were among those who made the journey, while the joiner, John Pike, his wife, Ann, and their seven children, the shopkeeper Thomas Hillyard, and Joseph Norris’s wife’s sister and his aging father, Thomas, had chosen to stay at home.11

  In St. Paul’s Church, the newly appointed Anglican minister, Dr. Emmanuel Heath, was preoccupied with religious matters. “I had been at church reading prayers,” the rector recalled, “to keep some shew of religion among a most ungodly debauched people.” Afterward, Heath retired to the covered stone walkway nearby where the town’s merchants habitually congregated. Having caught his breath, Heath was about to press on to the Thames Street house of Walter Ruding, where the Royal African Company factor was hosting a lunch with his wife and family for several friends. Heath’s departure was providentially delayed, however, by the arrival of John White, who had adjourned that morning’s Council meeting a few moments before. “He being my very great friend, I staid with him,” Heath explained. The friends had a glass or two of “wormwood wine . . . as a whet before dinner.” Subsequently White lit his pipe and was enjoying a leisurely smoke when, at roughly 11:30 A.M., the ground began “rolling and moving under [their] . . . feet.” Unfamiliar with Jamaica’s frequent seismic rumblings as a recent arrival, Heath was inclined to panic. “Lord, sir, what is this?” he asked, jumping to his feet. “It is an earthquake,” White announced with the composure of one accustomed to such things. “Be not afraid, it will soon be over.” The acting governor could not have been more wrong.

  Rather than subsiding as White had assured Heath it would, the earthquake intensified. Accompanied by an eerie rumbling sound, compared by one witness to that made by “a rustling wind, or . . . a hollow . . . thunder” with “puffing blasts . . . like those of a match made of brimstone,” the initial tremor built in magnitude and was followed by a series of terrific shocks. The ground shuddered and rose in waves, hurling the steeple of St. Paul’s Church to the ground in a cloud of choking brick dust. Landing amid a crowd of fifteen people whose last act was to gawp upward at their impending doom, the steeple shattered on impact, its bell making an ominous metallic clang as it skittered crazily across the street. Seconds later the rest of St. Paul’s crashed to the ground. Panic ensued. Hundreds of men, women, and children, merchants, sailors, shopkeepers, slaves, servants, militiamen, and councilors alike, took to the streets and ran in all directions. Others stood roo
ted to the spot. The air filled with wailing, crying, and sobbing, and a terrifying splintering sound emanated from the heaving ground. In the chaos, Heath and White were soon separated.12

  At the waterfront to the north of town, all hell was breaking loose. In an instant the earthquake liquefied the layer of sand and shingle upon which Thames Street was built. The quayside collapsed. With an awful cracking sound, it slid into the sea and sank thirty or forty feet. The water surged forward in a spitting mass of foam. The merchants’ three-and four-story houses and the warehouses on the north side of Thames Street bubbled into the ocean along with King’s House and Forts James and Carlisle. Bizarrely, as the buildings moved with the earth beneath them and their foundations more or less intact, most remained upright. Several roofs remained visible above the water. Others were swallowed entirely by the brine. The forts’ cannon, torn from their carriages by the shuddering of the earth, rolled wildly along the battlements, causing carnage amid the fleeing scarlet-coated militiamen assigned to man them as the low-lying forts boiled out of sight.13

  Among the houses first affected were many belonging to Port Royal’s elite. Samuel Bernard’s wife was “in her closet, two pairs of stairs high” with her daughter and white maid. Feeling the ground lurching beneath them, Mrs. Bernard ordered her maid upstairs to the garret where another of the family’s domestics, “Mrs. B,” was trapped with her child. The maid complied, but as she came running back downstairs to where she had last seen her mistress, the sea came rushing upward to meet her. Somehow the maid survived. The rest of the residents, including Bernard’s wife and daughter, Mrs. B and her child, and two men employed by Bernard, were drowned.14 Walter Ruding was preparing for the dinner to which Reverend Heath had been invited along with his family and friends when his house collapsed about him.15 Aside from a single “negroe man,” all inside lost their lives. Reginald Wilson, the port captain of Port Royal, was killed in his house with his only son, while the councilor and planter Peter Beckford, his two daughters, and a grandchild were buried alive.16

  One or two minutes after the earthquake had started, the sea had advanced five hundred feet into town from the northern shore. As well as Thames Street, Queen Street and the High Street and parts of New Street and Common Street had sunk as the sand slid away beneath them. In the interior of town most of the houses “were shaken down, save only eight or ten that remained from the balcony upwards above water.”17 The residence of the Quaker joiner John Pike sunk four fathoms under water. “I lost my wife, my son, a ’prentice, a white-maid, and 6 slaves and all that ever I had in the world,” Pike recalled. Pike’s neighbor and fellow Quaker George Phillips was also killed, but his house, a dwelling made entirely out of timber, survived.18 Another of the houses to remain standing belonged to the physician Thomas Trapham. As the building subsided and the water flooded in, drowning his wife and several of his children, Trapham and his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, ran upstairs and leaped out of the garret window. “Hanging by his hands upon the rack of a chimney” with Elizabeth clinging to his neck, Trapham struggled to maintain his grip as Port Royal collapsed about him.19

  At the junction of New Street and Common Street, the Norris’s house and adjacent shop where they did business sank into the ocean. Joseph’s wife’s sister, his partner, Thomas Hillyard, and his family, and the majority of the Norris’s black and white domestics were killed. Another of the household slaves, who had been out on an errand at the time, ran toward the shop to save his masters, “but by mistake seized in his arms the captain of a vessel and escaped with him” instead. Realizing his error, the slave returned to the property and dove into the water. He found Thomas Norris in his counting house, but with the building sinking ever farther and the sea rushing in, he was unable to save him. The two men perished side by side.20

  To the east, the area known as the Pallisadoes was also badly affected. The land at the narrowest point of the sand spit liquefied and sank and a wall of water surged across the gap, cutting Port Royal off from the mainland. The wooden palisade was “utterly ruined”; Fort Rupert was entirely submerged; and the graveyard was destroyed. The tombstones were uprooted and dashed to pieces, hundreds of buried corpses were unearthed as the ground yawned open, and the sea washed the coffins and decomposing bodies around the ruins of the town. The rest of Port Royal’s forts suffered similar fates. Forts James and Carlisle had sunk forty feet under the water with the initial shock. To the southeast Morgan’s Line was severely damaged, while Walker’s Fort and Fort Charles on the southwestern corner of the sand spit, although largely intact, were “sorely shaken and rent, and so sunk” as not to “be tenable.” Somehow, the town’s magazine, housed in a tower in the courtyard of Fort Charles, was entirely unscathed—the powder remained dry and the cartridges ready.21

  Outside St. Paul’s Church, Emmanuel Heath was running for his life. Reasoning that he would be safest in an open space, the rector decided to make for the parade ground next to Morgan’s Line. As he sprinted down Church Street, houses and walls collapsed on either side. “Some bricks came rolling over my shoes,” he recalled, “but none hurt me.” On reaching the battery, Heath “saw the earth swallow up a multitude of people” who had gathered there, “and the sea mounting in upon . . . [them] over the fortifications.” Resigning himself to his fate, Heath determined to return to his “own lodging [in the center of town], there to meet death in as good a posture as . . . [he] could.”22 Nearby, the merchant John Uffgress had fled the tavern where he had been enjoying an early morning drink and was also running for his life. “On either side” he recalled, he “saw . . . houses . . . swallowed up [by the earth, while] . . . others [were] thrown on heaps . . . [He felt] the sand in the street [beneath his feet] rise like the waves of the sea, lifting up all persons that stood upon it, and immediately dropping [them] down into pits.”23

  “The shake was so violent,” another who witnessed events in the center of town recalled,

  that it threw people down on their knees, and sometimes on their faces, as they ran along. . . . It was a very difficult matter to keep one’s legs. The ground heaved and swelled like a rolling sea . . . by which means several houses . . . were shuffled and moved some yards from their places . . . [and the streets] crack[ed] and open[ed, then] shut quick and fast . . . in some . . . many people were swallowed up; some the earth caught by the middle, and squeezed to death; the heads of others only appeared above ground: Some were swallowed quite down, and cast up again by great quantities of water; others went down, and never more were seen. . . . Other [openings] . . . swallowed up great houses; and out of some . . . issue[d] whole rivers of water, sprouted up a great height into the air, which seemed to threaten a deluge to [the center] . . . of Port Royal . . . [these water spouts were] accompanied with ill stenches and offensive smells, by means of which openings, and the vapours at that time, belched forth from the earth. . . . The sky . . . was in a minute’s time . . . dull and reddish . . . like a . . . oven.24

  Amid the chaos, some were miraculously saved. The Huguenot merchant Lewis Galdy fell into a chasm which opened beneath his feet only to be thrown into the sea by a subsequent tremor and picked up by a passing boat. Mordecai Lloyd, a twenty-three-year-old Quaker merchant who traded with the North American colonies, found himself in his shop when the earthquake struck. “On a sudden the earth opened and let me in,” he later informed his father, a native of Wales who had immigrated to Philadelphia in 1683. “Then was I carried under earth and water,” Mordecai continued, “until at last I got upon a floor of boards where multitudes lay about me most of them mortally wounded and I amongst them very little hurt.”25 A certain Mrs. Akers lost consciousness for “the tenth part of a minute” that she and several others alongside her were swallowed up by the earth, before being “vomited” forth into the water. She emerged unscathed, aside from a small scratch on one cheek “that did but just draw blood.” Those buried beside her were less fortunate. Held fast “in dismal torture” by earth locked around their legs
, arms, or bodies, they were pulled underwater and drowned. In “the moment before the Earth swallowed her . . . [Akers] imagin[ed] . . . herself upon the brink of a boundless Eternity. . . . [I] put up a short ejaculation to Almighty God,” she later recalled, “begging him to pardon . . . [my] Sins, and . . . receive . . . [my] Soul.”26

  The merchant John Uffgress survived along with “sixteen or eighteen” others by alighting upon “a small piece of ground” which lay upon solid substrata. “Praised be God . . . [it] did not sink,” he recalled.27 Reverend Heath was another recipient of good fortune. Having reached his home, he “found there all things in the same order I left them; not a picture . . . being out of place. I went to the balcony,” he continued, “and saw never a house down there, not the ground so much as cracked.”28 Uffgress’s wife and slave also survived. Having run out of their house as the earthquake started, “the sand lifted up [around Uffgress’s wife], and [with] her negro woman grasping about her, both dropped into the earth together.” Seconds later the sea rushed in on top of them and “rolled them over and over, till at length they caught hold of a beam” and were swept out into Kingston Bay.29