Apocalypse 1692

by Ben Hughes

  The ships moored in the harbor also suffered. As the earthquake began, the sea “suddenly . . . swelled as in a storm” and a monstrous wave swept across the roads. With their cables snapping under the strain, the ships were tossed about like driftwood. A few crashed into one another; several were damaged by timbers, roofs, and other debris from town; others were carried over some of the survivors who were clinging to the debris, killing them instantly. The Syam Merchant sprang a leak which would trouble her for several months; the French prize was driven into one of the quayside markets and wrecked; and HMS Swan was driven across the half-submerged rooftops of Thames Street.30 Crashing into the remains of King’s House, where former governor Inchiquin’s reception had taken place over two years before, the frigate demolished the upper story, “part of . . . [which] fell upon her and beat in her round-house.”31 Although the Swan remained afloat, it lost its rigging, guns, anchors, and cables, and twelve of the crew were killed. Among the casualties were the ship’s cooper, Phillip Bryan, the purser, Joshua Nash, the cook’s mate, John Harris, and Able Seaman Andrew Hodge. His sibling, Jonathon, survived.32

  After Port Royal roads, the tidal wave swept across Kingston Bay. Samuel Bernard and his son, returning home by boat from their early morning visit to Liguanea, met it midway. “We were near being overwhelmed by a swift rolling sea, six feet above the surface, without any wind,” the chief justice recalled, “but it pleased God to save us.” The Bernard’s boat was forced back to Liguanea by the swell. “I found all the houses even with the ground,” he related, “[and there was] not a place to put one’s head in, but in negro houses.” A certain Captain Phipps had been standing by the seaside at Liguanea with a friend at the time of the earthquake. “The sea [had] retired from the land in such sort,” he related, “that for two or three hundred yards, the bottom . . . appeared dry.” Spotting several fish which had been grounded, Phipps’s friend “ran and took them up, and in a minute or two’s time, the sea returned again, and overflowed [a] great part of the shore.”33

  The rest of the island suffered in kind. “[The earthquake threw] down almost all of the houses, churches, sugar works, mills, and bridges through the whole country,” Reverend Heath reported. “It tore the rocks and mountains, [and] destroyed some whole plantations, and threw them into the sea.”34 On the north coast “about 1000 acres of land sunk, and thirteen people with it,” one witness noted, while another added that “the planters’ houses, with the greatest part of their plantations . . . were swallowed, houses, people, trees, all up in one gape; instead of which, appeared for some time after, a great pool, or lake of water.”35 A few miles off the northern shore, the crew of HMS Guernsey also felt the effects. “All ye forenoon we had a fine gael of wind,” the logbook recorded, “[and] at noon we had a great Earthquake which lasted 4 minutes.”36

  In Sixteen Mile Walk between the parishes of St. Thomas in the Vale and St. Catherine, “two great mountains . . . fell and met, and stopped the [Cobre] river, [so] that it was dry from that place to the Ferry” at Kingston harbor “for a whole day.” The water “forced its passage out from [Salt-panns] hill, in . . . twenty or thirty . . . places . . . most of them, six or seven yards high from the foot of the hill,” thereby flooding the salt pans to the northwest of Kingston harbor. In a nearby plantation, the ground opened, swallowed and smothered two cows belonging to a certain Mr. Bosby, while only one of Passage Fort’s “thirty houses, ten taverns, and as many storehouses” survived.37

  At Yallahs in St. David’s, the sea retired “above a mile from the shore, while inland “a great mountain split.” Carrying a wave of uprooted trees before it, the land slid into the valley below, “covered several settlements, and destroyed nineteen white people.” Among the dead was a man named Hopkins, who “had his plantation moved half a mile from the place it formerly stood.” To the east, in St. Thomas’s, “a large and high mountain, near Port Morant” was swallowed up by the earth, leaving “a great lake or four or five leagues over.” In Clarendon Parish, “about twelve miles from the sea” in the vicinity of Thomas Sutton’s plantation, “the earth gaped, and . . . great quantities of water . . . sprouted up with a prodigious force,” while in the neighboring parish of Vere “all the Brick and Stone buildings . . . [were] levelled with the ground” and left “shattered and torn . . . [and] irrepairable. While they were tumbling,” the reverend of Withywood wrote, “the Earth opened in multitudes of places, and . . . spew’d out Water to a considerable heighth above ground, in such quantities in some places, that it made our Gullies run on a suddain, tho’ before [they had been] exceeding dry.”38

  At Spanish Town the death toll was comparatively light. Most of the houses built by the English were destroyed, the cathedral was “devoured in the same Ruines,” while “the low houses built by the wary Spaniards” survived. The Quaker Joseph Norris and several other Friends were at their meetinghouse at the time. “[We] ran outside,” Norris related, “where the ground waving like to a sea, we could not stand.” Norris “beheld the walls and houses shake, as a man would shake a twig, till they were laid flat around us, and we persevered in the middle within a small spot.” After “a quarter of an hour,” with the tremors “somewhat ceasing . . . we walked about the town,” Norris continued, “and glutted our eyes with the dreadful desolation of the houses.” Despite the damage, Norris noted that there were only “about 4 persons killed.”39

  In the wilds of the Blue Mountains and the Cockpit Country, which none but the maroons called home, there was considerable devastation. From the high slopes “came . . . dreadful roarings,” one contemporary source related. The noises were “terrible and amazing to all that heard them.” The “tops of the great mountains” collapsed in an avalanche of rock and earth. “Sweeping down all the trees, and everything in . . . [their] way” they made “quite a path from top to bottom.” Afterward, the mountaintops had a “miserable shattered appearance” and seemed “half naked,” stripped of their “large aspiring trees.” Other peaks fell “in a huddled and confused manner, [and] stopped up . . . the rivers for about twenty-four hours.” What damage and how many casualties such destruction caused in the rudimentary settlements of the maroons is unknown.40

  After three to four minutes, the earthquake abated. In Port Royal, which was to be plagued by a series of aftershocks of diminishing frequency and intensity that would last until mid-September, the survivors began to take stock. Having reached the safety of his lodgings in the center of town, Reverend Heath surveyed the destruction from his balcony. One third of the point was under water. The buildings on the wharf and on Thames Street, Queen Street, and the High Street were all submerged, save “eight or ten that remained from the balcony upwards above water.” The area where St. Paul’s Church had once stood was now covered by a large lagoon, and the “once brave streets of stately houses” had disappeared save “here and there a chimney, and some parts and pieces of houses.”41 To the south, Fort Charles had been inundated and even in the area least affected, from New Street to the great seaside on the southern edge of town, there was considerable flooding and several buildings lay in ruins. In the areas still above water, hundreds of chasms had opened up in the streets. Everywhere were the dead and dying. Many had fallen into the chasms only for them to close up again, trapping their victims and squeezing them to death. Some had been buried up to their waists, others were caught up to their necks with only their heads remaining above ground. Many more corpses were floating on the ocean amid a bobbing carpet of debris. Timbers, with survivors still clinging to them, partially destroyed roofs, broken furniture, and the coffins and decomposed corpses disgorged from the burial place at the Pallisadoes were being washed back and forth along with casks, crates, barrels, and bales of goods which had risen from the warehouses on the wharf. Death proved a great leveler. “Great men . . . and women whose top-knots seemed to reach the clouds, now [lay] . . . stinking upon the water,” alongside the corpses of indentured servants and African slaves.42

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sp; The survivors gathered on the ground that remained above water. One group, having noticed Emmanuel Heath looking down from his balcony, called the rector to join them in prayer. “When I came into the street every one laid hold on my clothes and embraced me,” Heath recalled, “that with their fear and kindness I was almost stifled. I persuaded them at last to kneel down and make a large ring. . . . I prayed with them near an hour, when I was almost spent with the heat of the sun, and the exercise. They then brought me a chair, the earth working all the while with new motions, and tremblings, like the rollings of the sea; insomuch that sometimes when I was at prayer I could hardly keep my self upon my knees.” Among Heath’s mostly Protestant congregation “were several Jews that kneeled, and answered as the . . . [others] did. They were heard to call upon Jesus Christ: A thing worth observation.”43

  Other survivors began to search for missing family and friends. “I endeavoured to go towards my house,” John Uffgress recalled, “upon the ruins of the houses that were floating upon the water, but could not: At length, I got a canoe, and rowed up the great sea-side towards my house, where I saw several men and women floating upon the wreck[age] out to sea.” Uffgress rescued “as many of them as I could” and rowed on “till I came where I thought my house had stood, but could not hear of neither my wife nor family, so returned again to that little part remaining above water.” By now a considerable crowd had gathered, but none had any news of Uffgress’s family.44

  At about 1 P.M., having urged his congregation to repent the “heinous provocations” which had brought the Lord’s wrath upon them, the Reverend Heath was approached by several merchants. “[They] desired me to go aboard some ship in the harbour and refresh myself,” he recalled. Clambering across the rooftops which remained above water, Heath was led to a canoe and rowed out to a long boat which took him aboard the Syam Merchant. Despite having sprung a serious leak, Master Charles Guy’s 200-tonner had survived and was now a floating refuge for grateful survivors, a fate it shared with several other merchantmen in the roads. Among those on board was John White, whom Heath had last seen when the earthquake had begun two hours before. The president was “overjoyed to see me,” Heath recalled. Both men spent the night aboard the Syam Merchant “but could not sleep,” due to “the returns of the earthquake almost every hour, which made all the guns in the ship . . . jar and rattle.”45

  In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, several of the sailors aboard the ships in the roads, including a number of Spaniards, began scavenging the ruins. Taking to their boats, they picked up any boxes and chests they found floating on the surface.46 Others began to dredge the ruined houses, and after sunset “a company of lewd rogues, whom they call privateers, fell to breaking open ware-houses, and houses deserted, to rob and rifle their neighbours.” As a result of the continuing aftershocks, several looters were killed when damaged properties collapsed about them.47 “Even the very slaves thought it their time of liberty,” one witness recalled, “wherein they committed many barbarous insolences and robberies.” The dead were also looted. “Some [were] stripped, others searched, their pockets picked, their fingers cut off for their rings, their gold buttons taken off their shirts.” Other survivors, busy trying to salvage their own goods, were robbed, while some of the looters fought over the choicest pickings. Elsewhere, dogs feasted on the dead, chewing the heads and limbs of those who had been partially buried, while several “audacious whores who remain still upon the place” drank themselves into oblivion after finding bottles and barrels of booze floating amid the wreckage.48

  ALTHOUGH THE exact death toll of the earthquake of June 7 is unknown, by correlating contemporary accounts it can be surmised that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 of Port Royal’s 6,500 inhabitants were killed. Of the victims, it is possible to identify 121 individuals. At least thirty-eight of Port Royal’s community of Quakers were among the dead; as were twelve of the crew of HMS Swan. No less than two of the most prominent members of the town’s Jewish community also perished: Moises de Lucena, the moneylender and merchant who left behind property and debts worth over £2,000, and his fellow merchant Isaac Gonsales. Other victims of note included two merchant ship captains: Richard Conning of the Richard and Sarah, who was on shore at the time of the earthquake and “buried in the ruins,” and a certain Captain Martin who was said to have been “swallowed” up by a chasm in the ground. The most prominent residents to perish were the port captain, Reginald Wilson; the Royal African Company agent, Walter Ruding; the disgraced provost marshal, Thomas Ryves; and the attorney general, Simon Musgrave, about whose death no particulars survive. Initially, Peter Beckford, the prominent planter and Council member who had attended the meeting held at Port Royal that morning, was also thought to have died following the collapse of his wharfside home. Buried in the ruins along with his two daughters, seventeen-year-old Priscilla and fourteen-year-old Elizabeth, and a grandchild, all three of whom were killed, Beckford was later dragged from the rubble “wounded and badly bruised.”49

  Outside of Port Royal, the death toll was relatively light. Four people had been killed in Spanish Town; thirteen had been swallowed up on the north coast; and nineteen “white people” were killed in Yallahs.50 Presumably, other casualties went unreported, while slave deaths barely warranted a mention. Similarly, fatalities among the maroons are impossible to assess. The financial cost of the earthquake was extreme. “Tis not to be computed what is lost,” the Reverend of Withywood opined in a letter to England, “but many People think [that goods] at least to the Value of 400,000 l. [were lost] at Port Royal only, of which the Merchants at home will bear the greatest share.”51 Joseph Norris lost assets “being as near as I can compute to the value of £3000, for I saved not more than what I had on, of all that I had on Port Royal, not so much as a bond, bill, or book.”52 Property loss was also extreme. As many as half of Port Royal’s two thousand buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Given the value of the town’s real estate, compared by numerous contemporaries to that of the properties in the street of Cheapside in London, it can be estimated that property losses may have amounted to £300,000. Combined with the material losses mentioned by the Reverend of Withywood and the property damage caused elsewhere on the island, the total cost of the earthquake may have been somewhere in the region of £1,000,000 in contemporary money.

  Rising after a sleepless night on the Syam Merchant, Reverend Heath spent June 8 tending to the spiritual needs of his flock. “I went from ship to ship,” he recalled, “to visit those who were bruised, and dying; likewise to do the last office at the sinking of several corps which came floating from the point. This indeed hath been my sorrowful employment ever since I came aboard this ship,” he continued, “we have had nothing but shakings of the earth, with thunder and lightning, and foul weather ever since.”53 The merchant John Uffgress also spent the morning of June 8 rowing between the ships in the roads in search of his family. “At length,” Uffgress recorded, “it pleased God that I met with my wife, and two of my Negroes. I then asked her, how she had escaped? She told me, when she felt the house shake, she run out, and called all within to do the same: She was no sooner out, but the sand lifted her up, and her Negro woman grasping about her, they both dropt into the earth together; and, at the same instant the water coming in, rolled them over and over, till, at length, they catched hold of a beam, where they hung, till a boat came from a Spanish vessel, and took them up.”54

  In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Port Royal was lawless. Chaos ensued. Hundreds of dead remained unburied, and sanitation became a serious issue. The treatment of the wounded was pressing, while the looters, emboldened by the authorities’ failure to react, grew ever more violent. Several “negroes” were arrested under suspicion of “murder and felony” and many survivors abandoned town. Some, like Heath and Uffgress, were accommodated on board the ships in the roads “where many continued about two months after.”55 The majority headed north across Kingston harbor to the mainlan
d. Those unable to find accommodation with family or friends elsewhere on the island set up a refugee camp on the shore opposite Port Royal at a site known as Kingston, or Killclown, where the new capital would later be built. Conditions in the camp were appalling. Some survivors huddled together in “little hovels” and “huts built with boughs, and not sufficient to keep out the rain.” The Norrises spent the first few nights after the earthquake sleeping “in carts covered with sheets and blankets” and later rented a slave cabin, a temporary solution that many of the better-off survivors resorted to in the first few days. The irony was not lost on John Pike, the Quaker joiner who had lost his wife and son, his apprentice, a white maid, and six slaves in the earthquake, along with “all that [he] ever . . . had in the world.” “All those it has pleased the Almighty to save . . . do now think a Negro’s house that is daubed with mortar and thatched, the eves hanging down almost to the ground, a pleasant house,” he noted in a letter to his brother written on June 19. “Here you may see colonels and great men bowing their bodies to creep into this little hutch, who before had houses fit not only to receive but to feast in an extraordinary manner a prince or King, as great as England’s monarch upon occasion, and now by this sad disaster have hardly bread to eat and never a house to be in.”56

  “Lying wet, and wanting medicines, and all conveniences,” many died of exposure or disease in the days and weeks that followed. A plague of mosquitoes, brought out by damp weather, tormented them, while clouds of flies, feasting on the bodies washed up on the shore, “sometimes a hundred or two hundred in a heap,” spread diseases. By one account the “general sickness” that ensued “all over the island . . . swept away . . . three thousand souls.” The illness was exacerbated by a lack of supplies. With the Rio Cobre blocked by the landslide triggered by the earthquake, fresh water was hard to come by and little food was available.57 “I must live now in a hut, eat yams and plantans for bread, which I could never endure; drink rum-punch and water, which were never pleasing to me,” one survivor complained.58 Among those who died of disease were Judith de Lucena, widow of the Jewish merchant Moises who had died during the earthquake, and Joseph Norris’s sister, Weamouth.59