Empire of Blue Water

by Stephan Talty

  For the pirates and their brethren, at least those who had not made the switch to farmer or merchant, the dawn found them still drinking in the malodorous taverns or unconscious in local alleyways, knocked senseless by round after round of Kill Devil, the “hot, hellish” rum made from the plantation molasses; it got its name from the belief that it was potent enough to kill Satan himself. Some had attempted to reach their homes on horseback, but the black liquor was so potent it was known to drop men from their mounts and leave them unconscious in the street, where they would “lie on the ground sometimes the whole night exposed to the injuries of the air.” There were two captured ships in the harbor, legally taken under commissions against the French, and many of the matelots were guzzling their part of the proceeds. With the whores draped over them in repose, they could have been Parisian dandies after a long night of slumming—that is, if you didn’t study their hands or faces too closely. Like marauding bears, they’d sleep for a day or two, then wake up penniless and brain-coshed and clamor to their captains for another mission. Roderick had made his way back to Port Royal, working the logwood boats and taking a privateer mission whenever one came around. He was yellow-eyed, his blood coursing with malaria, and his body had been racked by years of alcohol intake that would have killed most civilians. He lived with a whore and took part of her earnings when things were tight.

  Nearby were the two prisons, the Bridewell, home to the “lazie strumpets” who had run afoul of the law, and the Marshalsea, where the more violent criminals were housed. Also close at hand were the courts where wrongdoers were tried; as the sun rose higher in the sky, the first prisoners of the day emerged, those who had not escaped the eyes of the militia on their regular tours. By midmorning the prisoners had already been sentenced and were being marched to the prison to be whipped or dunked. Then they’d spend the rest of the day in the stocks, broiling under the merciless sun, with passersby tossing rocks and garbage at their heads. There were more serious cases, too: The courts tried runaway slaves, and the guilty were ushered out to the gallows, followed by their owners. The luckier ones avoided the penalty for rebellion: being nailed to the ground with crooked sticks and having fire applied first to the hands, then the legs, then the head. (“The pains,” Sloane reported, “are extravagant.”)

  There were places of worship dotted through the town for Quakers, Jews, Anglicans, Catholics, and Presbyterians, and the town’s leaders liked to believe that it was a tolerant place. But, even in this small corner of the world, the old bacilli of Europe had found a home in Protestant hearts, and bitter jealousies and hatreds ran through Port Royal society, sharpened by competition. The Jewish residents were hidden away in their own precinct and were active in business—far too active, according to some. Just weeks before, the council had written to England a petition, saying that Jewish merchants “eat us and our children out of all our trade” and were an evil spreading itself across the islands.

  The pastor of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dr. Heath, began his day by reading prayers at the church, which he did every day “to keep some show of religion among a most ungodly, debauched people.” Afterward he strolled over to meet with the lieutenant governor, John White; they had been friends for years, and Dr. Heath allowed himself a glass of wormwood wine “as a whet before dinner” (which, in Jamaica, was taken just after noon), while White puffed on a pipe filled with tobacco. Some West Indies planters had tried to compete with the American colonies and planted the addictive weed, but the soil did not produce a leaf anywhere near as rich and flavorful as that grown by the planters up north. The tobacco in White’s pipe came directly from Virginia, part of the triangular trade that kept Port Royal humming. The two men talked about the heat, about business, and about the French.

  For all the signals and portents that people the world over would later point to, it was really an ordinary day. Disaster would subsequently etch significance into each everyday thing, but Port Royal was simply living its remarkably successful life as it always had. Everyone was merely waiting for noon, when the three-hour siesta, one of the few concessions to the latitude in which these expatriates dwelled, would begin and the town would drop off into a fitful sleep.

  Seventeen minutes before noon, the ground started to roll gently under the feet of the townspeople. “It began with a small trembling,” wrote Hans Sloane. People froze and marveled at the feeling of the earth turning oceanlike, but they were not panicked; the town had suffered these rollings ever since the English had been on Jamaica. Dr. Heath asked White, “What is this?” “It is an earthquake,” White said. “Don’t be afraid, it will soon be over.” The ground swelled and dipped slightly like a wake under a ship, but the buildings stood. Then a second, stronger heaving motion rolled in from the north, and they heard a crash as St. Paul’s collapsed to the ground, followed quickly by a huge metallic clang; it was the church steeple, the pride of the town, slamming into a crowd gathered at its foot and snuffing out the lives of twelve townspeople. The tower bell shuddered out a strange ring, but it was quickly swallowed up in the sounds now vectoring in from all directions: the screams of men, the bomblike thud of three-and four-story brick buildings imploding, and a strange “hollow rumbling Noise.” The second wave had given way to a third tremor, which dwarfed the others in its ferocity. Terrified, Heath and White ran into the street and were instantly separated in the noise and chaos.

  Heath ran toward Morgan’s Fort, and the scenes that greeted him along the way were a combination of Jules Verne and Hieronymus Bosch. The tremors had literally liquefied the earthen streets on which the townspeople were fleeing for their lives; with its surface gleaming as water saturated the sandy soil, earth became water, and the streets rose and fell in nauseating ripples. People were swept along like corks tossed on a wave, and some clutched at the gables of buildings that went past like boats; one doctor snatched at a passing chimney with his two children around his neck and miraculously survived. But most did not. “While they fled from the Sea, the Earth devoured them in her gaping Jaws,” said Heath. “Or they were knockt on the head with their houses falling on them…or the Sea met them and swept them away.” Men and women were pulled down into the sand and then cemented there, as the quake caused all the water that had surged up into the now-briny earth to be sucked away just as quickly. Some stood trapped in the earth up to their necks, crying for help. One observer reported:

  That watery haitus closed again the next moment, catching hold of some people by a Leg, of others by the middle of the Body, and of others some by the Arm, etc., detaining them in dismal torture, but immovably fixed in the ground, till they, with almost the whole Town besides, sunk under Water.

  The hardening sand squeezed the captives until they suffocated or until wild dogs swarmed on them and ate their heads. A drawing of the calamity shows women’s heads sticking out of the earth like cauliflowers, with dogs poised nearby, as well as a woman and her daughters who were “beat to pieces” by smashing into each other during the quake. “Others went down,” Sloane wrote, “and were never more seen.”

  As he ran toward the fort, Heath looked up to see a sight he’d never forget: water cresting over the fortress’s three-story stone walls. Clearly this was Judgment Day, and the deluge would now follow the first catastrophe. Strangely, the fact that he believed that hope was now gone calmed Heath; he was certain he’d die, and so the pastor turned and ran back toward his own house. “I then laid aside all thoughts of escaping,” he remembered. “And resolved to make towards my own lodging, there to meet death in as good as posture as I could.” Heath hurried through narrow lanes that separated him from his home on Market Street; as he ran, the walls and houses on each side of him collapsed, spraying bricks and timbers across his path like props in a Buster Keaton film. “Some Bricks came Rowling over my shoes,” he said. “But none hurt me.” Dr. Sloane reported that “the Ground heaved and swelled like a rolling swelling Sea”; people who had been tripped up lay facedown on the ground, their arms and legs
spread out and their hands digging into the sand, trying to hold on to it as one would a raft in a plunging river. The violence of the rippling earth astonished those who saw it; one said the earth in the town of Liguanea moved “as a man would shake a twig.”

  When the rector reached his lodgings, he was stopped by another bizarre tableau: The home sat there pristine, unmarked, as if it were just an ordinary day. The street had not been touched. “Not a picture, of which there were several fair ones in my chamber,” was even a half inch out of place, he reported. Rushing to his balcony, Heath threw open the doors and looked out over the town. His immediate neighborhood was intact down to the panes of glass, while over the roofs he could see a picture of utter destruction: homes, warehouses, and townspeople being flung up into the air or dropping into the open maw of the earth. Spotting the pastor at his window, men and women in the street began shouting to him; they, too, were convinced the Rapture had arrived, and they wanted to pray with him. (The minister later said that even some of the Sephardic Jews called him to their side and were eventually converted to his faith.) Heath must have hesitated a fraction of a second: His survival had been nothing short of miraculous; why tempt God? But he turned and went down, with the roar of the earthquake still deafening. “When I came down,” he wrote, “every one laid hold of my clothes and embraced me, that with their fears and kindness I was almost stifled.” These men and women did not believe they were witnessing a random natural event; for them it was the Day of Judgment unfolding just as the Bible said it would. Didn’t they live “in the very place where Satan’s throne is erected,” as they had been warned many times before? And so the quake signaled the breaking of the Sixth Seal, as described in the Book of Revelation:

  When I saw the Lamb break open the Sixth Seal, there was a violent earthquake; the sun turned black as a goat’s-hair tentcloth and the moon grew red as blood. The stars in the sky fell crashing to earth like figs shaken loose by a mighty wind. Then the sky disappeared as if it were a scroll being rolled up; every mountain and island was uprooted from its base.

  The devout could expect only one thing to follow: the breaking of the Seventh Seal, followed by a half hour of silence and then the approach of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, their breast-plates the colors of fiery red, deep blue, and pale yellow, riding horses with heads like lions spitting sulfur and smoke and fire, and then the seven-headed dragons with diadems, and then unthinkable things. The rector, whose calm had returned after his panicked moment with White, spoke to his fellow citizens gently and urged them to kneel down in a circle around him. Expecting the final crack of doom at any moment, he prayed in a loud voice, his eyes closed, his face tilted up toward the cloudless sky.

  All around the circle of men and women, oddities of nature that would rarely be seen again were unfolding. Geysers erupted from the ground and arched towering plumes of water into the summer sky; some opened beneath men’s feet and shot them a hundred feet in the air until gravity caught up with them and they began to fall on the descending pillar of water, down to the ground and then into it, as they disappeared into the holes that had caught them unawares. Thousands of these “sand volcanoes” were reported throughout the island. “In Clarendon Precinct, the Earth gaped and spouted up with a prodigious Force great Quantities of Water into the Air, above Twelve Miles from the Sea.” The vicar of Withywood reported that “dire Chasms spew’d out Water to a considerable heighth above ground.” People running for their homes dropped away into “the Pit,” tumbling into an infernal washing machine filled with sand, water, and flotsam; a lucky few hit subterranean rivers that had been born just minutes ago and were carried horizontally under the earth at great speed, whipping beneath the feet of their fellow residents, only to crash into another geyser moving upward and so shoot back to the surface a half mile from where they first went down into the earth, drenched but unhurt. One woman ran out of her house into the street and saw the sand before her “rising up”; she clutched her black servant, and they dropped together into the earth, “at the same instant the Water coming in, rowl’d them over and over,” until in this sunken world they saw a beam from a house passing and grabbed on to it and were saved. A merchant named Lloyd gave his story: He’d been in his shop when the “earth opened and let me in.” He was carried along in an underground channel until he was pushed up through a wooden floor and found himself lying with other victims, many of them critically wounded. He himself was nearly unhurt, but his house had disappeared completely into the muck that had swallowed him up. One French refugee, Lewis Gauldy, was sucked down and released not once but twice, popping up at various points in the landscape like a target at a shooting gallery. The next day he announced that he’d found God.

  With the ground turning to mush, the living ran in terrified packs toward the harbor but were thrown down as they fled. Many of them jumped into the water and swam for the surviving ships that bobbed there in the chop, where six-foot waves swept over them. Stray timbers, canoes, and other refuse from the ruined city swept by in the strong current, braining some of the swimmers as they tried to escape. Soon the boats were crowded, and men fought for space on the decks. There were scenes of memorable courage, including that of a slave saving a white man and then drowning while trying to save his master, and another of a bondsman who dug a Colonel Beckford out of the sand before it crushed him. Depravity would soon overwhelm the memories of kindness.

  The earthquake tore the city apart. But it was the tsunami that followed hard upon it that proved lethal. Sweeping in, three stories high and traveling at sixty miles an hour, the great wave carried on its back the HMS Swan from the harbor, which “by the violent motion of the Sea, and the sinking of the Wharf,” reported one resident, “was forced over the tops of many Houses; and passing by that House where my Lord Puke lived, part of it fell upon her, and beat in her Round House.” The frigate stayed upright and later served as a life raft for over two hundred people. The foamy top of the inrushing water was even with some of Port Royal’s tallest structures as it came toward the town, then smashed buildings to pieces and carried off citizens back toward the harbor. The enormous surge of water bore away carts, cannon, fishing boats, wooden homes, and hundreds upon hundreds of men, women, and children, depositing their naked bodies miles away or, as it drew back, taking them out to the ocean, never to be seen again. One resident wrote home about the horrors but could not express them to his satisfaction: “’Tis impossible for my pen to write, or tongue to relate ye horror and terror of that daye.”

  As the wave rippled across the landscape, sections of the smoky blue mountains that had framed the town’s horizon dropped away like children’s blocks; one landslide dammed the river that supplied the town with drinking water (which would soon be selling at exorbitant prices in the postdisaster city). The drought lasted sixteen hours, until the runoff from the mountains could cut new paths down their sides and onto the plains. Many believed that the earthquake was even more intense in the blue hills than it had been in the towns. The sounds that rumbled in from their direction testified that tremendous natural forces were at work; the mountains “bellowed forth prodigious, loud, terrible Noises and Echoings,” and the rich forest that used to cover their sides was stripped away in places from peak to foot so that it looked as if they had been peeled clean. Hans Sloane wrote a long letter in 1694 filled with accounts of the earthquake, and his contacts from all over the island reported that the earth had acted in unaccountable ways. In Yallahs, west of Port Royal, “a great Mountain split, and fell into the level land, and covered several Settlements, and destroy’d nineteen white People.” The locals believed it was a judgment on the victims’ evil ways, and the place is now known as Judgment Hill. A man named Hopkins rushed home to his plantation, only to find it gone, the entire mass of earth, sugar crop, and house, and all having moved half a mile from its original spot. New lakes appeared where there had been only dry fields; a thousand acres of forest near the French settlement of St. Ann’s Bay dis
appeared underwater, taking fifty-three settlers with it. The seventeenth-century mind groped for words to describe the unsolid earth they now inhabited; it had become animated, even willful. A section of one mountain, “after having made several Leaps or Moves,” proceeded to track down and “overwhelm” a family, having traveled more than a mile to snuff out its victims.

  Four of the town’s five forts dropped into the harbor with their heavy guns, leaving only Fort Charles standing. Which of the ordinary citizens survived depended in most cases on what kind of house they lived in. The poor and piratical fared best: The huts that the slaves and the very destitute inhabited were made of thatch and wood held together with dried mud or mortar. The Spanish-built dwellings were the next step up in the social ladder. These low-slung houses, with their wall beams driven deep into the ground, withstood the earthquake very well. It was the rich merchants’ houses, which had been constructed to resemble the middle-class dwellings back in England, that proved to be death traps; they were three and four stories high, built of bricks, with tile roofs and glass in the windows. Heavy and rigid, they collapsed en masse, killing everyone inside. All the structures built of brick or stone—churches, warehouses, sugar works, and homes—were affected. The vicar of Withywood, whose parish lay thirty-five miles inland from Port Royal, wrote that the buildings “are now either leveled with the ground, or standing Monuments of the Wrath of God,…so shattered and torn that they are irrepairable.” Those neurasthenic wives who could not escape from their beds were among the first to die, while tiny huts that housed black slaves easily withstood the shaking of the earth. It was an early lesson in the earthquakeproofing of houses.