The Lore Of Port Royal, Jamaica

Illustration of pre-1692 Port Royal, Jamaica.

Port Royal, Jamaica has a rich history. Founded in 1618, it is located at the end of a spit of land at the mouth of Kingston Harbor.  From its earliest days it served as a refuge for English privateers preying on Spanish treasure ships sailing home from the New to the Old World.  When the British Parliament began limiting the number of letters of marque – official documents that essentially transformed a privately owned vessel into a government-sanctioned ship of war -- many privateers tossed aside the thin veil of legitimacy and resorted to outright piracy.

Whatever their means of income, the wealth they amassed and liberally circulated in Port Royal turned that commercial center into one of the gaudiest and most depraved ports-of-call in the seven seas.  To quote from The Power and the Glory, the third volume of the Cutler Family Chronicles:  

“Richard Cutler knew something of the history of Port Royal, as did most people familiar with the West Indies.  Situated at the western tip of a long, thin spit of land shaped like an ostrich leg with an Italy-shaped boot at its western end, it was, in its heyday in the late 1600’s, the largest, richest and most debauched British municipality in the Western Hemisphere, justly earning its dubious distinction as “Sodom of the West Indies.”  With an economy heaped in gold bullion plundered by English privateers off Spanish treasure fleets, Port Royal served as a safe-haven for pirates, buccaneers, cutthroats, and other low-lives keeping intimate company with the thieves, whores and other opportunists keen to pick a farthing or a florin from an unsuspecting tar dead to the world on a alehouse floor or in a dark alley rife with the stench of human waste and proliferation.  In 1680, Port Royal was said to host a tavern for every ten residents.  Inside those taverns, or on the streets outside, prostitutes brazenly plied their wares, their oft-used bodies tantalizing pie-eyed sailors too long away at sea.  

Henry Morgan, Pirate of the
Caribbean, 18th century lithography.

Tottering at the tip of the societal pyramid, the town’s few respectable citizens – merchants, mainland planters, an Anglican priest or two -- pooled their resources and appointed Henry Morgan, the renowned buccaneer and sworn enemy of propriety and Puritanism, as lieutenant governor.  It was a seemingly insane gamble that paid off.  Elevated from the base to the apex of society, Morgan found religion and set about to clean up the unholy mess, publicly hanging many of those with whom just a few weeks before he had been in cahoots.  His efforts, however, proved too little, too late.  At eleven forty-two in the morning of June 7, 1692, in what was widely perceived as divine punishment for its manifold sins and wickedness, Port Royal was rocked to its core by a violent earthquake that sent much of the city sinking, Atlantis-like, into the sea.  Those few who managed to survive the holocaust fled across the bay to the mainland, where, in collaboration with the sugar planters and wealthier merchants already living there, they established a new commercial center.  With the devastation of Port Royal fresh in their minds, these citizens of Kingston, as the new community came to be called, lived and worked and prayed as paragons of sobriety and Christian morals – until memories faded. 

What remained of Port Royal, meanwhile, was appropriated by the Royal Navy and re-built as its flagship base in the West Indies.”

At the end of the eighteenth century, as the United States and France waged an undeclared war known to history as the Quasi-War, the Royal Navy opened all of its West Indian bases, including its flagship base at Port Royal, to the fledgling American navy.  Why?  Because as Rear Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson famously explained to My Lords of the Admiralty, “Every American gun aimed at a French warship is one less English gun aimed at a French warship.”  Such good feelings between the United Sates and Great Britain were to extend into the first four years of the 1800’s.  After that, relations deteriorated, due to England’s fight for national survival against Napoleon and the commercial war in which the United States found herself inevitably entangled.   Despite the war raging in Europe and subsequent events, Port Royal retained its vitality (if not its depravity) until 1905, when Great Britain closed what was once one of its premier navy yards in the Western Hemisphere. 

What Became of John Paul Jones?

John Paul Jones*

Many people are aware that John Paul Jones was the one great naval commander to serve in the Continentail Navy during the American Revolutionary War.  His exploits in British waters as captain of Ranger and then of Bonhomme Richard are the stuff of legend.

Fewer people are aware of his earlier life.  Born on the southeast coast of Scotland in 1747, John Paul went to sea at an early age as a merchant sailor.  As master of his own vessel in the 1770s, he killed a member of his crew, a mutineer.  He claimed it was self-defense, but feared that a court in Tobago would find him guilty nonetheless.  So he fled to America, added "Jones" to his name, and for several years managed the Virginia estate of his deeased brother. Frustrated by the life of a gentleman farmer, he decided to join the navy.

Few people are aware, however, of what became of Jones after the Revolutionary War.  He remained in Paris, a city much to his liking and where he was revered, until he grew restless for action.  To quote from my novel For Love of Country:

"He [Richard Cutler] was referring to the rank of Rear Admiral bestowed upon Jones by her most Catholic majesty, the Tsarina of Russia, Catherine the Second. Three years ago, fed up with Congressional reluctance to invest in a navy, Jones had accepted the invitation of the Empress Catherine to join her Black Sea fleet in an attack against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. That fleet was under the titular command of a Romanov prince, Admiral Potemkin, vested with wresting Constantinople away from the Muslim Turks who had occupied the city for three centuries. Having liberated the Christians there, the Empress expected to receive, as just compensation for doing God’s work, a warm water port for her navy and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Once aboard the Russian flagship, Jones quickly concluded that Potemkin had no future as a naval commander. It took considerable effort and tact to convince Potemkin that Russia would be better served were he to hand over the reins of commander-in-chief to Jones, advice the reluctant prince finally accepted. At the Battle of Liman, having secretly reconnoitered the enemy fleet the night before from a rowboat, Jones destroyed fifteen enemy warships while killing three thousand Turks and taking sixteen hundred prisoners – all at the cost of one Russian frigate and eighteen Russian sailors. When reports of the stunning victory reached the capital, all Russia rejoiced except for one man, Prince Potemkin, who, stung by what he deemed a usurpation of his rightful glory, publicly accused Jones of molesting a ten-year-old girl selling butter in a St. Petersburg. square. Disgusted and disillusioned, Jones left Russia when the charges were dropped and returned to Paris, where details of his adventures were widely published."

Jones died in Paris in 1792.  In 1906 his remains were brought aboard the USS Brooklyn.  With three other cruisers acting as escorts, the "father of the U.S. Navy" sailed home on his final vovage.  Today, his coffin rests, appropriately, in Bancroft Hall at the United States Naval Academy.

*Painting by Charles Wilson Peale, c1781, published in the US before 

1923 and public domain in the US.

The Miracle of Yorktown

There are those who to this day insist that the United States was born by an act of divine intervention. How else, such people argue, could a ragtag band of farmers, silversmiths and shopkeepers prevail against the world's mightiest military, especially in 1780 when rebel enthusiasm for the Glorious Cause was clearly on the wane. America desperately needed a victory on land, and she desperately needed French control of the sea to ensure that victory.

America's prayers were answered in a small town located on the York River in southeastern Virginia.

Unsuccessful in its campaigns in the North, in 1780 the British High Command settled on a “southern strategy.” At the core of this strategy lay the assumption that living in Georgia and the Carolinas were legions of Tories loyal to King George who would flock to his banner if offered the opportunity. Once General  Cornwallis had subdued the Carolinas, he could march north, conquer Virginia, and restore the entire South to the British Empire.

There were, however, several problems with this theory. First, while indeed there were numerous Tories living in the South, as it turned out precious few of them were willing to spill their blood for the British king. And second, Cornwallis’s superior, Sir Henry Clinton, was in New York, many miles away, and the two generals had little use for each other. They communicated directly with American Secretary Germaine in London rather than with each other, and they refused to coordinate military tactics in any meaningful way. Sadly, for the British, Germaine’s views of the war were almost child-like in their naivety and optimism.

After a series of battles in the Carolinas produced no conclusive outcomes, Cornwallis finally marched north into Virginia. There, a perilous game of chess was being played between British and American forces, each side jockeying for position between the Virginia capes and Richmond, the state capital. Meanwhile, in Rhode Island, le Comte de Rochambeau had landed in Newport with a French army and le Comte de Barras had sailed in with a fleet of battle cruisers. From the West Indies le Comte de Grasse wrote General Washington that he would be sailing with a far greater naval force for the Chesapeake, where his services would be available to the Americans until the end of hurricane season.

Inspired by this delightful piece of news, General Washington, who had long favored a siege of New York, now suddenly changed strategy and ordered his ragged Continentals and the superbly uniformed French army on a forced march to the Chesapeake.

What happened next was a checkmate for the ages. Cornwallis’s army was defeated at Yorktown, but it was a victory made possible by yet another collosal wave of British blunders in an epic sea battle fought between de Grasse and Adm. Sir Thomas Graves.

The benevolence of a divine providence? Perhaps. You decide.