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.