Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
325 years ago today, on June 7th 1692, at 11:43 a.m. an earthquake struck the island of Jamaica
and its capital city of Port Royal. The bustling port town was nearly destroyed. But Port Royal
was a pirate city, and by some descriptions the most wicked and sinful city in the world,
and the irony of a city like that being destroyed by the Hand of God, was not lost
on the people of the time. And so the 1692 Jamaica earthquake offers us a unique opportunity to talk,
not just about the history of Jamaica and Port Royal, but it offers a unique opportunity in
modern archaeology. And for the History Guy it offers an excuse to talk about pirates. Aarrrr!
But let's start out trying to understand the real Pirates of the Caribbean. Because of the wealth
of the Spanish colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean, which was known as the Spanish Main,
was a particularly rich place for people who made their living raiding merchant ships on the high
seas. But most of them weren’t really pirates, they were privateers. The great powers of the day,
the British, the French and the Spanish, were frequently at war or at least at odds, and so
the governments would issue things called Letters of Marque. The Letter of Marque is permission
from a government to raid enemy ships at sea. So privateers are, actually in essence mercenaries,
who are acting as private soldiers and who are paid with the value of the booty that they
collect, and that is the value of the ships, and the cargo, and the passengers, and crews,
either for ransom or as slaves, is how they got their pay. Now these are different than pirates.
Pirates do the same thing, they raid ships on the high sea for the value of what they can collect,
but they do so without the protection of a Letter of Marque, and so they are more vulnerable to the
law. Now the line between the two is actually pretty thin, and that privateer might exceed
the authority of their Letter of Marque by say, raiding a ship from the wrong country,
or making a land raid, and so most of the people who made their living doing this sort of thing,
where at some times pirates and sometimes privateers, in the course of their life.
In the Caribbean there's a unique term called Buccaneer, and that actually
originally referred to landless hunters on the island of Hispaniola, who would hunt wild pigs,
and wild cattle and then they would usually dry that into what in French
is called viande boucanee, or roughly beef jerky. And so the people who did that those,
men were called boucanes, and the Spanish didn't like them for a number of reasons,
not the least of which was that they provided supply to the Corsairs that were raiding the
Spanish ships, and so the Spanish chased them off the island of Hispaniola and many of them ended up
becoming pirates themselves. And eventually the term, which was anglicized to become Buccaneer,
was used to refer to all of the various pirates, corsairs, privateers that operated in the
Caribbean. Although they were pirates they were not uncivilized. The Pirates of the Caribbean had
formed together a loose organization that was called, the Brethren of the Coast. This was a
syndicate of Captains who, both free booters and privateers, had organized together in
order to regulate economic activities, largely to prevent conflict among the various pirate groups.
In the early part of the 17th century the Caribbean pirates largely operated off the
island of Tortuga, which is a small island off the coast of Hispaniola or modern-day Haiti. But in
1655 a British fleet captured the Spanish island of Jamaica, and the British governor, knowing that
the Spanish wanted to take Jamaica back, invited the Brethren of the Coast to use the new capital
of British Jamaica, the port city of Port Royal, as their home port. The British got a ready-made
force to defend Jamaica from the Spanish, and the Pirates got a safe deepwater port with easy
access to the rich shipping routes of the Spanish Main. The deal worked out better than they could
ever imagine. Not only did successful Buccaneer captain's like Henry Morgan, who was the most
famous and feared Buccaneer of the 17th century, bring in lots and lots of wealth from the Spanish
ships that they had raided, but the Spanish were so disrupted that they were unable to meet the
Spanish colonies' need for manufactured goods. And so the Spanish colonists were forced to buy their
manufactured goods from the British merchants in Jamaica, ironically many of those goods having
been taken from Spanish ships by pirates. This system which was called, Forced Trade,
made Port Royal one of the wealthiest cities of the day. It was a bustling trading town. There
was so much money, gold and silver which had been taken by the Pirates, that the amount of running
cash in Port Royal relative to the population, was greater than the same amount in London in the day.
And was such an important trade city, the largest city in the Caribbean, that Port Royal was more
important to trade than Boston was. But it was a pirate city, and as a pirate utopia it was filled
with cutthroats and thieves who had lots of money, and so became a well known center of debauchery,
variously described as, the ‘Sodom of the West’, and the wickedness city in the Christian world. It
was so debauched, that the city of Port Royal had one public drinking house, per...ten...residents.
It had lots of prostitutes and brothels because a prostitute in Port Royal could make more money
than almost any other place on earth. And it was so known for public drunkenness, that even
the pirates favorite pets, parrots, developed a taste for wine, and were frequently drunk.
And the city was built on shaky foundations, literally. Port Royal is at the end of a sandbar,
it's built on sand, not land. And if there wasn't enough room to build they would frequently just
dump sand on the water, and build buildings on top of that, and because they had money,
sometimes those were heavy stone buildings that were literally built on foundations of sand.
The earthquake struck at 11:43 a.m. on June the 7th 1692. It came in three great shocks,
the largest of which was estimated to be about 7.5 on the Richter scale. The ground beneath the
city liquefied, a process called liquefaction, and the entire port city seemed to roll down
towards the ocean. In a period of just two minutes, two thirds of the city of Port Royal,
went below sea level. The sea rolled in great waves and great fissures,
and when people fell in those fissures would then close and crushed the people, and of course
many of the stone buildings also collapsed and crushed more people. And then the city was hit
by the tsunami which put nearly 90 percent of the city below water, and capsized more than 20
ships in the harbor. Of the city's population of approximately 6,500, about two thousand
died in the initial earthquake and tsunami, and afterwards deprived of shelter and clean water,
nearly three thousand died of disease in the aftermath. Port Royal tried to rebuild but then
it was struck by a series of disasters. In 1805, a fire burned most of the city to the ground and
several hurricanes of the early part of the nineteenth century left Port Royal abandoned,
except for a small British Naval Station. The capital of Jamaica was moved to Spanish City and
most of the trade that had been in Port Royal was moved across the harbour to the City of Kingston.
The symbolism of the ‘Sodom of the West’ being repeatedly destroyed by acts of God was not lost
on religious leaders of the day, and Port Royal was held up as the symbol of divine retribution,
and spurred a religious revival in Jamaica that turned the population against the
Pirates. The era of The Buccaneer was ending anyway, the British and Spanish had signed
a peace treaty and the pirate success was starting to threaten that treaty,
and economically the slave trade and sugar trade began to overcome piracy as the way
to support Jamaica, and so Jamaica started passing anti-piracy laws. Ironically many of
the Pirates of the early 18th century, met their end in the former pirate utopia of Port Royal,
at the bridge Naval Station there, and a place that was ghoulishly called Gallows Point.
But the earthquake and the process of liquefaction offers an unparalleled opportunity for modern
archaeology. The entire city of Port Royal sunk in just a couple of minutes, and was buried in the
sand leaving behind a pristine historical record. Usually archaeological sites are places that were
occupied for a very long period of time, and you have to dig through years of garbage to figure
out what's what, but Port Royal, the city that sunk, was preserved at a precise moment in time.
And some argue that it is the most important archaeological site in the Western Hemisphere,
it is our best record of life in the 17th century. In fact the way that we know that
the earthquake occurred at precisely 11:43 a.m. is because of a pocket watch that was discovered
in an archeological dig of one of the ships in the harbor. Stopped at exactly 11:43 a.m, a permanent
record, a remembrance of the very last moment of the Golden Age of piracy in the Caribbean.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
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