[The following is in regards to a massive, apocalyptic earthquake that destroyed the English settlement city, and pirate haven, of Port Royal in 1692.]
The quake had lasted approximately six minutes. In that time 90 percent of the town’s homes, its warehouses stuffed with goods, and the main pier for the city had been destroyed or simply vanished into the sea. Two thousand people died from the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami; another two thousand would die in the coming weeks from injuries and disease. The death toll was twice that of the San Francisco calamity of 1906, but that had occurred in a city of hundreds of thousands. The Great Earthquake of 1692 took more than 70 percent of Port Royal’s 6,500 residents; it would stand as the most lethal quake until the 1868 Peru-Ecuador disaster.
Professor George R. Clark of Kansas State University, who has studied the 1692 earthquake intensively, has rated it between values X and XI over the majority of Jamaica, with spots of Value XII intensity in isolated spots. A Value X earthquake involves the destruction of most buildings and foundations; in a Value XII, objects are thrown into the air and the ground moves in waves.
The Port Royal was one of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the Western Hemisphere. It was accentuated by the formation of the land beneath the city. The sand that Port Royal stood on was loosely packed and saturated with water before the tremors struck. As the earthquake hit, violent seismic waves rippled through the sand and literally changed the granular structure of the soil. The shaking caused the sand molecules to sink downward, where they were met by water rushing up to fill the empty space; this caused the layers of sand to lose their stiffness and strength. Very quickly the sand stopped acting as a solid and began behaving as a viscous liquid, and the ground beneath the residents’ feet changed from solid earth to quicksand in an instant. People and buildings dropped down into the watery mush and were lost. As to the tsunamis that Heath and others reported seeing, they may have been classic tidal waves caused by the violent buckling of a tectonic plate offshore or simply the result of the ocean’s flowing in to fill the space once occupied by the plunging surface of sand. Only those buildings, such as Heath’s home, which happened to sit on a solid base of limestone or gravel, were saved.
Looking over the ruined city, one of Hans Sloane’s correspondents grew somber:
Indeed, ‘tis enough to raise melancholy thoughts in a Man now, to see the Chimneys and Tops of some Houses, and the Masts of Ships and Sloops, which partak’d of the same Fate, appear above Water; and when one first comes ashore, to see so many Heaps of ruines, many whereof by their largeness shew, that once there had stood a brave House; to see so many Houses shatter’d, some half fallen down, the rest desolate and without Inhabitants, …there, where once stood brave Streets of stately Houses stood, appearing now nothing but Water, except here and there a Chimney, and some parts and pieces of Houses, surviving only to mind us of their sad Misfortune, Habitations for Fish, contrary to the Intent of the first Builders.
Source:
Talty, Stephan. “Apocalypse.” Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign. New York: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2007. 297-99. Print.
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