The City That Sank in Minutes

Port Royal, Jamaica, was called “the most wicked and sinful city in the world.” One in every ten buildings was a brothel or tavern. Pirates spent fortunes there in a single night. Henry Morgan — the most notorious buccaneer in the Caribbean — became its Lieutenant Governor.

At 11:43am on the 7th of June, 1692, the ground stopped being solid.

The Horror

The city was built on sand. When the earthquake struck — magnitude 7.5 — the sand liquefied. Buildings didn’t fall. They sank, still standing, straight down into the earth.

Eyewitnesses described people swallowed to the waist, then to the neck, then gone. Two thirds of the town sank immediately into the sea. One ship was lifted over the rooftops by the tsunami. Corpses from the cemetery floated in the harbour alongside the newly dead. Around 2,000 people died in the first minutes. Thousands more in the weeks that followed from disease and injury.

The exact time is known because a pocket watch was recovered from the harbour floor during an excavation in 1959 — stopped at 11:43.

The Modern Relic

Port Royal still exists — above and below the water. The part of the city that sank is still on the seabed off the Jamaican coast, largely undisturbed. Divers have recovered rum bottles, clay pipes, and coins from the streets that went under on this morning in 1692. The church where the rector said his prayers that day, minutes before the earthquake hit, is gone. The watch is in a museum in Kingston. The rest is still down there.

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