1692 · Caribbeanyear only
An earthquake drowns Port Royal and closes the buccaneer era
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An earthquake threw most of Port Royal into the sea in 1692. The town stood on a sand spit at the mouth of the Kingston harbour and had been the busiest port in the English Caribbean, a place where privateers refitted, prize goods were sold, and sailors with no master and no country could find work and disappear. Two thirds of it liquefied and sank. Julius Scott treats the disaster as the closing of an era. The Caribbean of the buccaneers had been a frontier where the borders between empires leaked and a man's status could be renegotiated at every landing. What came after was the plantation: surveyed estates, registered human property, garrisons, courts. Within fifty years the islands Scott calls enchanted had been taken almost wholly into that system. The masterless world survived at the waterline, in the crews, canoes and dockside taverns that moved news and rumour between colonies faster than any governor could, and that traffic is the common wind of Scott's title.
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