Port Royal — The Wickedest City on Earth

Before the earthquake, Port Royal held roughly 6,500 people in about 2,000 buildings — many of them multi-storey brick structures, all built on loose, water-saturated sand at the tip of the Palisadoes peninsula. When the shaking began at approximately 11:43 AM, that sand behaved exactly as unstable wet sand does under violent vibration: it liquefied, briefly taking on the properties of a fluid.

Eyewitness accounts describe the ground itself appearing to move in waves, fissures opening and closing — crushing people caught inside them — and entire streets of brick buildings sliding or sinking vertically into the earth, occupants and all. A tsunami followed within moments, lifting moored ships bodily over the rooftops of buildings still standing and depositing them among the ruins; one frigate, HMS Swann, was carried inland over the wreckage. By the time the ground resolidified, roughly two-thirds of the city and an estimated 2,000 people had gone under; a further 3,000 died of injuries and disease in the days that followed.

Because the destruction happened so suddenly and the site was then covered by 20 to 40 feet of oxygen-poor, silt-laden water, Port Royal's submerged quarter became an extraordinary time capsule rather than a ruin — buildings and their contents preserved largely as they were the moment the ground gave way, without the centuries of looting, rebuilding and decay that erode most archaeological sites on dry land. In 1969, diver Edwin Link recovered a pocket watch made by French maker Paul Blondel, its mechanism stopped by seawater at 11:43 — a time that matches contemporary written accounts almost exactly.

The most extensive scientific excavation ran from 1981 to 1990, a joint effort by Texas A&M University's Nautical Archaeology Program and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, focused on the submerged remains of Lime Street near its intersection with Queen and High Streets — once the commercial heart of the town. The dig recovered thousands of everyday objects: pewter mugs, intact crates of Chinese porcelain, clay pipes by the hundred, silver coins, and fully stocked kitchens, distinguishing between sections of the city that slid and jumbled as they sank near the harbour edge and inland sections that sank more vertically, with buildings left comparatively undisturbed.