Part 10

As we approached Port Royal Bay a novel and pleasing sight was again displayed to our view. The hills now gradually gave place to gentle slopes and green knolls till towards the entrance the land became perfectly level. Still advancing, we found ourselves in a narrow channel between the projecting headlands beautifully ornamented with cocoanut trees and separated from each other by a very small distance, scarcely sufficient to permit two large vessels to pass. At the extremity of these headlands, where the bay begins to sweep, there are placed two very strong forts, and there is a third at the opposite side so that no enemy can force an entrance if a good outlook is kept. The water in this channel is remarkably clear, and exhibits with great distinctness the tops and chimneys of houses at the bottom. It is now many years since a dreadful earthquake destroyed great part of the town of Port Royal and covered it with the sea, by which means the site of the harbour was completely changed, and what was formerly dry land, on which stood the town, became part of the entrance of the bay.

In the “Statistical Report of the Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding Among the Troops in the West Indies,” published as a Parliamentary paper in 1838, the following is the account given of Port Royal:

... The barracks stand at the very extremity of the peninsula on which the town is built, only three feet above the level of the sea, and frequently at high water a great portion of the parade-ground is inundated by the tide. The hospital is in a narrow street leading from the town to the barracks, and consists of a ground floor and upper storey, divided into six wards, with balconies in front and rear....

... During the above period [1817–1836] the average mortality has been about 113 per thousand of the strength annually, but it exhibits remarkable variations at different periods. Last year it was less than 1 per cent., while in 1825 about a third part of the force was cut off; thus demonstrating how difficult it is to form any fair estimate of the influence of these climates, except on the average of a long series of years. This station suffered very severely from the epidemic fevers which raged throughout the island in 1819, 1822, and 1825. A large proportion of the force also was cut off in 1821, when most of the other stations were comparatively healthy....

On comparing the ratio of deaths by each of the above classes of diseases with that which has prevailed generally throughout the island, there appears little difference in any except fevers, which have been rather under the average, particularly since 1830; and so irregular has been their operation that, though in 1819 and 1825, they cut off a third part of the force; in 1831 not a death took place from them.

On visiting Jamaica in 1844, while the captain and the other passengers of the ship, which was bound for Savanna-la-Mar, went up the harbour, to see Kingston, Gosse spent his time in examining the fauna and flora of the Palisadoes.

It is true there was little of the luxuriance or beauty that we associate with tropical scenery here. It is a low land of sand nearly nine miles in length; but scarcely anywhere more than a few hundred yards in breadth, forming a natural breakwater that separates the broad lake-like harbour of Kingston from the Caribbean Sea. I found it barren enough; but it was all strange, and to feet which for nearly two months had not felt the firm earth, even a run along the beach was exhilarating. The graceful cocoanut palm sprang up in groups from the water’s edge, waving its feathery fronds over the rippling waters that dashed about its fibrous foot. Great bushes of prickly-pear and other _Cacti_ were growing on the low summit of the bank, covering large spaces of ground, with their impenetrable masses, presenting a formidable array of spines: as did also a species of _Acacia_ that grew in thickets and single trees. All along the line of high water lay heaps of seaweeds drying in the sun, among which was particularly abundant a species of _Padina_, closely resembling the pretty “Peacock’s tail” of our own shores, though less regularly beautiful. Sponges of various forms, and large Fan-corals with the gelatinous flesh dried on the horny skeleton, were also thrown up on the higher beach; and I found in some abundance, a _Coralline_, of a soft consistence, and of a bright grass green hue, each branch of which was terminated by a radiating tuft of slender filaments.

Shells were very scarce on the sea beach; but on the harbour side many species were found in the crevices and pools of the low rocks, and just within the margin of the water. All were small, and few presented any facts worthy of being noticed: they were chiefly of the genera _Turbo_, _Phasianella_, _Planaxis_, _Buccinum_, _Vermetus_, and _Fusus_; the bivalves _Ostrea_, _Anomia_, _Spondylus_, _Avicula_, _Arca_, _Cardium_, _Venus_, and _Pholas_. Several specimens of a brilliant little _Choetodon_ were swimming and darting about the narrow, but deep pools; they were not more than an inch in length, marked with alternate bands of black and golden yellow. In the vertical position in which they swim, with the eye of the observer looking down upon them, they appear to bear the slender proportions of ordinary fishes; and it is only by accident as in turning, or on capturing one, that we detect the peculiar form, high and vertically flattened, of this curious genus.

For the naturalist there is a work of lasting interest in the form of a small rare volume published in 1855, by Richard Hill, the friend and collaborator of Gosse, entitled “A Week at Port Royal.” Even in his day it was “a place for the memory.”

One passage records that:

Admiral Sir Charles Hamilton related that in 1780 the submerged houses were plainly discernible between the town as it now stands and the usual anchorage of vessels of war. Bryan Edwards says, in 1793, the ruins were visible in clear weather from the boats which sailed over them; and Lieutenant B. Jeffrey, of the Royal Navy, states that when engaged in the surveys made between the years 1824 and 1835, he repeatedly traced sites of buildings where the depth of the water is from four to six fathoms. When there was little wind, he perceived traces of houses, especially distinct when he used the instrument called “the diver’s eye” let down below the ripple of the wave.

A later work, published in 1893 by Major M. M[artin] and others, entitled “Port Royal and its Harbour,” is of more general interest.

In 1891, at the time of the exhibition, Jamaica was visited by the present King and his elder brother, and Port Royal was not overlooked; nor was it when Prince Albert visited Jamaica in the spring of 1913.

In 1894, experimental borings were made by the military authorities with a view to obtaining a supply of fresh water, but these were abandoned when a depth of 270 feet had been reached.

By the irony of fate, the impetus given a few years since to British naval development was destined to result not in the increase in importance, but in the withdrawal of the remnants of the faded glory, of a fort which was formerly one of the principal advance guards of Britannia’s realm.

A shadow of coming events was cast in 1903 by the sale of the old depot ship, the _Urgent_, which for many years, after serving as a troop ship, had swung to the tide at the entrance to the harbour, which before the days of monster vessels boasted that it could hold the navies of the world. By a special order in council the commodore then flew for a short time his broad pennant in the dockyard instead of in the _Urgent_, which was destined to spend her last days in the inglorious capacity of a coal hulk in Boston harbour. Then the edict went forth that the office of commodore, which in 1838 replaced that of admiral, when Jamaica ceased to be an independent command, was to be abolished, and on March 31, 1905, Commodore Fisher struck his flag.

Of later years Port Royal has become most important as a military fort; if that glory were taken from it, it would sink almost into the insignificance of its neighbour Port Henderson, across the harbour’s mouth—where the old _Aboukir_, rebuilt, does duty as a storehouse, and where memory still lingers of the days when it formed a seaside resort for the gay folk of St. Jago de la Vega—and it would be without Port Henderson’s importance as a banana port.

Its ancient glory was recalled on September 10, 1914, when a large crowd assembled to see H.M.S. _Essex_ bring in as prize the Hamburg-Amerika line steamer _Bethania_ with five hundred naval reservists on board.

It is to be hoped that the completion of the Panama Canal may give to Port Royal a new era of commercial prosperity, unaccompanied by the drawbacks which attended its acquisition of wealth in the seventeenth century.

II ST. CATHERINE

The parish of St. Catherine derived its name from the queen of Charles II., who was king of England when the parish was formed. In the first

## act in which it is mentioned it is correctly spelled Katharine. It

consists of what before the passing of law 20 of 1867 constituted the parishes of St. Catherine, St. Dorothy, St. John and St. Thomas-in-the-Vale. St. Thomas-in-the-Vale was probably named after Sir Thomas Lynch. St. Dorothy, Roby, in his “Memorials of the Cathedral Church and Parish of St. Catherine” (1831), conjectures, received its name in compliment to Dorthy Wale, who had probably a large estate there.

=Passage Fort=, at first known as The Passage, probably so called by the Spaniards as being their place of embarkation from St. Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town), situated at the west end of Kingston harbour, first appears in the annals of Jamaica as the landing-place of a predatory expedition fitted out chiefly in Barbados and St. Kitts in 1642 by a certain Captain William Jackson, of whom little is known but of whose expedition a graphic account is given in a manuscript in the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum entitled: “CXVIII—Mercurius Americanus—A Briefe Journall, or a succinct and true relation of the most Remarkable Passages observed in the Voyage undertaken by Captain William Jackson to the West Indies or Continent of America. Anno Domini, 1642, September 27,” reprinted in “The West India Committee Circular,” May 9, 1911—January 16, 1912. The date, September 27, 1642, it may be mentioned, is the date of sailing, not of the writing of the account.

Richard Norwood, who was a minister of religion and a school teacher, writing under date May 14, 1645, from Somers Islands, now known as Bermuda, to the Governor and Company of Adventurers to the Somers Islands, alluded to the time when of late the valiant and victorious General Capt. Jackson arrived after his voyage through the West Indies, and added “it was doubtful how things would go.”

After attempts more or less successful on various islands and the Spanish main, Jackson, in the _Charles_, accompanied by the _Dolphin_ and the _Valentine_, put into Port Royal harbour on March 25, 1643. After trying the west coast of the harbour, where they perceived “noe passage,” they interrogated some prisoners and were led to Passage Fort “at a place where we found an Old Trench and a storehouse of Timber, lately sett by but not fully finished,” where, after a skirmish with both horse and foot of the enemy, they took the fort and marched past “divers workes,” one of which they dismantled, into Spanish Town. Jackson’s men were so pleased that they wished “to sett by their stacon here”; but the general, bent on robbing the Spaniards, had no taste for bucolic simplicity and gave up the town for “200 Beaves and 10,000 weight of cassavi bread for ye victualling of our ships, besides 20 Beaves every day for ye general expense till our departure and 7,000 pieces of Eight.” After spending sixteen days in “salting up our Beaves” Jackson and his men sailed away, but a few days later took a Spanish frigate “in an Harbour next to that where wee had formerly ridd at ankor,” probably Old Harbour.

The most important event, however, in the history of Passage Fort is the taking of Jamaica by the English in 1655. After an inexcusable failure on Hispaniola (or, to give it its original name, Haiti), due in some measure to silly jealousy between the naval and military authorities, when, to use Venables’s own words, passion usurped the seat of reason, and also to want of care—one might almost say of honesty—on the part of those responsible for the organization of the expedition, Penn and Venables, joint commanders of an expedition intended “to assault the Spaniard in the West Indies,” entered what we now call Kingston harbour on May 10, 1655, and anchored at about 11 A.M. On nearing the island it had been proclaimed to the whole army, as a result of the cowardice displayed in the attack on Hispaniola, that whoever should be found to turn his back on the enemy and run away, the next officer (that brought up the rear of that division) should immediately run him through, on penalty of death if he failed to do it.

[Illustration:

PASSAGE FORT ]

There were thirty-eight ships in the three squadrons, and about seven thousand troops, without counting the sea regiment, who numbered nearly one thousand more.

A few shots fired into the fort from the _Martin_ (one of the smallest of the fleet, carrying but twelve guns and sixty men), which was run ashore as near the fort as possible, and the landing of the troops, seemed to have sufficed to disperse the Spaniards, whose best soldier, a major, had been disabled by a shot. They left three guns mounted in the fort.

Thus Jamaica was captured by a wretched army without the loss of a man. Colonel Clarke, who had died at sea on the 9th from wounds received at Hispaniola, was buried at Passage Fort on May 11.

The following account, signed W.B., and written probably by William Burrows, who was Sir William Penn’s chief clerk in the Navy Office after the Restoration, is taken from the journal of the _Swiftsure_:

The landing-places are two, and are only banks supported with stakes, a matter of twenty yards long towards the water; all the rest being trees and bushes, among which can be no good going ashore. At the more eastward, where we landed, we saw the ordnance the Spaniards left; the army having landed at the other, within that to the westward. A pretty parcel of ground is cleared within the landing-places. About a furlong and a half thence, the way leads into the wood, which continues till within a quarter of a mile of the town; all the way being even, without hills, and a fair path for eight to march abreast. At the issuing out of the wood begins the Savanna, which stretches about, and is very fair and plain to the westward of the town; so that I deemed there might be room enough for 50,000 men to draw up in battalia.

The Rio Cobre has, since the conquest of the island, brought down so much sand and deposited it at its mouth that the site of Passage Fort is now some four or five hundred yards off the sea. In dry weather, it now meanders through a new course which it cut for itself in 1838, across the beach to the harbour, giving no idea of the power which it acquires in the rainy season. Here, as of old, is there “no good going ashore,” the slope of the beach being very gradual.

In “The Present State of Jamaica” (1683) we read: “Going from Port Royal to St. Jago de la Vega, people land at Passage, where a fort was in Col. Doyly’s time, and there is about thirty houses that are storehouses, alehouses, and horse keepers, and hackney coaches; this being the greatest passage in the island, it is two leagues from Port Royal by sea, and six miles from St. Jago by land.”

Totally destroyed by the earthquake of 1692, the village was but

## partially rebuilt, and was, when Long wrote his history (1774), of small

importance, consisting of about fifteen houses, chiefly inhabited by wharfingers, warehouse keepers and the masters of wherries and hackney chaises, which plied with passengers to and from Port Royal and Spanish Town. Large ships could not lie alongside as there was not sufficient depth of water; and for this reason it was in a measure superseded by Port Henderson, where the depth of water is greater; but, with the abandonment of Spanish Town as the seat of government, both villages gradually diminished, and Passage Fort is to-day a mere fishing hamlet.

Richard Hill, in his “A Week at Port Royal” (1855), says:

The early maps of Saint Catherine’s show that there have occurred deviations in the course of the Rio Cobre, that are not easily to be reconciled by abundant rains. Antecedent to the discovery of the West Indies, the embouchure of the river was perceptively in the ponds, shut in by the narrow belt of land on which Fort Augusta stands, the river having been at that time more of a surface stream, and striking to _the sea due south; the outlet curving northward_, and embaying Passage Fort. At the time of the conquest of the island by the English the river flowed in an opposite direction _due north_, coursing the foot of the Caymanas Mountains, and making the present lagoons in the upper part of that plain its channel, seeking the _sea southward_, through what is now an independent stream, called the Ferry River (Fresh River). In 1722, in the midst of an extraordinary rain-storm, this channel was suddenly quitted, and a straight line made _eastward_. The settling waters, as they reached the Harbour of Kingston, impeded by the easterly winds, regurgitated through the lakelet into which they gathered themselves, and digging out the soil at the foot of the mountains, made the present lagoons, increasing the sea-board lands of Hunt’s Bay 3000 feet (three thousand).

In Spanish Town, the ancient capital, although there is nothing to speak to us of the native Arawâk, we can perhaps, better than anywhere else in the island, picture to ourselves the deeds of the Spaniards in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century; and especially the long struggles between the people’s or rather planters’ representatives and the government in the House of Assembly for a century and a half; together with the political and social entertainments at King’s House, as narrated for one short period in the graphic pages of Lady Nugent’s Journal, until, with the removal of the government to Kingston by Sir John Peter Grant, Spanish Town was shorn of its grandeur, to be only revived at rare intervals by such episodes as the consecration of the Bishop of Antigua in 1911.

Jackson gives the following account of the town in 1643.

The fame of our proceedings in other places had arrived here eight days before us, so that they had time enough to convey all their best household stuff away, leaving nothing behinde them of any value, but onely ye possession of empty houses, with some few chaires, bedsteads, jarres of Mountego, and ye like poore materialls. However, we feasted ourselves this night with Hoggs, Henns, and other good provisions, which wee found in and about ye Towne. This place is called by ye inhabitants Sant Jago de la Vega, being a faire Town, consisting of four or five hundred houses, built for ye most part with canes, overcast with morter and lime, and covered with Tyle. It is beautiful with five or six stately churches and chapples, and one Monastery of Franciscan Fryers, and situated upon descent of a delectable and spacious plaine, on ye North West whereof runneth a pleasant River, whose streame doth empty itself into ye Harbour, distant from hence about four miles Eastward, where our Fleet lay at ankor.

The houses, unlesse it bee in ye Markitt Place, stand somewhat separated one from another, by which means it taketh up farr more roome than thrice ye number of our comparted building in Europe.

The churches and houses of the Spaniards were for the most part destroyed by the Venables’s soldiery in sheer wantonness. But when they began to settle the island, they repaired those which were worth repairing. It is doubtful, however, if much Spanish work exists to-day.

The foundations of St. Jago de la Vega were probably laid by the then viceroy, Diego Columbus, about the year 1523. His son Lewis, created Duke of Veragua, had for a second title Marquis de la Vega, after this town. Hickeringill (writing in 1661) tells us that when the English took the island it contained 2000 houses, sixteen churches and chapels and one abbey, and that of these the English soldiery left but two churches and 500 houses undemolished, but it is thought by Long that this was an exaggeration.

In April 1755 when the penkeepers of St. Catherine, St. John, St. Dorothy and St. Thomas-in-the-Vale petitioned the Assembly against the proposed removal of the courts of justice and public offices to Kingston (the assembly itself being then sitting there) they stated that St. Jago de la Vega then consisted of 499 houses, of a rental value of nearly £20,000, and 866 settled white inhabitants exclusive of visitors, and 405 mulattoes and negroes: that there were 472 pens and provision plantations in the neighbourhood, and there were 24,000 inhabitants in the parishes named.

When Doyley, on the death of Brayne in September 1657, found himself in supreme command in the newly acquired island of Jamaica, he set himself resolutely to work to establish the colony on a firm basis. After having successfully repelled three attempts made by Sasi, the last Spanish governor, to retake the island from Hispaniola, he, in August 1660, was met by internal rebellion, got up by Colonel Raymond, who persuaded Colonel Tyson, the gallant commander of the English troops in the last defeat of Sasi a few months earlier, to participate in it.

Of Raymond little is known beyond that Beeston calls him “a discontented reformed officer,” and Long “a factious officer.” Tyson, we know, was not one of those who came out with Venables, but arrived a year later. Leslie tells us that they were “two gentlemen who adhered to the Protector and had a mighty influence on the soldiers.”

In the face of contradictory evidence it is a little difficult to discover the real origin of the outbreak. An interesting contemporary account of it is given by Colonel (afterwards Sir) William Beeston, in a journal kept by him “from his first coming to Jamaica,” and printed from the MSS. now in the British Museum, in “Interesting Tracts relating to the Island of Jamaica ... St. Jago de la Vega, 1800.” He says: