Posts tagged "pirates"

At 11:43 AM on June 7, 1692, the ground beneath Port Royal began to shake. Within minutes, two-thirds of the richest city in the Americas slid into Kingston Harbour. Buildings, streets, warehouses packed with plundered treasure, taverns still serving rum at midday -- all of it swallowed by the sea in a catastrophe so total that clergy across Europe called it divine judgment. They had a point about the wickedness, if not the theology. Port Royal in its prime was a place where pirates spent...

Kingston Harbour is one of the largest natural harbours in the world, and the story that unfolded along its shores reads like a fever dream of empire, piracy, disaster, and reinvention. Port Royal, sitting at the tip of the Palisadoes -- the narrow sand spit that shelters the harbour -- was once the richest and most notorious city in the Western Hemisphere. Today, it is a quiet fishing village where the ghosts of buccaneers share space with fishermen mending nets in the morning sun. The...