Hughes - Apocalypse 1692: empire, slavery, and the great Port Royal earthquake

PERCHED ON A SAND SPIT jutting into the muddy waters of Kingston Bay, Port Royal is a sleepy fishing village of 1,600 souls. It is an unassuming place. The sound of the waves slapping the seashore is interrupted only by the fast patrol boats of the Jamaica Defence Force. The locals get by on the profits hooked by a handful of marlin fishermen and a few dollars brought in by occasional tourists seeking an insight into Jamaicas murky past. Those who venture out from the resorts to the north and east of the island and make their way via Michael Manley International Airport and the scrub and sand dunes of the Pallisadoes are rewarded by the sight of a handful of relics which pay tribute to Port Royals former prominence. Half a mile to the east of town, as the spit narrows, is the eighteenth-century naval cemetery. Crooked gravestones adorned by weather-worn inscriptions bear witness to the toll yellow fever took on the Royal Navy seamen whose base once dominated town. Beyond is the ruin of an octagonal tower, part of the seventeenth-century Fort Rupert. The rest lies under a shallow lagoon whose waters also conceal a large fragment of a brick battery wall. Further on visitors pass Morgans Harbour, a hotel named after the most famous of Port Royals former inhabitants: a Welsh farmer turned Caribbean privateer who terrorized the Spanish colonies and rose to the post of lieutenant-general of Jamaica. Beyond Morgans is St. Peters Church. Built in 172526, the present building lies atop

IN ENGLAND, the second half of the seventeenth century was a period of great change. Where issues of religion, family and clan ties, and the struggle between Parliament and the crown had dominated the early Stuart era, trade, the generation of wealth, and the rise of science and the arts grew in importance after the Restoration in 1660. Three Anglo-Dutch Wars and a series of Navigation Acts prohibiting foreign ships from trading with Englands colonies saw the country eclipse the United Netherlands as the leading European player in global trade. This growth was mirrored by an interest in colonial possessions. Englands economic and political influence spread along the shores of West Africa, among the islands of the West Indies, the Eastern Seaboard of North America, and the subcontinent of India. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution saw James II, Englands last Catholic monarch and would-be emulator of Louis XIVs absolutist France, usurped by the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange. The Bill of Rights, passed in 1690, sealed the governments primacy over the crown: the new constitutional monarchs, William and Mary, were unable to suspend laws, levy taxes, make royal appointments, or maintaina standing army without Parliaments permission. The rise of the Whigs saw a shift away from agrarianism and a state-managed mercantilism of cloying tariffs, jealously guarded monopolies, and the belief that global wealth was finite, toward a commercial society built on the potential of free trade.