Apocalypse 1692 Read online

  ALSO BY BEN HUGHES

  The Siege of Fort William Henry:

  A Year on the Northeastern Frontier

  The Pursuit of the Essex:

  Heroism and Hubris on the High Seas in the War of 1812

  The British Invasion of the River Plate, 1806–1807:

  How the Recoats were Humbled and a Nation was Born

  Conquer or Die!

  Wellington’s Veterans and the Liberation of the New World

  They Shall Not Pass! The British Battalion at Jarama

  Apocalypse 1692

  EMPIRE, SLAVERY, AND THE GREAT PORT ROYAL EARTHQUAKE

  BEN HUGHES

  WESTHOLME

  Yardley

  ©2017 Ben Hughes

  Maps by Tracy Dungan

  Maps © 2017 Westholme Publishing

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Westholme Publishing, LLC

  904 Edgewood Road

  Yardley, Pennsylvania 19067

  Visit our Web site at www.westholmepublishing.com

  ISBN: 978-1-59416-621-1

  Also available in hardback.

  Produced in the United States of America.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Chronology

  Maps

  Prologue

  1. The West Indies Fleet

  2. As Hot as Hell, and as Wicked as the Devil

  3. Black Ivory

  4. Plantation Slavery in the New World

  5. No Peace Beyond the Line

  6. The Decline and Fall of the Earl of Inchiquin

  7. A Dismal Calamity

  8. Inhuman Barbarities

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustrations

  MAPS

  Following page xi:

  1. The Atlantic World in the late Seventeenth Century

  2. The Caribbean in the late Seventeenth Century

  3. Jamaica at the time of the Great Earthquake of 1692

  4. Port Royal, Jamaica, in the 1690s

  5. The Coast of West Africa in the late Seventeenth Century

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The second Earl of Inchiquin

  A Prospect of Bridgetown, Barbados, 1695

  A Hispaniola buccaneer

  Sir Hans Sloane

  Dutch and Africans trading ivory

  “Tradeing on Ye Coast of Africa”

  Olaudah Equiano

  Sugar processing on a plantation

  “A Rebel Negro armed & on his guard”

  A diving bell used to salvage on the seabed

  A London broadsheet announcing the July 7, 1692, earthquake at Port Royal

  “Old Cudjoe making peace”

  Sailors from the slaveship Zong throwing slaves into the ocean

  Chronology

  1502 The first African slaves arrive in the Americas.

  1509 The Spanish settle Jamaica.

  1642-46 The English Civil War.

  1649 Charles I is executed.

  1652-54 The First Anglo-Dutch War.

  1653 Oliver Cromwell is appointed Lord Protector.

  1655 An English expeditionary force under General Venables and Admiral Penn captures Jamaica from Spain as part of Cromwell’s Western Design.

  1658 Oliver Cromwell dies.

  1660 Charles II ascends to the throne thus restoring the line of the Stuarts.

  1662 The growing English settlement on Point Cagway, Jamaica, is first referred to as Port Royal.

  1664 The English capture the fort of Carolusburg (later renamed Cape Coast Castle) on the Gold Coast of West Africa in the prelude to the Second Anglo-Dutch War.

  1665-67 The Second Anglo-Dutch War.

  1670 With the Treaty of Madrid Spain recognizes the English right of possession to Jamaica.

  1672-74 The Third Anglo-Dutch War.

  1673 A major revolt of Coromantee slaves breaks out on Lobby’s estate, St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica.

  1678 A slave revolt breaks out on Duck’s estate, St. Catherine’s Parish, Jamaica.

  1680 Spanish agents begin purchasing slaves in Jamaica for transshipment to the Spanish colonies of the Americas.

  1688 The Glorious Revolution sees James II flee to France and William and Mary crowned joint monarchs of England.

  1688-97 The Nine Years’ War. France fights the English, Spanish, and Dutch in Europe and the New World.

  1689 Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, a True History. September: The Earl of Inchiquin is commissioned governor of Jamaica.

  1690 July: Jamaica’s largest slave revolt to date, believed to have been led by an Akan slave named Cudjoe, breaks out on Sutton’s estate, Clarendon Parish.

  1691 March to May: Inchiquin launches a raid against the privateers of Hispaniola.

  1692 January: Governor Inchiquin dies and is replaced as temporary head of the island council by Councillor John White. June: A massive earthquake destroys Port Royal.

  1693 March: William Beeston, Inchiquin’s permanent replacement, arrives at Jamaica.

  1694 June to July: A major French invasion is repulsed.

  1730-40 The First Maroon War breaks out in Jamaica.

  1738 March: Cudjoe signs a peace treaty with the governor of Jamaica giving the Leeward Maroons the right to live unmolested in the Cockpit Country.

  1807 The trade in slaves is abolished throughout the British Empire, although slavery continues in the colonies.

  1962 Jamaica gains its independence from Britain.

  Maps

  Prologue

  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 Jamaica’s 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 Royal’s 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 Morgan’s Harbour, a hotel named after the most famous of Port Royal’s former inhabitants: a Welsh farmer turned Caribbean privateer who terrorized the Spanish colonies and rose to the post of lieutenant-general of Jamaica. Beyond Morgan’s is St. Peter’s Church. Built in 1725–26, the present building lies atop the ruins of its predecessor destroyed on June 7, 1692. An inscription on a gravestone illuminates the events of that day: “Here layes the body of Lewes Galdy. . . . He was swallowed up in the Great Earthquake . . . & by the Providence of God was by another Shock thrown into the Sea & Miraculously saved by swimming until a Boat took him up.” Galdy was fortunate indeed: a third of Port Royal sank beneath the sea that day and a third of its 6,500 inhabitants were killed. Buried in the mud and murk of Kingston Bay are the remains of Port Royal’s drowned
streets. An array of seventeenth-century artifacts have been found: silver pieces of eight and gold doubloons imported by merchants who once traded with the cities of Portobelo and Cartagena; finely crafted pocket watches; gold rings; fragile Chinese porcelain; cannon balls, rusty pistols, and swords; a vast array of broken rum, porter, beer, and wine bottles; iron balances and lead weights; thousands of fragments of clay pipes; and coral-encrusted chains, collars, and manacles once used to constrain the slaves on whose labors the island’s legendary former wealth was built.1

  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 England’s 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. England’s 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, England’s last Catholic monarch and would-be emulator of Louis XIV’s absolutist France, usurped by the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange. The Bill of Rights, passed in 1690, sealed the government’s primacy over the crown: the new constitutional monarchs, William and Mary, were unable to suspend laws, levy taxes, make royal appointments, or maintain a standing army without Parliament’s 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.

  The Glorious Revolution also gave rise to the Nine Years’ War. The conflict pitted France against the League of Augsburg, an alliance of the English, Dutch, Spanish and Swedish, the Duchy of Savoy, and several German principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. While the war’s principal theatre, northwestern Europe, played host to a series of bloody stalemates and tactical victories which did little to alter the status quo, the Catholic hinterlands of the British Isles saw ferocious fighting, and a series of engagements in the Channel gradually established England’s naval superiority. In the colonies, skirmishes were fought by naval vessels, privateers, and militia on land and sea.2

  All these changes were evident in Jamaica. In the final decades of the seventeenth century the island emerged from its piratical past into a future of vast wealth and terrible suffering fueled by its sugar monoculture. In the 1690s, the elite deposed the absolutism foisted upon them by a despotic, populist, and self-appointed governor; free traders fought monopolists in the courts, the Council, and Assembly chambers; and the merchants of Port Royal struggled with the plantocracy for control of the island’s economy. On the plantations, the subjugation of African slaves caused bloody revolt. Scientists traveled to the colony to study the island’s flora and fauna, while the Nine Years’ War saw Jamaica raided by French privateers, and the island’s militia, naval forces, and privateers launched counterattacks against enemy bases on Hispaniola. Apocalypse 1692 ties all these threads together in a narrative which explores the personalities and motivations of the individuals involved, from the departure of the colony’s newly appointed governor from London in 1689 via the brutalities of the transatlantic slave trade to the cataclysmic events of June 7, 1692.3

  CHAPTER 1

  The West Indies Fleet

  LONDON, MADEIRA, AND THE WEST INDIES

  November 1689–May 1690

  On the 15th [March] we met a violent storm, which on the 17th increased so much that we were near foundering. The upper deck was full of water up to the gunwales, and the tarpauling not being good the water in the hold was above the ballast. . . . Our foremast was dangerously sprung, and as we ran before the wind a great sea pooped us, filled the cabin so full that it set me and the other gentlemen swimming, and did much damage.

  —Governor Kendall to the Earl of Shrewsbury, April 4, 1690

  ON A FRIGID DAY in late November 1689, beneath a choking blanket of smog, a forest of two thousand ships’ masts was spread across the Thames in London’s thriving commercial district. Cursing as they slipped on the cobblestones, scores of laborers manhandled puncheons, casks, crates, bags, and boxes from the riverside warehouses to the cranes at the quayside. Horses and carts, peddlers and hawkers, their breath frosting in the gelid air, added to the confusion. On the river, a turgid, stinking, brown effluent, watermen directed a myriad of wherries, hoys, prams, lighters, and barges ferrying the goods out to mid-river. The ships at anchor in the Pool ranged from 40-ton pinks, sloops, brigs, schooners, and brigantines to mighty broad sterns of over 500 tons bristling with cannon. On board, skeleton crews rigged hoists to the spars and lowered the goods into the ships’ cavernous holds. On the north bank stood the Custom House built in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666 for a little over £9,000 to Sir Christopher Wren’s design. Illuminated by the wan winter light seeping in through its tall riverside windows, the Long Room on the second floor was busy with merchants and their liveried servants, paying bonds to bewigged clerks for passes to clear their goods. Nearby was the Excise Office, whose police force of several thousand battled hosts of smugglers to enforce the trading laws. In the warren of streets and alleys beyond, merchant sailors loitered in gin shops and dockside inns. Amidst a fug of tobacco, they drank, smoked from communal clay pipes, and played cards, dice, or ten-bones while merchant captains competed for their attention with whores intent on parting the tars from their pay. Alongside the taverns, their signs lit by gas lamps, were several coffee shops. Among the most popular was the Jamaica, in St. Michael’s Alley, whose patrons perused the news sheets for updates on the war against France and the situation in the colonies while taking stock of the commodity prices quoted in Whitson’s Merchants Weekly Remembrancer.1

  Several blocks to the north was Leadenhall Street, the commercial district’s principal thoroughfare. Among the main buildings was the Royal Exchange, an imposing building with an ornate clock tower which stood midway between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street. The upper floor of the exchange housed two hundred shops “full of choice commodities, especially for men’s and women’s apparel.” Downstairs were a series of piazzas surrounding an interior courtyard where merchants traded their goods. Jewish merchants were segregated to the covered colonnades to the southeast. Nearby were Englishmen dealing in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian products, while those selling Jamaican produce gathered in the southwest corner. A few blocks east were the offices of England’s largest joint stock companies, state-backed giants whose royally decreed monopolies had ensured their rise to commercial prominence. The headquarters of the East India Company, a “corporation of men with long heads and deep purses,” stood near those of the Royal African Company, an enterprise which had been granted a thousand-year monopoly in West African trade by Charles II in 1670.2

  An economic revolution was taking place in England in the second half of the seventeenth century. Since the Restoration of 1660, when Charles II had returned to the throne after a decade of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, there had been a boom in ship building and manufacture, and the country’s rising merchant class had begun to exploit the emerging markets of the New World. By the end of the century, English merchant shipping was frequenting the ports of North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, exchanging manufactured goods for lumber, agricultural and animal produce, mineral wealth, and slaves while vessels of the East India Company brought tea, spices, silk, textiles, and porcelain from India and China. In an attempt to secure a global trading hegemony, the English had fought three wars against the Dutch since mid-century. Although frequently bested in the naval battles that characterized these conflicts, the English had eventually
ground down their opponents. Backed by Parliament’s Navigation Acts of 1651, 1662, 1663, 1670, and 1673, which forbade foreign ships from trading with England’s colonies, by the last decade of the seventeenth century London was beginning to outstrip Amsterdam as the principal hub of international trade. Imports and exports had grown by a third since the Restoration, while the lucrative reexport trade, which saw English ships serving the ports of Europe, would rise from a turnover of £700,000 per annum in the 1660s to £1,677,000 by 1699.3

  FIFTY OF THE merchant vessels at anchor off Custom House Quay that November were bound for the West Indies. After rendezvousing with fourteen warships of the Royal Navy, the fleet was to sail across the Channel, heading south through the Bay of Biscay before calling in at Madeira to gather wood and water and load up with wine. The fleet would then brave the open Atlantic before gathering at Bridgetown, Barbados, from whence eleven merchant vessels, with a single frigate acting as escort, were due to sail on to Port Royal, Jamaica, the commercial hub of the English Caribbean, while the rest of the warships would be sent against the French. As the majority of their cargo would be picked up en route at Funchal, Madeira, most of the merchant vessels were lightly loaded, their gunwales riding high above the brown waters of the Thames. The largest, at two hundred-tons displacement, were the 28-gun George and the 24-gun Antilope, both London-built broad sterns designed to cope with the treacherous conditions of the North Atlantic. The George, whose thirty-six “English Saylors” were commanded by Master John Robinson, was loaded with twelve casks of French brandy, two hundredweight of bottled claret, ninety-eight puncheons of English beer, and one hundred and fifty tons of dry goods. The latter could include such diverse items as silk scarves and woolen bays, fans, gloves, hats and wigs, locks and keys, books, tanned leather, whips, pipes, saddles, coaches, parrot cages, and tombstones. The Antilope’s master, Jonathan Harle, had loaded a similar cargo alongside sixty tons of arms and ammunition “for their majesties service.” Nine other vessels were also bound for Jamaica. Five were broad sterns of between one hundred and one hundred and eighty tons. All carried similar cargoes to those stowed by Harle and Robinson. There were also five pinks, small, narrow-stern vessels with shallow drafts built in the Dutch style. The smallest was the forty-ton Robert. Having no cannon on board, her master, James Coates, and the seven sailors under his command would have to rely on their consorts’ firepower if they encountered French men of war or privateers or the much-dreaded pirates of the Barbary Coast. Coates would pick up all his merchandise in Madeira. Like several of his fellows, he would set sail from London without a single barrel, puncheon, or bag of cargo on board.4