Port Royal the Atlantis of the Caribbean sunk into the depths
The incredible story of Port Royal, the Atlantis of the Caribbean, sunk into the depths due to an earthquake.
Port Royal was a small Jamaican town colonized by the English in the early 1600s. On June 7, 1692, a powerful earthquake—though not violent in nature—struck the British colony. Due to the unique geological conditions on which the town was built, it sank into the sea, taking with it the entire settlement and its inhabitants. This catastrophic event preserved much of the city in remarkable condition on the Caribbean seabed, turning it into a kind of "Atlantis" of the Caribbean—an authentic submerged archaeological treasure that remains a popular dive site to this day.
At the time, Port Royal was the wealthiest English possession in the New World, its prosperity fueled by pirates from the "West Indies," the rum trade, and the slave trade from the coasts of West Africa. On the morning of June 7, 1692, Reverend Heath, the pastor of the largest church in the harbor, was praying when the ground suddenly began to shake violently. The reverend managed to escape as the earth began to sink beneath his feet.
Decades earlier, English pirates had built Port Royal on unstable land. The colony was situated on a narrow strip of land, sloping steeply toward the sea, composed of soft sands and river gravel, more than 30 meters thick. The ground was poorly consolidated and unstable. When the earthquake struck, the layers of sand and gravel, shaken by the seismic waves, slipped into the sea, dragging the entire town with them. Following the quake, a tsunami flooded the few parts of the town that remained above water. Within minutes, Port Royal had sunk to a depth of over 15 meters. By the time the disaster was over, more than 2,000 people had perished, and the once-thriving port was reduced to nothing more than submerged ruins.
A few weeks after the devastating disaster, Reverend Heath, who had miraculously survived the tragic event, wrote the following about the so-called "wrongdoers" who remained in the area: "I hope that this terrible judgment of God will lead them to change their ways, for I do not believe there are people so devoid of the fear of God on the face of the Earth." Nearly two centuries later, in 1959, two American archaeologists began to survey the seabed around Jamaica's coast, digging through layers of two to three meters of mud and sand.
What they discovered, after days of intense searching, were the remains of the city, still intact beneath the waters off Jamaica. Although many buildings had been destroyed by the tremors, entire city blocks of houses and shops from Port Royal had been carried by the shifting earth into the sea and remained remarkably well-preserved on the ocean floor. After removing the layers of sediment covering them, the archaeologists uncovered buildings with walls still standing, and doors and windows still in place.
It was a truly astonishing discovery that surprised even the archaeologists themselves. In one home’s kitchen, at the bottom of a copper vessel, they found the bones of a turtle—presumably the remnants of a meal that had been started but never finished. In a woodworking shop, they found an almost-completed bed, while inside a small pharmacy, bottles of medicine and albarelli (traditional apothecary jars) were still neatly lined up, containing ready-to-use remedies.
While swimming among the ruins, the divers also found closed bottles of rosewater, a gold wedding ring engraved with an inscription, and, among the remnants of the pirate city, a treasure chest, corroded by saltwater, with over 1,536 silver coins scattered around it. Subsequent underwater explorations led to the discovery of more sections of the city, still perfectly intact beneath layers of sandy debris. However, these underwater excavations remain a perilous adventure.
This is even more true for the submerged remains of Port Royal, the Atlantis of the Caribbean, considering that Jamaica is a seismically active area due to its location along the boundary of the Caribbean Plate, which collides with the southern edge of the North American Plate. The region is frequently affected by periodic seismic activity, including moderate to strong tremors, which can pose significant risks to divers involved in archaeological research. Additionally, the recurring earthquakes, combined with the erosive effects of rainfall and ocean currents, continuously add new layers of sand and silt that settle over the archaeological site.
To highlight the seismic activity in the Caribbean, one need only recall the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2012 with a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale, which struck the southwestern coast of Haiti. The quake destroyed much of the capital, Port-au-Prince—including the Presidential Palace—and resulted in over 200,000 fatalities. The tremor occurred along the northern margin of the Caribbean Plate, which moves eastward at an average rate of about 20 mm per year relative to the North American Plate. In the western region of Haiti, the boundary between the two plates is characterized by two complex systems of strike-slip faults, running roughly parallel to one another in an east-west orientation.
