The Wrath of God

During summer when the mornings are still, the Marco Beach Boys and Girls always take time for stories and inspiration. When the Gulf of Mexico is so calm it becomes a mirror, and the colors of sunrise reflect upon the water, the horizon will disappear as the sea and the sky become a window into the past.

Well after Juan Ponce de Leon arrived on Marco and departed with the idea his conquistadors found the fountain of youth, a new age of explorers sailed into the Ten Thousand Islands and left the legends of pirates and buried treasure. Captain Calico Jack Rackham and two beautiful women led the pirates of the day and many believe a buried bounty of silver bullion lies lost among the ancient shell mounds of the Isla de San Marcos. 

Anne Bonny and Mary Reid were the women aboard with Calico Jack Rackham as their pirate schooner sailed from the Ten Thousand Islands and into the Caribbean. When the daring pirate that chose to sail with women made a last landfall in Port Royal, Jamaica, the ghosts of a wicked city would fail to offer a warning that the end of another pirate was near. 

The city of Port Royal began when the British conquered the Spanish colonies of Jamaica in 1655. The Spaniards were making use of a remote sandbar for careening and repairing sailing ships, and after the Spanish were vanquished, the English began building a fort to protect the newly found deep water port from enemy aggression. After two years of stonework, Fort Charles was complete and British naval, trading, and privateering vessels were under the protection of English cannon. During the next two decades, five more forts were built on the sandbar, and with the surrounding artillery, the new fortified outpost of brick and stone was the most well defended port in the Caribbean.

Rising between the six castle-like fortifications, the town of Port Royal began to grow rapidly. Because of the deep-water access to the new colony, large ships began unloading cargo, and merchants supporting the shipping industry began to flourish. During the 1670’s Port Royal was growing faster than any other township in the New World. The new city rising between the forts was soon host to slave markets and a vast sugar and rum empire. Before 1690, the denizens of the city numbered well over 8,000 and were living as merchants or slavers in more than 500 brick and stone buildings.

When privateering became encouraged under the maritime laws of England, buccaneers and pirates filled the high streets and the queen’s roads and soon the only occupants of the original churches were the lonely priests and ministers.

When Captain Henry Morgan became governor of Port Royal, the largest city in the New World was Boston. The second largest city was Port Royal. The Jamaican city was also the most infamous and dangerous as it was surrounded by a fleet of pirate ships and six forts bristling with cannon. Cutthroat prostitutes, swashbucklers, and buccaneers of every kind were afoot day and night and were consistently well oiled by the infamous Kill Devil Rum, which killed hundreds every year from alcohol poisoning.

Any evening in Port Royal could easily find pirates staggering down the lantern lit streets where almost every inn was a brothel, and murder was an hourly event. Torture of prisoners was another source of sinister entertainment, and if no captives were available, plantation workers were driven before cracking whips into the most wicked city since Sodom and Gomorra. One account from a visitor declared there were more stolen gold coins loose in the streets of Port Royal than could ever be found legally in London Towne.

Before his death, Captain Henry Morgan became so disgusted with the wickedness of the evil city he often gave the warning, “The Wrath of God must certainly be forthcoming.”

Captain Morgan was right. Only a few years after his death and burial in the graveyard of Port Royal, his prediction came true.

On a Sunday morning, at twenty minutes before noon on June 7 in 1692, a bell began ringing in a church tower without anyone pulling the lanyard. Minutes later, the first of three giant earthquake shocks rocked the evil city. When a second shockwave opened the fissures in the cobblestone streets and the stone fortifications began to fall, a tidal wave carried the sailing ships ashore as the rushing water drowned two thousand of the cutthroat crew. Once the third and final quake began to finish with the ground and open the sea, the graveyard and the ever-ringing bell in the church tower sank under the turbulent waves. After the graveyard was open and three quarters of the city was under thirty feet of water, floating coffins popped to the surface and rose to meet the sinking battlements of Fort Charles.

Three days later thousands were dead but the city tried to rally. Eventually, after a tenuous few years, trade was reestablished and the wicked ways of Port Royal continued until a massive fire erupted near a gunpowder magazine and the portions of the town that were rebuilt became ashes after an explosion and firestorm.

Meanwhile Calico Jack Rackham and his pirate queens, Anne Bonny and Mary Reid, sailed with their crew of buccaneers over the sunken city and anchored above the ruins. After a naval patrol discovered the pirate schooner and the drunken and sleeping pirates, a new British magistrate ordered the outlaw mariners captured. After waking in a cell and looking out toward a waiting gallows, Calico Jack promised to trade the location of his silver treasure buried in the Ten Thousand Islands for his freedom. The British official scoffed at the offer and the pirate captain that reportedly once roamed the shell mounds of Marco and the Ten Thousand Islands was hanged in what remained of Port Royal, Jamaica for his crimes of piracy on the high seas. The pirate queens, Anne Bonny and Mary Reid, were spared the gallows because they were expecting children.