Marine Submersion and the Moral Geography of Port Royal, Jamaica

• In Event: Imaginaries of (Un)settlement in the Western Atlantic

Abstract

Stories of oceanic inundation have long evoked powerful moral messages. In its close focus on the 1692 earthquake and aftermath that submerged Port Royal, Jamaica, one of the wealthiest but “wickedest” cities in the West Indies, this paper constructs a moral geography of early modern marine submersion. Drawing on imperial correspondence, political commentary, maps, and the archeological record, it revisits America’s most notorious pirate lair to reconstruct how a catastrophic “natural disaster” was imagined in the metropole and on the periphery of an expanding Atlantic world. When Port Royal sank beneath the sea, Jamaica was transformed, but so too was the human geography of the wider Caribbean. As the real and imaginary landscapes of the West Indies were reconstructed, the boundaries between contemporary imperial spheres of influence became blurred, which provided space for those who sought to skirt the law to spread north into the Bahamas.

In its careful consideration of the ways marine submersion shaped empires and their outlaws, this paper adds fresh perspective—a vertical dimension—to the “spatial turn” in early American history. Close focus on the Caribbean, moreover, adds to the burgeoning field of “thalassography,” which acknowledges the existence of many seas nested within the Atlantic world. Ultimately, this interdisciplinary look at how culture, ecology, geography, and the imagination became firmly entangled alongshore reveals that the conceptual complexities beneath the surface of the sea played a powerful role in creating new human networks and identities across the Caribbean.

Author

• Christopher Leonard Pastore, State University of New York at Albany