were plainly discernible between the town as it now stands and the
usual anchorage of vessels of war. Bryan Edwards says, in 1793, the
ruins were visible in clear weather from the boats which sailed over
them; and Lieutenant B. Jeffrey, of the Royal Navy, states that when
engaged in the surveys made between the years 1824 and 1835, he
repeatedly traced sites of buildings where the depth of the water is
from four to six fathoms. When there was little wind, he perceived
traces of houses, especially distinct when he used the instrument
called “the diver’s eye” let down below the ripple of the wave.
A later work, published in 1893 by Major M. M[artin] and others,
entitled “Port Royal and its Harbour,” is of more general interest.
In 1891, at the time of the exhibition, Jamaica was visited by the
present King and his elder brother, and Port Royal was not overlooked;
nor was it when Prince Albert visited Jamaica in the spring of 1913.
In 1894, experimental borings were made by the military authorities with
a view to obtaining a supply of fresh water, but these were abandoned
when a depth of 270 feet had been reached.
By the irony of fate, the impetus given a few years since to British
naval development was destined to result not in the increase in
importance, but in the withdrawal of the remnants of the faded glory, of
a fort which was formerly one of the principal advance guards of
Britannia’s realm.
A shadow of coming events was cast in 1903 by the sale of the old depot
ship, the _Urgent_, which for many years, after serving as a troop ship,
had swung to the tide at the entrance to the harbour, which before the
days of monster vessels boasted that it could hold the navies of the
world. By a special order in council the commodore then flew for a short
time his broad pennant in the dockyard instead of in the _Urgent_, which
was destined to spend her last days in the inglorious capacity of a coal
hulk in Boston harbour. Then the edict went forth that the office of
commodore, which in 1838 replaced that of admiral, when Jamaica ceased
to be an independent command, was to be abolished, and on March 31,
1905, Commodore Fisher struck his flag.
Of later years Port Royal has become most important as a military fort;
if that glory were taken from it, it would sink almost into the
insignificance of its neighbour Port Henderson, across the harbour’s
mouth—where the old _Aboukir_, rebuilt, does duty as a storehouse, and
where memory still lingers of the days when it formed a seaside resort
for the gay folk of St. Jago de la Vega—and it would be without Port
Henderson’s importance as a banana port.
Its ancient glory was recalled on September 10, 1914, when a large crowd
assembled to see H.M.S. _Essex_ bring in as prize the Hamburg-Amerika
line steamer _Bethania_ with five hundred naval reservists on board.
It is to be hoped that the completion of the Panama Canal may give to
Port Royal a new era of commercial prosperity, unaccompanied by the
drawbacks which attended its acquisition of wealth in the seventeenth
century.
II
ST. CATHERINE
The parish of St. Catherine derived its name from the queen of Charles
II., who was king of England when the parish was formed. In the first
act in which it is mentioned it is correctly spelled Katharine. It
consists of what before the passing of law 20 of 1867 constituted the
parishes of St. Catherine, St. Dorothy, St. John and St.
Thomas-in-the-Vale. St. Thomas-in-the-Vale was probably named after Sir
Thomas Lynch. St. Dorothy, Roby, in his “Memorials of the Cathedral
Church and Parish of St. Catherine” (1831), conjectures, received its
name in compliment to Dorthy Wale, who had probably a large estate
there.
=Passage Fort=, at first known as The Passage, probably so called by the
Spaniards as being their place of embarkation from St. Jago de la Vega
(Spanish Town), situated at the west end of Kingston harbour, first
appears in the annals of Jamaica as the landing-place of a predatory
expedition fitted out chiefly in Barbados and St. Kitts in 1642 by a
certain Captain William Jackson, of whom little is known but of whose
expedition a graphic account is given in a manuscript in the Sloane MSS.
in the British Museum entitled: “CXVIII—Mercurius Americanus—A Briefe
Journall, or a succinct and true relation of the most Remarkable
Passages observed in the Voyage undertaken by Captain William Jackson to
the West Indies or Continent of America. Anno Domini, 1642, September
27,” reprinted in “The West India Committee Circular,” May 9,
1911—January 16, 1912. The date, September 27, 1642, it may be
mentioned, is the date of sailing, not of the writing of the account.
Richard Norwood, who was a minister of religion and a school teacher,
writing under date May 14, 1645, from Somers Islands, now known as
Bermuda, to the Governor and Company of Adventurers to the Somers
Islands, alluded to the time when of late the valiant and victorious
General Capt. Jackson arrived after his voyage through the West Indies,
and added “it was doubtful how things would go.”
After attempts more or less successful on various islands and the
Spanish main, Jackson, in the _Charles_, accompanied by the _Dolphin_
and the _Valentine_, put into Port Royal harbour on March 25, 1643.
After trying the west coast of the harbour, where they perceived “noe
passage,” they interrogated some prisoners and were led to Passage Fort
“at a place where we found an Old Trench and a storehouse of Timber,
lately sett by but not fully finished,” where, after a skirmish with
both horse and foot of the enemy, they took the fort and marched past
“divers workes,” one of which they dismantled, into Spanish Town.
Jackson’s men were so pleased that they wished “to sett by their stacon
here”; but the general, bent on robbing the Spaniards, had no taste for
bucolic simplicity and gave up the town for “200 Beaves and 10,000
weight of cassavi bread for ye victualling of our ships, besides 20
Beaves every day for ye general expense till our departure and 7,000
pieces of Eight.” After spending sixteen days in “salting up our Beaves”
Jackson and his men sailed away, but a few days later took a Spanish
frigate “in an Harbour next to that where wee had formerly ridd at
ankor,” probably Old Harbour.
The most important event, however, in the history of Passage Fort is the
taking of Jamaica by the English in 1655. After an inexcusable failure
on Hispaniola (or, to give it its original name, Haiti), due in some
measure to silly jealousy between the naval and military authorities,
when, to use Venables’s own words, passion usurped the seat of reason,
and also to want of care—one might almost say of honesty—on the part of
those responsible for the organization of the expedition, Penn and
Venables, joint commanders of an expedition intended “to assault the
Spaniard in the West Indies,” entered what we now call Kingston harbour
on May 10, 1655, and anchored at about 11 A.M. On nearing the island it
had been proclaimed to the whole army, as a result of the cowardice
displayed in the attack on Hispaniola, that whoever should be found to
turn his back on the enemy and run away, the next officer (that brought
up the rear of that division) should immediately run him through, on
penalty of death if he failed to do it.
[Illustration:
PASSAGE FORT
]
There were thirty-eight ships in the three squadrons, and about seven
thousand troops, without counting the sea regiment, who numbered nearly
one thousand more.
A few shots fired into the fort from the _Martin_ (one of the smallest
of the fleet, carrying but twelve guns and sixty men), which was run
ashore as near the fort as possible, and the landing of the troops,
seemed to have sufficed to disperse the Spaniards, whose best soldier, a
major, had been disabled by a shot. They left three guns mounted in the
fort.
Thus Jamaica was captured by a wretched army without the loss of a man.
Colonel Clarke, who had died at sea on the 9th from wounds received at
Hispaniola, was buried at Passage Fort on May 11.
The following account, signed W.B., and written probably by William
Burrows, who was Sir William Penn’s chief clerk in the Navy Office after
the Restoration, is taken from the journal of the _Swiftsure_:
The landing-places are two, and are only banks supported with stakes,
a matter of twenty yards long towards the water; all the rest being
trees and bushes, among which can be no good going ashore. At the more
eastward, where we landed, we saw the ordnance the Spaniards left; the
army having landed at the other, within that to the westward. A pretty
parcel of ground is cleared within the landing-places. About a furlong
and a half thence, the way leads into the wood, which continues till
within a quarter of a mile of the town; all the way being even,
without hills, and a fair path for eight to march abreast. At the
issuing out of the wood begins the Savanna, which stretches about, and
is very fair and plain to the westward of the town; so that I deemed
there might be room enough for 50,000 men to draw up in battalia.
The Rio Cobre has, since the conquest of the island, brought down so
much sand and deposited it at its mouth that the site of Passage Fort is
now some four or five hundred yards off the sea. In dry weather, it now
meanders through a new course which it cut for itself in 1838, across
the beach to the harbour, giving no idea of the power which it acquires
in the rainy season. Here, as of old, is there “no good going ashore,”
the slope of the beach being very gradual.
In “The Present State of Jamaica” (1683) we read: “Going from Port Royal
to St. Jago de la Vega, people land at Passage, where a fort was in Col.
Doyly’s time, and there is about thirty houses that are storehouses,
alehouses, and horse keepers, and hackney coaches; this being the
greatest passage in the island, it is two leagues from Port Royal by
sea, and six miles from St. Jago by land.”
Totally destroyed by the earthquake of 1692, the village was but
partially rebuilt, and was, when Long wrote his history (1774), of small
importance, consisting of about fifteen houses, chiefly inhabited by
wharfingers, warehouse keepers and the masters of wherries and hackney
chaises, which plied with passengers to and from Port Royal and Spanish
Town. Large ships could not lie alongside as there was not sufficient
depth of water; and for this reason it was in a measure superseded by
Port Henderson, where the depth of water is greater; but, with the
abandonment of Spanish Town as the seat of government, both villages
gradually diminished, and Passage Fort is to-day a mere fishing hamlet.
Richard Hill, in his “A Week at Port Royal” (1855), says:
The early maps of Saint Catherine’s show that there have occurred
deviations in the course of the Rio Cobre, that are not easily to be
reconciled by abundant rains. Antecedent to the discovery of the West
Indies, the embouchure of the river was perceptively in the ponds,
shut in by the narrow belt of land on which Fort Augusta stands, the
river having been at that time more of a surface stream, and striking
to _the sea due south; the outlet curving northward_, and embaying
Passage Fort. At the time of the conquest of the island by the English
the river flowed in an opposite direction _due north_, coursing the
foot of the Caymanas Mountains, and making the present lagoons in the
upper part of that plain its channel, seeking the _sea southward_,
through what is now an independent stream, called the Ferry River
(Fresh River). In 1722, in the midst of an extraordinary rain-storm,
this channel was suddenly quitted, and a straight line made
_eastward_. The settling waters, as they reached the Harbour of
Kingston, impeded by the easterly winds, regurgitated through the
lakelet into which they gathered themselves, and digging out the soil
at the foot of the mountains, made the present lagoons, increasing the
sea-board lands of Hunt’s Bay 3000 feet (three thousand).
In Spanish Town, the ancient capital, although there is nothing to speak
to us of the native Arawâk, we can perhaps, better than anywhere else in
the island, picture to ourselves the deeds of the Spaniards in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth century; and especially the long struggles
between the people’s or rather planters’ representatives and the
government in the House of Assembly for a century and a half; together
with the political and social entertainments at King’s House, as
narrated for one short period in the graphic pages of Lady Nugent’s
Journal, until, with the removal of the government to Kingston by Sir
John Peter Grant, Spanish Town was shorn of its grandeur, to be only
revived at rare intervals by such episodes as the consecration of the
Bishop of Antigua in 1911.
Jackson gives the following account of the town in 1643.
The fame of our proceedings in other places had arrived here eight
days before us, so that they had time enough to convey all their best
household stuff away, leaving nothing behinde them of any value, but
onely ye possession of empty houses, with some few chaires, bedsteads,
jarres of Mountego, and ye like poore materialls. However, we feasted
ourselves this night with Hoggs, Henns, and other good provisions,
which wee found in and about ye Towne. This place is called by ye
inhabitants Sant Jago de la Vega, being a faire Town, consisting of
four or five hundred houses, built for ye most part with canes,
overcast with morter and lime, and covered with Tyle. It is beautiful
with five or six stately churches and chapples, and one Monastery of
Franciscan Fryers, and situated upon descent of a delectable and
spacious plaine, on ye North West whereof runneth a pleasant River,
whose streame doth empty itself into ye Harbour, distant from hence
about four miles Eastward, where our Fleet lay at ankor.
The houses, unlesse it bee in ye Markitt Place, stand somewhat
separated one from another, by which means it taketh up farr more
roome than thrice ye number of our comparted building in Europe.
The churches and houses of the Spaniards were for the most part
destroyed by the Venables’s soldiery in sheer wantonness. But when they
began to settle the island, they repaired those which were worth
repairing. It is doubtful, however, if much Spanish work exists to-day.
The foundations of St. Jago de la Vega were probably laid by the then
viceroy, Diego Columbus, about the year 1523. His son Lewis, created
Duke of Veragua, had for a second title Marquis de la Vega, after this
town. Hickeringill (writing in 1661) tells us that when the English took
the island it contained 2000 houses, sixteen churches and chapels and
one abbey, and that of these the English soldiery left but two churches
and 500 houses undemolished, but it is thought by Long that this was an
exaggeration.
In April 1755 when the penkeepers of St. Catherine, St. John, St.
Dorothy and St. Thomas-in-the-Vale petitioned the Assembly against the
proposed removal of the courts of justice and public offices to Kingston
(the assembly itself being then sitting there) they stated that St. Jago
de la Vega then consisted of 499 houses, of a rental value of nearly
£20,000, and 866 settled white inhabitants exclusive of visitors, and
405 mulattoes and negroes: that there were 472 pens and provision
plantations in the neighbourhood, and there were 24,000 inhabitants in
the parishes named.
When Doyley, on the death of Brayne in September 1657, found himself in
supreme command in the newly acquired island of Jamaica, he set himself
resolutely to work to establish the colony on a firm basis. After having
successfully repelled three attempts made by Sasi, the last Spanish
governor, to retake the island from Hispaniola, he, in August 1660, was
met by internal rebellion, got up by Colonel Raymond, who persuaded
Colonel Tyson, the gallant commander of the English troops in the last
defeat of Sasi a few months earlier, to participate in it.
Of Raymond little is known beyond that Beeston calls him “a discontented
reformed officer,” and Long “a factious officer.” Tyson, we know, was
not one of those who came out with Venables, but arrived a year later.
Leslie tells us that they were “two gentlemen who adhered to the
Protector and had a mighty influence on the soldiers.”
In the face of contradictory evidence it is a little difficult to
discover the real origin of the outbreak. An interesting contemporary
account of it is given by Colonel (afterwards Sir) William Beeston, in a
journal kept by him “from his first coming to Jamaica,” and printed from
the MSS. now in the British Museum, in “Interesting Tracts relating to
the Island of Jamaica ... St. Jago de la Vega, 1800.” He says:
April 27, 1660. At my arrival the people were still as an Army, but
without pay, commanded by General Doyley, under whom, as chief
ministers, were Major Fairfax and Captain Burroughs; the government
was only by a court-martial held once a month at St. Jago, and what
disputes General Doyley [_gap in the print here_] self, who lived very
near and private, did not by any means love planting, but hindered
those that were willing to plant, by telling them they would be all
called off. The people were now healthful, and provisions began to be
plenty, and trade to increase; the privateering was carried on, and
good prizes often brought in by them....
About this time the rump parliament being again up in England no
recruits came for the Army, and they had no pay which made the
soldiers deem themselves neglected, and a general expectation there
was that all would be called off, and the island deserted, there being
no news of His Majesty’s happy restoration; this gave occasion to one
of the Regiments at Guanaboe, and formerly commanded by Colonel
Barrington, but now by Lieutenant-Colonel Tyson, who being set on by a
discontented reformed officer called Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond, who
lived near him, began to mutiny and set up for themselves, saying,
they would live no more as an Army. And accordingly, August 2, they
declared they would have the Island settled in Colonies, and make
constables and civil officers. These, General Doyley not being able to
appease with words, drew some forces to St. Jago to appease them, but
was cautious, not being certain but that those he brought if it came
to the push, would fail him, and be of the mind of the others; and,
therefore, he ordered a ship of Southampton, called the _Mary_,
Captain Richard Tylar, Commander, to lay ready without the fort that
if he saw things grow desperate he might embark and leave them; but by
sending several messengers to them, and at length Major Richard Hope,
of the Liguanea Regiment, he so prevailed with them, telling them the
danger if they persisted, and, on the contrary, that if they delivered
up the two Lieutenant-Colonels they should all be pardoned, that they
promised the next morning to deliver up their officers. Accordingly,
in the morning, the soldiers brought down the two Lieutenant-Colonels,
and delivered them up; on whom there presently sat a Court-Martial who
adjudged them worthy of death, and accordingly, in a very short time,
in sight of both parties, they were shot to death. Then the soldiers
were all ordered to their several quarters, but were grown so
insolent, that the General was forced to give them leave to plunder
the houses of Tyson and Raymond in St. Jago, which flushed them to
plunder more, even any that they could pretend had any correspondence
with those men; and yet after all this, and all the fair words that
were given them, it was as much as the General and their Officers
could do to keep them from mutinying and to get them to return to
their precincts.
Tyson and Raymond were shot on August 3, 1660, tradition says, under the
large tamarind tree which still stands in Spanish Town, in =Mulberry
Garden=, now used as a poor-house. August 2 is the date usually given,
but Beeston’s account makes it clear that they were shot on “the next
morning,” _i.e._ the 3rd.
Leslie, without giving the source of his information, adds, “Raymond
expressed no concern, but died with a haughty kind of Resolution. Tyson
behaved in a manner more becoming, and seemed penitent for the part he
had acted.” We learn from the “Calendar of State Papers,” that in May
1660 an Order in Council was made “To permit Mary Tyson to repair to her
husband, Lieut.-Col. Edward Tyson, in Jamaica, in the ship _Bear_, now
bound thither, with accommodation for two maid-servants and one
manservant.” Her arrival must have been a sad one. She found her gallant
but misguided husband laid in a rebel’s grave.
Long says that Raymond was probably encouraged in his attempt by the
knowledge that Doyley was not armed with any express commission or power
to punish such offence capitally; and Gardner, thus fortified, says that
Doyley’s action was illegal. But Beeston tells us that “the government
was only by court-martial,” and this surely implied the right to shoot a
rebel. The news of the Restoration reached Jamaica twelve days after the
affair, but Doyley did not receive his commission to act as a
constitutional governor until February 8, 1661.
Leslie makes the outbreak a Cavalier and Roundhead affair, and Bridges
and Hill concur in that view. Gardner, following Beeston, thinks it was
mainly due to a desire for a simple civil life. Long says, “Raymond’s
object, it has been supposed, was to seize the Government himself; but
the real design is not certainly known.” In contradistinction to
Beeston, Long tells us that Doyley was “a steady advocate for pursuing
the cultivation of the island, to which most of the private men were
disinclined.”
The outbreak was probably just as much due to a desire for a more civil
form of government than that favoured by Doyley as to any feeling of
loyalty to the Stuarts; and the fact that Doyley felt compelled to take
precautions for his personal safety in case of defeat may have been
dictated as much by fear of the soldiers’ dislike for him as a martinet,
as of the antipathy of the Roundhead portion of them to him as a
cavalier.
Of the ecclesiastical buildings at St. Jago de la Vega trustworthy
records exist only of an abbey, and a chapel of the red cross and a
chapel of the white cross. The present =Cathedral=, the oldest cathedral
in the British colonies, stands on the site of the red cross chapel. The
bases of two piers (Long calls them columns) 8 feet square, part of the
entrance to the abbey (which stood to the south of the present parade),
were, in Long’s time, standing near the south end of the public offices.
They were of brickwork, strongly cemented. He says: “I have seen in this
town a great many large stone mouldings for the bases and other parts of
columns, which, as well as the sculptures dug out of the ruins of
Sevilla Nueva, in St. Ann’s, appeared to have been executed by no mean
artist. The Spanish ecclesiastics ... must be allowed some merit in
having cultivated the elegances of architecture in these remote parts of
the world. Some of their public structures at St. Domingo, the Havannah,
La Vera Cruz, Carthagena, Panama, &c., would make a noble figure even in
European cities.” Unfortunately it would seem that, judging from his
comments on buildings still standing, art criticism was not one of
Long’s strong points.
[Illustration:
SPANISH-TOWN CATHEDRAL
]
The original church, erected by the English, probably on the foundations
and of the materials of the Spanish building, as the parish church of
St. Catherine, was thrown down by the hurricane of 1712, and was rebuilt
of red brick in 1714, as is stated on a tablet over the entrance door in
the tower at the west end:
D. O. M.
This Church Dedicated to ye Service of Almighty God was thrown downe
by ye dreadfull Hurricane of August ye 28th Anno Domini MDCCXII., and
was by ye Divine Assistance, through ye Piety and at ye expence of ye
Parishioners, more beautifully and substantially rebuilt upon its old
foundation in ye thirteenth year of ye Reigne of our most gracious
Sovereigne Queen Ann and in ye Government of his Excellency the Lord
Archibald Hamilton, in the year of our Lord MDCCXIV.
Matthew Gregory, Esq^r.
& Church Wardens.
Mr. Beaument Pestell.
Below this on another marble slab is the following inscription: