Apocalypse 1692: Empire, Slavery, and the Great Port Royal Earthquake

Hughes (The Siege of Fort William Henry) wittily portrays the grittiness and debauchery of late-17th-century Jamaica in this well-crafted narrative history, focusing on the city of Port Royal in the years preceding the devastating earthquake of 1692. As the heart of the British Empire in the Caribbean, Port Royal was bustling with commercial activity, military craft, markets, and attractions; it was also home to an eclectic mix of merchants, slaves, indentured servants, banished minorities, sailors, and privateers. Hughes entertainingly illustrates the character of this “peculiarly debauched society,” which was rife with alcoholism, gluttony, corruption, loose sexual morals, disease, and “a self-indulgent attitude toward sin,” within a broader “climate of gross brutality.” He situates this “wickedest town in the English Empire” in the larger contexts of Jamaican, Caribbean, and Atlantic history while touching on various interrelated topics: the sugar-fueled and slave-operated plantation economy of the island, slave resistance and maroon communities, imperial rivalry and buccaneering, and the barbarity of the slave trade. The calamitous earthquake of 1692, around which the narrative is framed, sent much of the city tumbling into the ocean and is depicted in the last few-dozen pages. Though Hughes presents little new historical information, this work provides an entertaining and substantial account of an underdiscussed era. (Dec.)