Expeditions to Port Royal follow one after another, but rumor has it that during all this time only a small fraction of the treasures that were stored in the ominous capital of the pirates of the Caribbean have been found …
Heavenly punishment
This hot June day in 1692 in Port Royal, Jamaica began as usual. Well-armed French, Spanish and British ships swayed in the bay, but it was difficult to determine by the state flags - the flagpoles of most of the ships were bare and sticking out to the top like lone splinters.
The flags were not removed out of false modesty - these ships were now owned by pirates, and such a clearly exposed membership of the coastal fraternity indicated that the gentlemen of fortune felt completely safe in Port Royal.
The new owners of the ships were nearby. Someone sold to a local merchant a batch of goods found in the hold of another victim, someone, having already received his share, squandered it in the nearest tavern, more than returning the money, usually to the same merchant with whom he had fiercely bargained half an hour ago.
Jamaica's "mistress" - Britain - was tens of thousands of miles away; the governor of the island sat tightly in his chair and, receiving frenzied profits from each pirate raid, guaranteed the coastal brotherhood his patronage, and the former owners of Port Royal, the Spaniards, bypassed the ominous island. So everything that happened on this day can only be explained by the punishment of God.
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On June 7, at 11:43 am, a rolling thunder swept over Jamaica, as if thousands of powder magazines had exploded simultaneously. The earth shook and cracked. Houses, a minute ago, unshakably standing on solid foundations, fell into these cracks entirely, along with their owners.
At the same moment, out of nowhere, gigantic waves that had taken up the anchored ships and with devilish force hurled them right into the center of the city. Those who managed to escape, jumping out from under the crumbling dwellings, found themselves under a hail of cannonballs, cannons and wooden debris, which had recently been mighty ship hulls.
It was all over in a few minutes. Port Royal - the thunderstorm of the Atlantic, the capital of the pirates of the Caribbean, taking with it more than five thousand lives, perished on the seabed, as if it never existed.
Soon, not far from the crash site, a new capital of Jamaica, Kingston, appeared, and everyone gradually forgot about Port Royal.
Treasure hunters
Almost two hundred years after the cataclysm, in 1870, British Admiral Charles Hamilton reported to the Admiralty that when approaching the port of Kingston, in good weather, at the bottom one could see … stone buildings forming regular streets.
The Admiralty was busy with other business and ignored the admiral's message. Port Royal fell into oblivion again, now until 1936, when the American treasure hunter Harry Riesenberg became interested in it.
For many months Riesenberg and his comrades examined the underwater ruins, over and over again combing the flooded pirate capital. Finally, either satisfied with what was found, or completely disappointed in the results of the expedition, Riesenberg finished his search and retired. What treasures he drew from the seabed remained unknown.
In 1959, the American National Geographic Society sent an expedition to excavate the sunken city. Underwater archaeologists were well prepared: old maps of Port Royal were obtained from the archives, they were compared with the modern coastline of Jamaica and tried to draw a new map of the city hidden by the water. After painstaking work, the walls of Fort James, which protected the entrance to the bay, private houses and the royal port warehouses, began to clearly appear on the map. We decided to start with them.
The main difficulty of the search was that the buildings that were described by Admiral Hamilton over the years were covered with a thick layer of silt and now looked more like underwater hills of different heights. A dredge pump was put into operation. Soon, along with sand and mud, fragments of tiles and plaster, pieces of coal and bricks, broken earthenware fell on the deck of the barge, where the dredger was installed …
Realizing that there was nothing to look for in the royal warehouses - either everything had already been destroyed by water, or Riesenberg's people and other treasure hunters were actively "working" here, the expedition moved to private houses. Here, the finds were more varied: copper trays and pots, aluminum spoons, pieces of a hearth and even a cauldron, at the bottom of which food remains were found, which, apparently, was being prepared at the very moment of the disaster.
Except for these remnants of the cultural layer, the dredger did not get anything valuable from the bottom. And then it was decided to use divers.
The very first dive of the diver brought the main find: a golden watch overgrown with coral polyps was raised from the bottom of the sea. On the inside of the lid, it was possible to read the watchmaker's name - "Paul Blondel".
But this was not the value of the find. To make sure that the watch is the same age as Port Royal, and was not lost later, it was sent to the Museum of Science and Technology in London, which houses the world's best and most complete collection of antique watches. The museum reported that the watch was made in 1686 in Amsterdam. With the help of X-rays, it was possible to establish that the hands of the hours, before they were eaten by corrosion, showed 11 hours 43 minutes. So the exact time of the disaster was established.
A little later, the expedition of the society discovered artillery shells, various utensils, yards of ships, rusted guns and ship guns. However, the Americans soon completed their search program. After all, their goal was only preliminary reconnaissance. A more thorough research began in 1966 under the patronage of the Jamaican government.
King's chest
On May 1, 1966, another excavation began. Once again, archaeologists were rewarded for their labors. The finds in Port Royal have revealed what the whole city of the 17th century looked like.
The leader of the expedition, Robert Marks, wrote: “During excavations we even come across food, for example oil, which has become hard as stone. We know what kind of tobacco was smoked then - we found a whole leaf of tobacco. We can tell what kind of spirits we were drinking at that time: we analyzed the contents of sealed bottles. There was rum, wine and brandy. We picked up about two hundred and fifty nearly unharmed pewter items. This is more than has been found at all other underwater archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere combined. We found six thousand clay pipes, silverware, pocket watches and a copper apparatus for distilling rum."
There were also more interesting finds. Once the divers took out from the bottom a chest with the coat of arms of the Spanish king Philip IV. The chest contained several thousand perfectly preserved silver coins of the second half of the 17th century.
How did the silver of the Spanish treasury end up in Port Royal, which belonged to England? The chest is not a god to be the prey of pirates, because they have always shared the loot. For hiding even one copper coin, the guilty person was threatened with death. The solution to this puzzle was found in the archives.
It turns out that back in 1690, a couple of years before the disaster, near the island of Jamaica, three Spanish galleons with a cargo of silver on board were wrecked. The divers and fishermen of Port Royal raised the treasures from the bottom and kept them for themselves. And then the city sank, and the ocean took back the Spanish silver, which now went to the government of Jamaica.
Konstantin Fedorov