titution. Like her
sisters on the continent, she opposed a spirited and successful
resistance to the early encroachments of the crown. When our Revolution
broke out, her Assembly passed resolutions declaring their entire
concurrence in the principles set forth by the Congress, and gave as the
reasons for not joining in our armed vindication of them, their insular
position, and the peculiar nature of their population. Had geography
permitted, Jamaica would doubtless have made one Slave State the more in
the original Union, and would have been one of the fiercest afterward in
the secession. We may well believe that nothing but the knowledge that
she would be crushed like an eggshell by the mighty power of England,
hindered her in 1834 from heading her sister islands in a revolt against
the impending abolition of slavery, and thus giving the world
twenty-seven years earlier the spectacle of a great slaveholders'
rebellion.

The history of Jamaica, otherwise so monotonous and devoid of interest,
even to its own people, yet includes one awful event, the destruction of
Port Royal by the earthquake of 1692. This city, built by the English
soon after the conquest, on the tongue of land which encloses the
present harbor of Kingston, soon became the most splendid city of the
English in America. Its quays and warehouses, Macaulay says, were
thought to rival those of Cheapside. This wealth and splendor were not
wholly the fruit of lawful commerce, for Port Royal was the favored
resort of the buccaneers. Their lawless forrays against the Spanish
filled it with wealth, and filled it also with voluptuous wickedness.

Tradition adds, perhaps to give emphasis to its doom, that just before
the earthquake, a successful expedition had filled the city with booty,
which loaded the warehouses, and even overflowed into the dwelling
houses and verandas. But the stroke of judgment came, and a few shocks
of an earthquake in a few seconds buried the greater part of the
dissolute and splendid city beneath the waters of its own harbor. The
decaying bodies that were thrown afterward on the shore produced a
pestilence which swept off three thousand of those who had survived the
earthquake. The sad remnant went over to the inside shore of the harbor,
and built Kingston. A poor village of some twelve or fifteen hundred
souls, adjoining the naval station, is now all that represents the once
wealthy and wicked city, the Sodom of the West, and smitten wit