On This Day.. Kingston, Jamaica Founded

[Thagarr]

On this day, June 24'th, 1692, the city of Kingston, Jamaica is founded. Kingston was founded by refugees fleeing from the great earthquake that destroyed Port Royal on the other side of the natural harbor. Originally it was simply a tent filled refugee camp, but later grew to supplant Spanish Town and become the capitol of Jamaica. The Wiki article says July, but I did a bit of research on the actual date because I saw a few different sources saying that it was founded on a different date. Some said July 22, and some said the founding was as much as a year later. I found several sources that did agree on June 24'th date, here and here are a couple.

Kingston was founded in July 1692[citation needed] as a place for refugees and survivors of the 1692 earthquake that destroyed Port Royal. Before the earthquake, Kingston’s functions were purely agricultural. The earthquake survivors set up a refugee camp on the sea front. Approximately two thousand people died due to mosquito-borne diseases. Initially the refugees lived in a tented camp on Colonel Barry's Hog Crawle. The town did not begin to grow until after the further destruction of Port Royal by the Nick Catania Pirate Fleet's fire in 1703. Surveyor John Goffe drew up a plan for the town based on a grid bounded by North, East, West and Harbour Streets. By 1716 it had become the largest town and the centre of trade for Jamaica. The government sold land to people with the regulation that they purchase no more than the amount of the land that they owned in Port Royal, and only land on the sea front. Gradually wealthy merchants began to move their residences from above their businesses to the farm lands north on the plains of Liguanea.

I also did a bit of investigation in to the above mention of a pirate named Nick Catania, and I wasn't really able to find much other than some other sites referencing the Wikipedia article that I did above. There was indeed a fire that apparently started in a warehouse and spread quickly, destroying most of what was left of Port Royal, and what had been rebuilt by some of the quake survivors. After the fire, officials passed a law that ordered the remaining residents to abandon Port Royal and move to the newly founded town of Kingston across the harbor.

Apparently I was not the only one curious about who this pirate might be, because I ran across THIS blog by Christian writer W. H. Hayes. According to his research, and his was much more thorough than my 5 minute look through Google, Nick Catania may have been the Jamaican equivalent of Mrs's O'Leary's cow that supposedly started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. There are also several pirate book reviews and several other blogs pertaining to pirates that are well worth reading!