Port Royal
The first European to set foot on what would become Port Royal in Jamaica was Christopher Columbus, who reached the island on his second voyage in 1494. Jamaica would become a Spanish colony shortly thereafter, and sugar cultivation carried out by African slave labor would soon follow. Still, the Port Royal area remained relatively unimportant to the Spanish. Then, in 1655 the British invaded Jamaica, taking the island along with Port Royal and touching off war between England and Spain.
Under the British, Port Royal became a primary outpost for an affiliation of pirates called the Brethren of the Coast, known in popular parlance as buccaneers. With the blessing of the British, these pirates conducted raids on Spanish shipping from their den at Port Royal, seriously impeding Spain’s ability to move goods through the Caribbean. The influx of stolen wealth led to a rapid expansion of the city, and when available land ran out they began filling in shallow areas of the sea and building atop that.
Due to the presence of the pirates, everyday life within the town was regularly punctuated by drunkenness, brawling, and outright murder. The British would eventually legitimize the pirates by granting them letters of marque, transforming them from oceangoing brigands into respectable privateers. Still, this veneer of legality did nothing to mitigate the realities of violently seizing foreign ships on the high seas, and if anything made the newly minted privateers all the more confident in their position within Port Royal and all the more willing to behave badly.
This modern Sodom and Gomorrah would meet a fate similar to the biblical original in June 1692. First, an earthquake rocked the city, knocking down buildings built on foundations of sand. Two minutes later a tsunami caused by the earthquake arrived, inundating ninety percent of it in moments and washing away soil liquefied by the earthquake. Half the population was killed outright in the first moments of the disaster, and much of the city was simply gone. The ordeal was not over for the survivors, however, as epidemics broke out in the aftermath of the calamity killing most of those who remained.