Yesterday , June 7, marked 325 years since the 1692 earthquake that sank most of Port Royal and destroyed the district of St David, near Llandewey, St Thomas, killing about 300 people. The scarred hill is today known as Judgement Cliff.

As a result of the earthquake, Port Royal residents fled by boat across the harbour to Kingston, which was the beginning of the town that became the capital of Jamaica in 1872. The deciding factor in changing the capital from Spanish Town was the Kingston harbour where merchant ships could anchor with less difficulty.Indeed, Kingston became a major trans-shipment port, which was even more important before the advent of the commercial airliners. When the People’s National Party Government of 1955 removed the bicycle tax, they replaced it with a tax on incoming boats in Jamaican waters. And that would not have been possible had Kingston not become a major transshipment port.The fact that Jamaica Welfare, founded in 1937 by Norman Washington Manley, commissioned Harry Belafonte to sing

Jamaica Farewell partly to promote tourism and partly to promote Jamaican music is instructive re Kingston as a port of call. A line of the first verse of the song goes: “I took a trip on a sailing ship and when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop.”Prior to the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, Paul Bogle walked 45 miles from Stony Gut in St Thomas to Spanish Town to see Governor Edward John Eyre who refused to see him. It would have been less painful were it seven years later when the capital was moved to Kingston as the journey would have been about 15 miles less.Marcus Garvey, who was born in St Ann in 1887, would move to Kingston as a young man to work in his uncle’s printery. William Alexander Clarke Bustamante, born in Blenheim, Hanover, would make Kingston his home where he had his private loans business and where he would make his mark as a trade unionist. Also, Norman Washington Manley, born in Roxborough, Manchester, would set up his law office in downtown Kingston while his residence was in St Andrew.Kingston had a major earthquake 215 years later in 1907 that resulted in the city having to be rebuilt. This is why Kingston does not have many very old buildings that are say, 250 or 300 years old. Had the merchants in Kingston not successfully sued the insurance companies that refused to pay them, Jamaica might have been like Haiti today.The merchants were not insured against fire but successfully argued that it was the earthquake that caused the fire that destroyed many buildings. Included in the destruction was the Roman Catholic Cathedral that was on Duke Street. The bishop decided to build a new cathedral on North Street.The complaint of the congregation at the time is most instructive to students of history. They did not want the new cathedral to be built in the rural areas, and by that they meant North Street in Kingston where the cathedral is still located.By the 1950s, Kingston’s population outgrew the city and residents started moving into St Andrew. Today the metropolis is bubbling with activity and production, even if not as much as would be desired.There has been talk about changing the law to charge the passengers in illegal taxis known as robots. I urge Transport Minister Mike Henry to think again. True, the vehicles are not insured for passengers. I have argued that Government should have an insurance policy for ‘robot’ taxi drivers who cannot afford it.How can we be serious about production if we expect everyone to rely only on available transport? Yes, strenuous efforts have been made by governments to provide buses and other vehicles, but it is still not enough.In 1957 there was a major earthquake that is not remembered because the damage to buildings was substantially less than that of 1907. The earthquake damaged the Richter scale itself so it could not be measured.After the 1907 earthquake, a building code was put in place, which might have made all the difference. The then mayor of Kingston, Balfour Barnswell, told the residents who complained that he hoped that they now understood why there was a building code.In the early 1970s, Portmore in St Catherine became the place for many housing schemes and is now considered part of the Kingston Metropolitan Area. Today, Kingston and St Catherine have seen beach areas disappear. This is said to be as a result of climate change.On the one hand, some say that the Port Royal earthquake was really a tsunami, so what is taking place today is not new. On the other, there is no real explanation other than climate change for the rising sea levels, which we have witnessed all over Jamaica.Two years ago, in June 2015, I wrote about going to Montego Bay on cadet camp in the early 1970s only to find in 1992 that the beach we went to had disappeared. There were even photographs published of us on the beach a week later in another article about the camp.What I did not write at the time but wrote later, was that there were also tourists on the beach. There was an amusing episode between some of the cadets and an elderly female tourist who obviously thought that Kingston was a tiny district of perhaps less than 50 people.As the cadets went on the beach, she approached us and asked “You guys come from Kingston? Some of the boys said “Yes, Miss”. Her next question was “Do you know someone down there named Grey”. None of us answered, not out of disrespect but to control the inevitable laughter, which would have been far more disrespectful.My point here is that the beach was big enough to have tourists but disappeared in later years. But what are we to do about climate change?I am grateful to Trevor Munroe who, in another context, wrote in the

Gleaner of the late Rex Nettleford telling him that transforming Jamaica is not a sprint run but a marathon.ekrubm765@yahoo.com