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DELAWARE ART MUSEUM/HOWARD PYLE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN
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For a few decades, the Caribbean port was riding high, swollen with trading, pirates, and vice galore. The rollicking Yo-Ho-Ho YOLO years, which prompted the Catholic Church to call Port Royal the “wickedest town in Christendom,” ended abruptly one June morning in 1692.
“The land split open, swallowing crowds of people and homes in one gulp and then sealing closed,” Nat Geo quotes a written account by one survivor. “The sky darkened to red, mountains crumbled in the distance, and geysers of water exploded from the seams ripped in the earth.”
Then came a “great wall of seawater swelling high above the town.” In three minutes, the earthquake and tsunami dealt Port Royal, in present-day Jamaica, a blow from which it would never recover. Researchers are still pulling the pieces together.
Read our full story here.
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