Kgn was once a ‘hog crawle’ and not a family city

THE EDITOR, Madam:

BECAUSE THE origins of the city of Kingston are little known, I would like to share with your readers the following facts relating to the birth of Jamaica’s present capital.

To say that “from its inception, Kingston has been a single family city” would be most inaccurate as the word “family” does not relate to Kingston, which is named after Charles II, who, with his brother, James, established a slave trading company at Port Royal, known as the Royal African Company.The term “single family city” could be used, say, to describe the New England city of Philadelphia, but certainly not Kingston, Jamaica, which was a slave entrepôt with European merchants bartering for human cargo and tropical produce.

Kingston rightly should have been called“New Port Royal.”The majority of the inhabitants of the new city did not even see the necessity of having a school and did everything possible to impede those who established one. Kingston became “the merchant princes’town”.

To suggest that “the future of downtown Kingston lies in the past” is not only sad, but also ridiculous. The site of Kingston was once a large “hog crawle” owned by a Spaniard and which, obviously, was“captured” in 1655. Its first English owner was a Col Barry who continued the rearing of hogs on the site. It was ideally suited for the purpose.

The birth of Kingston was entirely different from that of other urban settlements in the island of Jamaica, which grew out of Taino and Spanish settlements. Kingston’s birth was traumatic, resulting from a terrible natural disaster, a sudden earthquake on June 7, 1692.

The new city was conceptualised by those who had survived not only the disaster itself, but also the pestilence that followed. Within six weeks, plans were afoot for a new town to be laid out on a very unhealthy area situated between a great swamp “of standing, stinking water and the rising sun”. Why the haste? It was business as usual. Slavers were on the high seas, heading for their destination: Port Royal. Some of these vessels had left England two years before for the West African coast and would now be crossing the Middle Passage (the Atlantic), soon to be arriving. It was expedient to establish the town quickly even if it were to be a squalid one.

MARGUERITE R. CURTIN