MONDAY, JANUARY 14, 1907, 3:30 p.m. It was a regular day sunny and hot with a cloudless sky and what was said to be a faint breeze. At 3:32 p.m. the city of Kingston was busy enough all was alive and well. Suddenly there came the sound of a rushing, mighty wind, followed by the sound of a train roaring in a tunnel and the violent shaking of the earth so that men and buildings were tossed about like puppets. Screams split the air. Within 10-20 seconds a town of 46,000 had been rendered immobile hundreds lay dead or dying buried beneath mounds of rubble and dust. By 3:33 p.m. three shocks had been felt and every building in Kingston sustained some damage; many in the lower part of the city were destroyed.
Accounts of this catastrophe by Sir Frederick Treves and W. Ralph Hall Caine, both published in 1908, report solid brick walls bulging and collapsing, carriages being lifted and flung through the air, telegraph poles swaying like leaves in the wind, and great structures whether made of iron, wood or stone, crumbling. People were simply picked up and tossed while struggling to maintain their balance. More often than not they ended up resembling flailing pawns in an overturned chess game. Those individuals who managed to escape out onto the streets were quickly enveloped in a thick yellow fog punctuated by the sound of crackling and tumbling walls.
A residence in Kingston - Courtesy of the National Army Museum, London.
What many thought were heaps of dust were actually people trying to move in a city that had suddenly become foreign. Within twenty minutes fire blazed through the streets of Kingston and lasted for up to four days in many cases finishing off what the earthquake had started. It was also not long before rampant looting broke out and armed guards had to be posted throughout the city. At the public hospital, there was no way to cope with the number of wounded. At 3:30 on that fateful day there were some 200 patients in hospital, by 5:00 p.m. that number had risen to 800. According to W. Ralph Hall Caine, who observed much of the devastation from the Port Kingston, the ship on which he had sailed to the West Indies with numerous English businessmen, planters and parliamentarians, 'the sky was a brilliant constellation of glorious lights, the waters over which we passed, dark and awesome, rendered all the more forbidding by the human flotsam and jetsam (from which I must shut my eyes) floating idly on its surface for a ruined city'(p. 230).
Days later Kingston resembled a ghost town empty, silent, dark and broken. £2,000,000 of damage was assessed and over 800 people lost their lives. The Gleaner and the Jamaica Daily Telegraph published death tolls which were scanned by thousands searching for news of loved ones. Only a few received proper burial. Some were buried in large trenches in the May Pen Cemetery and some were burnt without ceremony.
Accounts of this catastrophe by Sir Frederick Treves and W. Ralph Hall Caine, both published in 1908, report solid brick walls bulging and collapsing, carriages being lifted and flung through the air, telegraph poles swaying like leaves in the wind, and great structures whether made of iron, wood or stone, crumbling. People were simply picked up and tossed while struggling to maintain their balance. More often than not they ended up resembling flailing pawns in an overturned chess game. Those individuals who managed to escape out onto the streets were quickly enveloped in a thick yellow fog punctuated by the sound of crackling and tumbling walls.
A residence in Kingston - Courtesy of the National Army Museum, London.
What many thought were heaps of dust were actually people trying to move in a city that had suddenly become foreign. Within twenty minutes fire blazed through the streets of Kingston and lasted for up to four days in many cases finishing off what the earthquake had started. It was also not long before rampant looting broke out and armed guards had to be posted throughout the city. At the public hospital, there was no way to cope with the number of wounded. At 3:30 on that fateful day there were some 200 patients in hospital, by 5:00 p.m. that number had risen to 800. According to W. Ralph Hall Caine, who observed much of the devastation from the Port Kingston, the ship on which he had sailed to the West Indies with numerous English businessmen, planters and parliamentarians, 'the sky was a brilliant constellation of glorious lights, the waters over which we passed, dark and awesome, rendered all the more forbidding by the human flotsam and jetsam (from which I must shut my eyes) floating idly on its surface for a ruined city'(p. 230).
Days later Kingston resembled a ghost town empty, silent, dark and broken. £2,000,000 of damage was assessed and over 800 people lost their lives. The Gleaner and the Jamaica Daily Telegraph published death tolls which were scanned by thousands searching for news of loved ones. Only a few received proper burial. Some were buried in large trenches in the May Pen Cemetery and some were burnt without ceremony.
