Moon Author's Review
Kingston didn't become an important city, or a city at all for that matter, until well after the British captured Jamaica from Spain in 1655. It wasn't until the great earthquake of 1692 left the nearby boomtown of Port Royal almost entirely underwater that Kingston's population grew to any size--thanks to the survivors fleeing from across the harbor. A subsequent disaster, a devastating fire in 1703, left Port Royal virtually abandoned and sealed the town's fate as a literal backwater. Prior to this, Kingston's Downtown area was dominated by a fishing and pig-farming village known as Colonel Beeston's Hog Crawle.
