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"CITY BENEATH
A world-famous diver, walking 180 feet beneath the sea, discovers fabulously rich Port Royal— destroyed by deluge and earthquake, now a breathtaking fairyland encrusted with coral. Can he dig up the loot?
IT was like an incredible dream when I came upon Port Royal, 180 feet under the surface ripples of Kingston Harbor, off Jamaica. I was the first in nearly 250 years to walk the streets of a city that had been deservedly named "Pirate's Babylon," swallowed by an earthquake, and now lying coral'encrusted on the bottom of the sea!
In the seventeenth century. Port Royal was sanctuary for every out' lawed man, ship and cause on the Spanish Main. It was a fold for black sheep — pirates who had fled the justice of the outside world and the injustices of one another. Built upon the sandy point of the pahsades that today form the outer rim of Kingston Harbor, it was a city of several thousand houses and many thousands of inhabitants.
Fortress of infamy, it was also a town of tremendous wealth. It was the only place to which buccaneers and pirates could safely bring their ill-gotten treasures. Shipload after shipload of plundered gold and silver bars, ornaments, jewels, coins and statues arrived to pack the great storehouses.
No power nor weapon of man was capable of penetrating the fortress of Port Royal to dispute the blackguards' right to their loot. But there is strength beyond that of puny man.
This the men and women of Port Royal were to learn on June 7, 1692. June 7, J 692/
There was no hint of the catastrophe to come.
Suddenly, the sky was robbed of color. Blackness engulfed the city. Thunder drummed, lightning flashed and the rain fell like a great mountain reservoir suddenly undammed. Wind tore through the town, ripping, twisting, uprooting. Then the sea hunched its shoulders and moved wrathfully against the land.
Port Royal quivered. For a few seconds it hung between oblivion and survival. Then the waters rose and the land fell away. Gradually, the wind and the rain, the thunder and the lightning ceased — slinking away as though sickened at the violence of their own anger. Where Port Royal had been, there were only a few struggling figures in a sea of countless bodies. Guilty and innocent alike had gone down in the deluge and earthquake; but a few half -crazed persons managed to survive. Somehow they struggled across to the far side of the bay, and there, after many hardships, they founded a new city, Kingston, which stands today.
ONE day while searching in these waters for the sunken treasureladen hulk of a Spanish galleon, I