Shiver Me Skid Plates: On the X-Trail of Pirate Jamaica, Part II

Continued from Part 1 

A short walk past an old Red Stripe
sign proclaiming it to be “Where the Buccaneers Drank their Beer,” brought me into the city that cheered Morgan on his return from Portobelo. You needn't be Rockefeller to see that Port Royal is a far cry from a prim Williamsburg restoration or anything like that. Rather, the Pirate Pompeii greets the sunrise as a quiet fishing village in which uniformed schoolgirls await their bus in the dawn's crisp air, and --provided you stay long enough past day-oh for it to open -- the Red Stripe flows pier-side at a shabby watering hole called the Fisherman's Cabin. For me, it was enough to pull a chair up to this still-shuttered establishment and watch a rusted freighter sail the harbor in a scene as tropical as any showing palm-shaded natives with pots on their heads.


Dilapidated in true Jamaican fashion, Port Royal still reels from the 17th-century quake and appears all the more "pirate" for it. Indeed, as I was advised after being joined by a grizzled denizen of the Fisherman's Cabin pier named Rodney Campbell, you can find specters of the old buccaneers still haunting the island. "Ah, but where?" asks I, eager to experience these ghosts firsthand. "Aahll aroun'," confides he with eyes grown wide. Looking about, he swept his arms in a wide arc. "De pirate spirits are aahll over Jamaica. ” 

Nearby, some -- I dunno -- dancehall music drifted on the morning air accompanied by the enticing aroma of frying fish. In the distance, the freighter I'd been watching cleared the harbor's headlands and splashed into open seas.

Tomb at St. Peters

But not all the pirate spirit to which Campbell referred was to be the insubstantial variety, as Port Royal retains such buccaneer sites as St. Peter’s Church, which houses the silver communion service said to have been given it by Morgan himself, and upon which pirate buffs gaze in the manner of pilgrims before a chunk of the original cross. Beyond, Fort Charles bristles with cannon as it did at the time of the earthquake, while across a parade known as Chocolata Hole when it was used as a mooring for ships, original battlements overlook the site of the sunken pirate vessel Ranger, now studied by archeologists. The Old Gaol that withstood the 1692 quake (and which, as imagined by Hollywood, figures prominently in “Pirates of the Caribbean”) stands along a quiet street, unchanged save for a Ting soda sign affixed to its ancient façade. 

Kritzler.

A trip down the airport road brought me back to the Jamaica of Rastamon Vibration and Bob Marley tees. It was from there where I and my swashbuckling (and, tragically, late) cousin and boon companion, Ed Kritzler, with whom I would make my way to the former Jamaican capital of Spanish Town. Author of the best-selling Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, Kritzler dug up a treasure of Jewish (and Caribbean, and European) history nearly lost to the world. Here was scholar who was anything but scholarly in manner; a gonzo historian driven by what seemed a past life beckoning from a point just beyond his ken. The result was a history that -- while taking decades of Ed's time on Earth to uncover -- could not elude that mysterious call, much less the spirit of what he often referred to as "New World adventure."

Bending the Nissan to our will, Ed and I wended our way past Kingston's industrial harborside en route to the raucously commercial district abutting Spanish Town's Parade Square, some 12 miles distant. The Square is suitably Georgian in aspect and encloses the remains of the courthouse in which the notorious pirate trio of "Calico Jack" Rackham, Anne Bonney and Mary Read were tried.

Bonney, not disguising her sex.

The daughter of a Carolina plantation owner, Bonney had run off with John Rackham, a dandified pirate chieftain. Following the 1720 capture of their ship, the Revenge, they and Read were convicted of piracy – a crime for which Calico Jack was strung up on Rackham Cay, outside Port Royal’s harbor. “Pleading their (pregnant) bellies,” the two women were sent to languish in the Spanish Town jail, the ruins of which can still be seen near the courthouse.

Of additional pirate note is the grave of Thomas Modyford, colonial governor of Jamaica, who, as Morgan’s abettor, first enlisted him as a privateer. The grave requires a bit of searching, but will be found near the Square in the mango-shaded yard behind the Cathedral of Saint Jago de la Vega, under a layer of dead leaves. Brush these aside and you will just be able to make out the inscription:

Mistake not Reader for here 
Lyes not only the Deceased Body 
Of the Honorable Sir Thomas Modyford Baronette but even the Soul and Life of all Jamaica ...

Even less readable, the rest seems lost to history.

But the pirate-seeking, X-Trail-riding New World adventurer is not lost, and after leaving Spanish Town, may drive Jamaica's sleek Highway 2000 that extends west from near the old capital through a landscape of lush verdure and pale savannah. Here, the Blue Mountains rise to the right, reminders of the tale in which Columbus answered Queen Isabella's request for a description of Jamaica by placing a crumpled-up swatch of green velvet before her. 

Traveling the larger swatch, the X-Trail's 2.5-litre inline four-cylinder engine with its 150-horsepower output and six-speed manual transmission delivered open-road driving characteristics that -- while not exactly green nor velvety -- were more suited to the car-like traits of the crossover that this Nissan once was than to the truck-like ride you might expect from a now fully-fledged 4x4. Thus transported, Eddie, the SE and I to the village of Toll Gate, where Route A3 begins its course through fields of sugar cane and into an out-of-the-way Eden of green hills, gaily-painted houses and black, iron-truss bridges that my cousin referred to as the "South South Coast."

Near the South South Coast’s southernmost tip the four-by tenaciously clambered over an unnamed road (it sometimes seems that Jamaica tourism’s tagline should be “One Lane” rather than “One Love”), its independent, multi-link suspension and ample ground clearance endowing it with proper dirt-road poise. We hugged the shoreline until arriving at Old Woman’s Point, where the elements have carved the image of a seaward-gazing crone into a cliff that also conceals a cave wherein actual pirate booty was uncovered in the 1960s. Well known to Kritzler and others, the discoverer never reported the find — thereby establishing himself as a pirate in the grand tradition.

Old Woman’s Point presents its profile to what the parchment maps refer to as Long Bay (one of at least two so named on Jamaica) -- a ten-mile arc leading into a mossy headland unpopulated by anything beyond the occasional palm. Standing in the mouth of the cave from which someone stole the buccaneer loot while, elsewhere, people were madly grooving to ”Stoned Soul Picnic” -- one sees the surf-pounded shore frame a view of Jamaica unchanged from that which the pirates had known.



End of Part II.