The Portland and ‘Judgement Cliff’ doomsdays

ON WEDNESDAY, October 2, we tell the story of Obeahman Plato and the tsunami, hurricane and earthquake that destroyed Westmoreland in 1780, a year when hurricanes raged. These natural phenomena are not rare, for the island is prone to them, as a timeline of the country’s history indicates.

The Port Royal 7.7 magnitude earthquake of June 1692 is one of the better-known deadly Jamaican natural phenomena, but what the narratives are not saying is that Port Royal was not the only place in Jamaica affected on June 7, 1802. Other places, too, in the east were well shaken up. At Liguanea in St Andrew, all the houses were destroyed and water was ejected from 40-foot deep wells.

Many landslides occurred across the island, and several rivers were temporarily dammed. A few days after the earthquake and its aftershocks, the Kingston Harbour became flooded with large numbers of trees stripped of their bark and brought down after one of these dams was broke. A majority of the houses at St Jago (Spanish Town), too, were destroyed.

The biggest landslide took place near the district of Easington, across the Yallahs River in St Thomas. The earthquake shook off a great piece of a mountainside sending rocks and other debris all over the place, covering over 2,625 feet, burying a plantation, and killing 19 people. The folklore says the plantation belonged to a Dutch owner who was a wicked and evil man, and that was why his property was affected. The hillside has been called ‘Judgement Cliff’ since then. And, was it judgement also that transpired in Portland in the middle of the night, over 80 years ago?

Before climate change and all that it has engendered, the parish of Portland was Jamaica’s wettest, perhaps still is. It rained almost every day in the hills, and, as such, rivers and their tributaries overran that hill-and-gully place, where the vegetation was verdant. And the air salubrious.

Millbank, a district way up the Rio Grande Valley, and through which that great river runs, was once regarded as one of the wettest places on Earth. The region, one of Jamaica’s biggest watersheds, would sometimes receive continuous rainfall for several consecutive days, giving rise to floodings, landslides and slippages, marooning people for days.

The place is blessed with an abundance of water, but that blessing turned deadly one early morning in November 1937 when everybody, and the roosters and animals were asleep, it seemed. After three days of uninterrupted rain, the land became oversaturated and the waterways overflowed their banks on Tuesday, November 23, about 1 a.m., everything, including Hell, broke loose.

The village of Swift River bore the brunt of the deluge and loss of lives. “Forty drowned in the Swift River village. Fed by tremendous rains, the river swept everything before it in a mad dash to the sea,” The Daily Gleaner reported.

One Caston Pinnock is quoted as saying, “At about one o’clock the morning, I heard men bawling and I woke up. I opened the door and saw that the river was down and water was coming into my house. I saw Josiah Shirley standing on the veranda of his house opposite mine. There was the river between us. There were other people there and all of them were bawling. They could not escape. They were penned in by the water.

‘There were three houses at Josiah Shirley’s place, two small ones and the large one where he was standing on the veranda. His wife and daughter and children were in the smaller houses. They went, nobody could help them. Josiah was still on the veranda. There was another man with him. Suddenly the house capsized. Josiah was taken away by the river. The other man jumped clear of the house and held onto a tree and saved himself.

“I then heard a woman bawling behind my house. I took out some rope. The woman was pinned against a palm tree. Sam Aiken, Uriah Shirley and Loren Buckley were helping me. We told her to take the rope and tie it around her waist. We threw it to her and she did so. We pulled her out. It was Jane Orr. After that the water started to go down. I saw Solomon King trying to get across the river. He was struggling hard and called out aloud, ‘We gone now!’ It was he and his wife, they were washed away.”

Surrounding districts, such as Eden, Bloomfield, Long Wood and Springfield were also drenched. Twenty-two people died in Springfield, one in Longwood and 18 in Eden. The communities of Skibo, Comfort Hall, Bybrook, Moore Park, Ann’s Delight and Berwick Spring, too, were not spared the fury. More than 30 houses were carried away by the tumultuous torrents, and in some places, the very land on which they were established took the ride towards the Caribbean Sea.

The twin rail and road bridges over the historic Spanish River surrendered to the force of the waters, which turned and twisted metal as if they were thread. In the Rio Grande Valley, five houses were swept away at Berrydale. At Fellowship, Charles Chung’s shop and all the grocery within were taken away.

Landslides and more floods wreaked havoc on people’s lives in Comfort Castle and Millbank, where a massive piece of a mountainside from over 700 feet above the village slipped away. The debris covered over 100 acres, entrapping people in their destroyed homes, blocking the flow of water, and killing two people, and many animals. The school at Comfort Castle was used as a shelter.

Many people relocated from the area where the deluge took place in Swift River, and there were more floods, especially one that took place in 2001. These two incidents, for some people, have Biblical significance – judgement from God. Yet, they seem to have been nature doing what nature does.