OBEAH, A type of witchcraft which originated in Africa, was practised widely during the days of slavery in Jamaica. It was used for benevolent and malevolent purposes. Practitioners were revered and feared at the same time because the people firmly believed in the power that they supposedly possessed.

It was outlawed in 1760 after it was factored heavily in the Easter Rebellion led by Takyi/Tacky in St Mary. Many people found guilty of practising it after the passage of the law were killed by the authorities who themselves feared it because they did not understand it. The anti-obeah law is still in the book, by the way.

Now, in Westmoreland, there was an obeahman, known as ‘Plato the Wizard’. He terrorised black, white and brown people throughout the parish with his spells, for he feared none. Despite his warning that severe physical and spiritual torment and tribulations would consume anyone who dared to arrest him, he was captured by the authorities, taken to Montego Bay and condemned to death. But, not before he prophesied that his death would be avenged within a year by a storm that would ravage the whole island.

He told the jailer who tied him and burned him at the stake that he, the jailer, would not live long enough to triumph over his death because he had taken care to “obeah him”. It is said that the jailer subsequently got very ill, and despite medical aid and trip to the Americas to seek help, he died within a year. Sounds like fiction?

What, however, is not fictitious, and is regarded the greatest calamity brought about by nature to ever manifest in Jamaica’s known history, is the tsunami, hurricane and earthquakes that struck Westmoreland on Tuesday, October 3, 1780, the same year of Plato’s prediction. It was a destruction worthy of being written about by the Governor of Jamaica, Colonel John Dalling, to the government in London, England.

“Notice, besides the severity of the hurricane, the governor reported that there were earthquakes as well – and that the quakes totally demolished every building in the parish of Westmoreland and that remaining inhabitants were faced with famine: I am sorry to be under the disagreeable necessity of informing your Lordships of one of the most dreadful calamities that has happened to this colony within the memory of the oldest inhabitant,” Governor Dalling writes, among other things.”

In the morning, the weather was regular; nothing unusual was observed. At Savanna-la-Mar, in the afternoon, suddenly, the sky became heavily overcast. About three o’clock, the wind began to blow very hard from the southeast. It was accompanied by heavy rain.By four, the wind got much stronger, tearing up trees, uprooting them, and stripping houses of their shingles.

Between five and six the sea began to rise, and continued to swell to a tremendous level. People were scared, but fascinated, and looked on in awe. Suddenly, the high wave tossed itself with a mighty swash upon the space, and pulled all and sundry with its powerful backwash into the sea. It was a tsunami, but they wouldn’t have known. From this time until about eight o’clock, the wind was furiously wreaking havoc all over the parish and beyond.

The tsunami was now being followed by a merciless hurricane, which destroyed everything in its path. Minutes after eight o’clock, it relented somewhat, but continued to blow very hard until midnight, when it left with its fury westward. But, before it made its inglorious exit, there was an earthquake at 10 o’clock, and frightening aftershocks. Earthquakes in the midst of a hurricane, in the dark. Was Plato’s curse at play?

“With repeated shocks of an earthquake which has almost totally demolished every building in the parishes of Westmoreland, Hanover, part of St James, and some parts of St Elizabeth and killed members of the white inhabitants, as well as of the negroes … The wretched inhabitants are in a truly wretched situation, not a house standing to shelter them from the inclement weather, no clothes to cover them, everything being lost in the general wreck. And what is still more dreadful, famine staring them in the face,” Governor Dalling writes.

“No pen can describe the horrors of the scene which was presented to the sight of the few who survived to lament the fate of their wretched neighbours; the earth strewed with the mangled bodies of the dead and dying, some with broken limbs, who, in that situation, had been tossed about during the storm, and afterwards left on the wet, naked earth to languish out the night in agonies with no hand to help, or even pity them … and it is thought not less than 400 whites and negroes must have perished in and about Savanna-la-Mar,” Colonial Office file CO 137/79 says.

A gentleman from Savanna-la-Mar is also on record saying, “The morning ushered in a scene too shocking for description, bodies of the dead and dying scattered about the watery plains where the town stood, presented themselves to the agonising view of the son of humanity whose charity lead him in quest of the remains of his unhappy fellow creatures!”

In the adjoining parishes of St Elizabeth, St James and Hanover much damage was also done and many lives, too, were lost, but nothing near the calamitous extent of what happened in Westmoreland, the epicentre.

Did Plato’s obeah work? Or was that unspeakable western disaster a mere coincidence with his wishes? Who knows, but it is a great story on which to reflect.