Free Pirates of the Timestream by Steve White Page A

his head sadly. “The Spanish colonists had, by this time, evolved a relatively earthquake-proof style of low-slung architecture anchored to the Earth with thick, deeply-driven wooden posts. The English wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted to recreate England here in the tropics. All this massive construction is standing on a thirty- to sixty-foot layer of loose sand resting on coralline limestone and loose gravel. The great earthquake of June 7, 1692 and its accompanying tsunami will result in liquefaction of the sand and cause the entire northern part of the town—that’s where we’re standing now—to simply sink into the sea. Nearly half the population will be killed outright, and another two thousand of the homeless survivors will subsequently die of disease among the thousands of decomposing bodies.”
    Jason looked around him with new eyes. The solidity of Port Royal suddenly seemed an illusion. He had forgotten that only twenty-four years from now all of this was going to vanish into the sea with Atlantis-like thoroughness, providing clergymen as far away as Cotton Mather in Boston with material for sermons on the wages of sin.
    “For now, though, Port Royal seems to be going full bore,” he observed.
    It certainly was. They continued past warehouses stuffed with the island’s exports: animal skins, logwood, tortoiseshell, spices, dyes and the up-and-coming product: sugar. Other warehouses were receiving ironwork, clothing and assorted luxuries from England. Still others took in goods from elsewhere in the Caribbean for transshipment. All of the great buildings were beehives of activity, with slaves and indentured servants hauling on ropes to hoist the cargo up to large windows where other laborers grappled and pulled it inside. They passed merchants’ establishments where gold and jewelry brought back by buccaneers was being weighed on scales, which archaeologists centuries later would find to have been discreetly weighted in the merchants’ favor. Everywhere, money was changing hands—all sorts of money, from the floods of pirate plunder that flowed through Port Royal, including doubloons, piastres, golden moidores and especially Spanish pieces of eight.
    “They’ve recently declared pieces of eight to be legal tender here in Jamaica,” Grenfell remarked. “They practically had to, after Morgan’s sack of Portobello earlier this year, which brought in a haul of seventy-five thousand pounds, as compared to a total annual value of ten thousand pounds for the entire island’s sugar exports. Ordinary seamen each had sixty pounds or more to squander on rum and whores. That was what an average worker earned in three years!”
    “I’m beginning to see why this town is the way it is,” said Jason.
    “For now. But the sugar industry—including the production of rum—is the wave of the future. Henry Morgan himself understood this. In the end, he plowed his loot into his vast plantations and made far more money that way than he had ever pillaged. A remarkable man all around. At present, though, sugar cultivation is still getting started. The first shipment to England was only eight years ago, in 1660. But exports are now in the hundreds of tons. In a few years, they’ll outstrip plundering as a source of wealth.”
    “Which,” Boyer said tonelessly, “accounts for that .” He pointed ahead at a wharf where a line of bound blacks were being led down a gangplank under the watchful eyes of guards with short, vicious-looking whips. They had all thought they had adjusted to the aromas of a seventeenth-century port city. But the ship from which the blacks were emerging gave off a stench that almost bowled Jason over, accustomed though he was to the smells of earlier and less delicate ages. Nesbit scurried into concealment behind a large packing crate and was violently sick.
    Grenfell nodded. “Yes. Sugar is a crop that requires backbreaking work, especially when the plantations are just getting started and