Port Royal
PORT ROYAL
You want to see the fate that was Port Royal’s?
Then let me flyyou back three hundred years:
look in this tavern, see those buccaneers,
flushed more from fiery grog than honest toils,
who soon would dice away their ill-won spoils;
then hear the thunder roaring in their ears
as underfoot all firmness disappears
and round their throats the rising ocean boils!
Now marvel as this port, the stamping-ground
of pirates on their hellish pleasures bent,
by quake and flood is shaken flat and drowned.
Then tell me, when that fury has been spent,
if you, like some, believe that God had frowned
on Man and to his anger given vent!
Port Royal, Jamaica, 1672
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