Dennis Minott | Pulverising romance of Port Royal and plunder

There is an unsettling ease with which Jamaica is now being asked to clap for pirates. Port Royal has gained the glitter of UNESCO inscription and, in the heady rush to monetise heritage, marketers seem ready to turn a long season of robbery, kidnapping, and murder into a week of selfie-friendly cosplay.

Dr Patricia Green – architect, conservationist, and clear-eyed scholar – asks the adult question in a room intoxicated by costume: why, precisely, are we celebrating pirates?

Her argument is not a prim refusal of history. It is a plea for accuracy, ethics, and proportion. The words pirate, privateer, and buccaneer are neither synonyms nor innocent. They mark a spectrum of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence at sea and on shore. Pirates were the “lowest grade of seafaring robbers”. Privateers were pirates on retainer to the Crown, looting under letters of marque. Buccaneers often overlapped with privateers, but widened the radius of English aggression from the Caribbean to the South Sea. The common thread was predation: coastal raids, ship seizures, robbery, kidnapping, and murder – prosecuted for private gain and periodically baptised by kings.

Green’s history sands the sugar off the legend. Sir Francis Drake was not merely the dashing circumnavigator of schoolbook romance; he was a buccaneer who prospered by stealing Spain’s stolen goods. Sir Anthony Shirley, polished at Oxford and the Inns of Court, took a pirate’s command and led a 1597 raid on Spanish Jamaica. Henry Morgan – appointed commander-in-chief of Jamaica’s forces in 1669 –would be arrested for piracy, then knighted by Charles II and returned as lieutenant governor to guard the Royal African Company’s human traffic. In this theatre, plunder repeatedly put on a robe and sat in the governor’s chair.

NOT SOFTEN THE TRADE

Even catastrophe did not soften the trade. When the earthquake of 1692 drowned much of Port Royal, the Church of England minister Emmanuel Heath recorded privateers breaking open warehouses while the ground still heaved and the dead were scarcely settled. The so-called golden age of piracy faded not by repentance but by naval supremacy; Ann Bonny and Mary Read were condemned by Jamaican courts in 1720. This is the moral landscape we are about to costume for visitors. Are we proposing that brutality, once stamped by a royal seal, may be varnished into spectacle? Or that murder, when conveniently taxed, may be paraded with steel drums and rum?

Green rightly insists that piracy’s logic is not merely a museum piece; it has migrated ashore. She points to development rackets, complicit approvals, survey maps that perform cartographic somersaults after the ink is dry, and construction sites where substitution is a sport. That is not a poetic flourish; it is a diagnosis of a spirit, predation dressed up as policy. As I have elsewhere argued, the swords and sloops of yesteryear have become boardrooms and monopolies today. Economic overlords corner essential services, influence public rules, and harvest rents while citizens pay in noise, dust, floods, and inflated bills.

To celebrate Green’s clarity is to honour memory while refusing kitsch. Port Royal deserves thoughtful interpretation: archaeology and architecture, hydrology and seismology, the histories of enslavement and resistance, and the living culture of surrounding communities. It deserves school curricula that distinguish fact from fable, and signage that frames the harbour not as a theme park but as a theatre where empire rehearsed its violences – and where Jamaicans, enslaved and free, navigated survival with terrible ingenuity. The point is not to erase pirates from the story; it is to place them under the proper light and assign the proper weight.

WITHOUT SELLING OURSELVES

We can tell the pirate story without selling it short or selling ourselves. Tell of letters of marque that deputised robbery. Tell of slave forts and auction blocks; of how the Atlantic economy stitched Port Royal to West Africa, Bristol, and Cádiz. Tell of court records that condemned women while sparing men with useful ships. Explain the earthquake not as providential thunder but as geology and town planning entwined: a sandy spit overloaded by greed, houses too heavy on unconsolidated ground, and no respect for hazard. That kind of truth dignifies the dead and instructs the living.

What would celebration look like if we centred dignity rather than debauch? Imagine a Port Royal Week that opens with libation for the enslaved and a symposium on maritime law, climate risk, and coastal resilience. Replace the cartoon eye-patch with a student-built exhibition on ship construction, Caribbean navigation, and hydrographic mapping. Commission artists to converse with the sea floor’s archaeology. Stage readings from trial transcripts alongside dub poetry about modern extortion and procurement fraud. Invite fishers, pilots, surveyors, and historians into the same tent and ask them to design the next hundred years of a coastline under climate stress. That is a festival: one that earns foreign exchange by exporting intelligence.

Green’s intervention lands at a political hinge. After elections, portfolios change hands and the temptation to chase quick foreign exchange grows. But our future cannot be financed by erasing our past’s victims. To be sure, Jamaica must trade. Yet the brand we export should be an island that knows its history and insists that the profits of heritage flow to the people who live and learn beside it. We can welcome visitors without selling our souls, and we can make a living while telling the whole truth.

We will not extinguish the appetite for spectacle. But we can season it with fact. We can swap the lazy bliss of cosplay for a hard, generous beauty: the beauty of a country self-aware, protective of its coastline, allergic to corruption, and tender with its dead. Celebration that refuses to lie becomes instruction. Tourism that refuses to flatter becomes development. And Port Royal – long misnamed the Wickedest City – may yet model the bravest city: a small place telling a large truth to a world still in love with pretty theft.

Dr Patricia Green has given us the questions. Our duty is to answer without flinching, and to build policy, pedagogy, and place-making worthy of that honest light.

Dennis A. Minott, PhD, is a physicist, green energy consultant, and longtime college counsellor. He is the CEO of A-QuEST. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com