Original subtitles

For 300 years, the pirate city of Port Royal has...

... lay hidden at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.

The city was devoured by the sea.

But now a new investigation will empty the sea.

Pull the plug out of the Caribbean Sea...

... and reveal what was called the world's most sinful city.

It was the largest pirate center of all time.

We unveil outstanding new evidence...

... for the incredible disaster that destroyed the city.

An earthquake, a tsunami and deadly quicksand

It was a scene of total devastation.

A city that was considered so sinful that it deserved the wrath of God.

Port Royal was like Sodom and Gomorrah in one.

A group of researchers with advanced tools...

... is now tackling the mysteries of Port Royal.

How did the disaster go?

Why did the city sink in minutes?

We drain and showcase the most infamous pirate city of all time...

... like it's never been seen before.

Imagine being able to empty the sea.

Pull the stopper out of the sea to see what is on the bottom.

Now powerful new technology can do just that.

Digital photos and sonar...

... gives us outstanding new knowledge about the sunken ruins.

With the new information, we can study the declining world of Port Royal.

In the 17th century, Port Royal was on the south coast of Jamaica

an English stronghold in the heart of the Spanish Empire.

It dominated the future Kingston Harbor

from the end of a long headland.

In the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean", Jack Sparrow visits Port Royal.

The city became fat on the piracy and had up to 8,000 inhabitants.

The new world's fastest growing city.

But it was also known as the most sinful city in the world.

It had more bars and brothels...

... than any other English colony.

The port itself is very loose.

It is now worse than Sodom and filled with all kinds of fornication.

On June 7, 1692, Port Royal was hit by a disaster.

A huge earthquake wiped out 2/3 of the city from the map

and lowered it to the bottom of the sea.

Now the archaeologist Jon Henderson, an expert on sunken cities...

... use new technology to discover how the disaster happened.

Port Royal sank so fast that it took its secrets.

This is a sunken city but also a disaster site.

It sank so fast that it lasted a moment.

It's called New World Pompeii.

It's under water so we can detect it. It's rare.

With advanced technology, Jon will rediscover the sunken city...

... and create an accurate, digital, model of the ruins.

It will show how the city was torn to pieces in 2 minutes.

Jon's finds will be used to apply for World Heritage status...

... to reinforce the importance of Port Royal...

... and preserve the ruins for the future.

If it succeeds...

... the information allows us to drain the sea virtually.

We can scale away millions of liters of water...

... and finally bring the sunken city of Port Royal to light again.

I read about Port Royal as a boy.

Reading about a sunken pirate city is of course exciting.

That's something exciting for me right now.

The sunken city is just outside the fishing village of Port Royal.

But exactly where?

To study the ruins, Jon must first find them.

The most mysterious thing about Port Royal is...

... is that no one is completely sure of what is there.

But traces of the 300-year-old city still remain.

This is a pretty solid wall. It's a house wall.

It shows where a house was located.

It's just a fragment of the lost city.

Most of it is hidden under several meters of sediment and dead coral.

Think about what might be down there.

Hundreds of buildings with intact content under the coral.

To reveal the true scale of Port Royal...

... Jon needs the latest search equipment.

He wants to reveal the secrets of the hidden buildings...

... and show more than you can see with the naked eye.

It is a difficult place to work because the visibility is quite poor.

That is why it has never been mapped.

Sometimes you do not see the hand in front of you when you dive.

The abysmal sight made previous surveys difficult.

So Jon has taken the help of the most powerful digital technology.

This technique has never before been used in archeology.

It is the first time.

It can bring the place to life and create a 3D model of it.

The autonomous surface craft, ASV, uses sonar...

... to measure variations in bottom height.

This is the first mission across the site.

The conditions are absolutely perfect today.

ASV can mark walls and boundaries in the sunken city...

... so that Jon can create a 3D model.

So it would be good to see if we can see the buildings in 3d.

But what did the lost city look like?

Another technology can show us that.

An autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV, takes thousands of pictures...

... with the technique of photogrammetry.

Together, the two drones can let us visualize the city...

... in high resolution for the first time.

They will unlock a new vision of Port Royal...

... and reveal clues about the disaster that destroyed the city.

This is no easy task. Visibility is often abysmal.

And you work in the mouth of a heavily trafficked port.

We should reach the central part now.

But after just a few hours, it's really bad.

A motorboat wanders into the mapping area.

We're trying to find the drone.

We do not know where it is. A boat went through and hijacked the line.

So one of our guys is out there looking.

A boat drove into our AUV.

It turned off the antenna.

They find the damage more severe than they thought.

It's as bad as it could get. We've lost the drone.

The photo mapping is incomplete.

And the accident knocked out equipment worth half a million dollars.

-We can write it off completely. - We can not replace it.

Not now. We'll be back. It's pretty sad.

The first survey, with ASV, was successful at least.

The team gets data about the sea depth...

... which helps them map the ruined city.

Here we have the flat part where the city remains.

It's a promising start but only half of the data they need.

Jon may return to complete the photo mapping of the houses.

When you dry up the sea, you see how Port Royal became a power factor.

It all depends on the situation.

Just at the entrance to Kingston Harbor.

When you drain the sea here...

... you see one of the world's largest natural harbors.

16 km long and 3.2 km wide, it is large enough for hundreds of ships...

... which protects against the hurricane-whipped waters.

The long headland on which Port Royal was built was even better.

We will see the tongue extending out into the harbor.

The steep sides made it perfect for anchoring ships.

There is deep water so big ships...

... can quickly get very close to the beach.

It may seem like a perfect place for a port.

But the land tongue of loose sand...

... would lead to the downfall of Port Royal.

The main problem is that there is no stable bedrock here.

So if there is a shake in an earthquake, you are bad out.

I doubt anyone realized it was that bad.

Seven months after the photogrammetry equipment was destroyed...

... Jon Henderson is back.

Now the photographer Simon Brown will do the job...

... and photograph the sunken city.

The visibility is so poor that Simon has to go very close to the ruins...

... and take thousands of pictures.

Just three days later, the photos were put together...

... to a 3D image of what lies beneath the surface.

-Okay, Simon. Show what you have. -That was not easy.

But we saw a lot of building five.

Building Five may have been a grand family home.

Now there is only one room left.

And it shows with incredible detail.

This looks amazing.

We can see the wall and the yard next to it.

You can see the fire pit and the low walls.

It's great. We can see individual bricks.

You can show this and then people see what's down there.

I did not think it would be so good.

Jon's mission now yields outstanding results.

Outstanding photographs reveal important evidence of the seabed.

The cornerstones of sunken homes.

To this we can add sonar data about the seabed.

In 3d we see the sunken city in relief...

... and we're seeing Port Royals' borders for the first time.

This is the remaining 5.2 acres of the lost city.

You can see how big the sunken city was...

...for the first time.

With the information, we can recreate Port Royal's buildings.

We can pull the plug out of Kingston's natural harbor.

Drain the sea from the sunken city...

... and lift Port Royal out of its water-soaked grave.

Sunlight can light up its streets once again.

For the first time in 300 years, we can reconstruct

what was there.

We can shed light on the disaster that destroyed Port Royal...

... drowned hundreds of houses and their mighty fort.

The clues to its sinfulness...

... are still hidden in the dark.

We drain the sea around the sunken pirate city of Port Royal.

For the first time we can see it in its entirety

since an earthquake lowered it into the sea 300 years ago.

Now we can see if it really was the most sinful city in the world.

Since the 1950s, there have been three archeological expeditions

searched through Port Royal's underwater ruins

to expose its pirate past.

And in the 1980s, a team found part of the city's structure itself.

During the 10 years we excavated five buildings almost completely.

My most exciting excavation.

Now we can use science to map discoveries.

From three archaeological excavations...

... all over the sunken city.

Thousands of relics from a lost world.

All are clues that tell the story of Port Royal's last days.

It is a disaster site so the preserved object...

... which was used at a certain moment in time.

Each item provides insight into the 17th century Caribbean pirate world.

They give us snapshots of everyday life.

From pewter tableware to Chinese china...

... and signs of personal wealth.

The archaeological finds from Port Royal show how rich the city was.

Usually, cities in the New World are poor copies of cities in Europe.

But Port Royal can actually be compared to Europe's capitals.

But how did Port Royal become so rich?

The city was built on the fortunes of stolen Spanish treasures.

In the 1650s, England and Spain were at war.

The English territory of Jamaica in the Caribbean...

... was surrounded on all sides by the Spanish Empire.

From Florida through Mexico and to South America.

Port Royal on the south coast of Jamaica...

... started as a small British imperial outpost.

But Fort Charles' size shows how important the city soon became.

This fort was built to defend Kingston's harbor entrance.

Here you could accommodate 500 ships.

To gain the upper hand over the Spaniards

the English took the help of pirates.

In 1657, the governor of Port Royal actually invited the pirates...

... to act as a kind of defense force.

For the British state, pirates who took looted Spanish goods could...

... to English ports be an asset.

Pirates got permission, hijacker letter...

... to plunder Spaniards at sea and on land.

They came to be called buccaneers or hijackers.

What happened in Port Royal was state-sanctioned piracy.

And in Port Royal, in the middle of the Caribbean...

... the hijackers were in the perfect position.

They were within striking distance of the major waterways to Europe.

The Spanish goods must be transported past Port Royal.

So it was a bit like having a fox in the middle of the hen house.

That made Port Royal the global capital of piracy.

Pirate treasures looted from Spaniards...

... is said to remain in Port Royal to this day.

A silver communion tableware is said to have been looted from Panama in 1671.

These are exactly the kind of things that interested pirates.

Silver, gold and everything that was valuable were taken by raids...

... and then arrived in Port Royal.

The merchants, the pirates and the local taverns became rich.

That was what Port Royal lived on.

According to the agreement, the English krona took a quarter of the change.

The rest the pirates divided among themselves.

After one of the first buccaneer expeditions, 1659...

... brought the fleet home a fortune worth $ 75 million.

The Spanish wealth that reached Port Royal in waves was colossal.

A huge influx of cash

transformed the fortified outpost into a rapidly growing city.

WELCOME TO PORT ROYAL

Archaeologists have mapped the sunken city...

... using historical descriptions and maps.

So Jon walks the streets of today's Port Royals...

... to match them with the underwater ruins.

We know, from the maps, that the modern fishing village...

... has the same streets now as in the 17th century.

So the main street Queen Street...

... extends down there to the sea.

It continues in the sunken city.

Archaeologists know that Queen Street...

... extends just over 90 meters straight into the sea.

When we map the city, we see its size.

A dense network of streets covering more than 20 hectares.

Everything is protected by three impressive coastal forts facing the sea.

Inside the walls was Port Royal...

... as densely populated as 17th century London.

If you visited Port Royal during the heyday, you saw a city...

... which was packed with people in a small area.

Clues on the seabed show that...

... the architecture was similar to London.

They had the same density of brick buildings...

... with 3-4 floors, steep, tarred roofs...

... very narrow but deep plots with front and backyards.

In the drained city you can see as many as 2,000 bricks and wooden houses...

... penetrated along the streets of Port Royals.

There lived a population here...

... which would reach 8,000 at its peak.

But the narrow, narrow, streets would be a death trap...

... when the earthquake hit them.

It is a closed and very overcrowded peninsula...

... where people live close to each other in houses with 2-4 floors.

When the earthquake came, there was nowhere to flee.

By the 1670s, Port Royal had become the Las Vegas of its time.

It was almost like a border town...

... during the gold rush stuck in 17th century America.

And people came here to get rich quick.

With the promise of such riches...

... merchants and artisans flocked to the city.

Some became the equivalent of millionaires overnight.

There's a story about a pilsner buccaneer...

... who gave the city's most beautiful prostitutes a thousand pounds...

... to strip before going to bed.

But where was Port Royal the most sinful city in the world?

Outstanding discoveries show...

... how Port Royal got its reputation.

A building on Lime Street contained important clues.

More than 60 artifacts.

And all were bottles.

Building 1 in Port Royal was obviously a tavern.

We found more than 60 bottles in the back room.

Still sealed.

Archaeologists had discovered

-one of Port Royal's many water holes.

According to records, there were hundreds of taverns here.

Maybe as many as one in ten residents.

Jon dives over the remains of the sunken tavern.

Here the pirates spent much of their money on alcohol.

It is difficult to imagine the immorality and drunkenness.

The Buckanjars put their fortune on rum, wine and women.

A typical buccaneer put a lot of money into entertainment.

And there was a lot of fun in Port Royal...

... in the form of alcohol, good food and sex.

Port Royal became notorious for its immorality.

These taverns can just as easily be called brothels.

VISITORS TO PORT ROYAL

There were so many prostitutes and prostitutes...

... that it is virtually impossible to civilize the city.

In the world of the 17th century...

... Port Royal seemed ripe for God's wrath.

Some people thought that the city deserved to be wiped off the face of the earth.

But no one predicted...

... the triple catastrophe that would hit the city.

Traces of the disaster remain on the seabed.

We drain the sea around Port Royal...

... and reveals the most infamous pirate city of all time...

... to shed new light on a disaster that drowned the city...

... in an incredible apocalypse.

Among thousands of clues from the bottom...

... there is shocking evidence of when the earthquake occurred.

A pocket watch from the 17th century.

Its hands have long been rusted by the sea.

A closer analysis of the find shows something interesting.

When it was x-rayed, we saw that it stopped at 11:43.

We know, from historical sources, that the earthquake fell before noon.

Some have interpreted it...

... like the clock stopped when the earthquake struck.

But what powerful natural forces triggered the quake?

To find the answer, we do not just drain Port Royal...

... without all of Jamaica to reveal the source.

It is hidden in the dark hundreds of meters below the surface.

When you drain the sea around Jamaica, you see huge furrows at the bottom.

They are fault lines that run in an east-west direction.

The faults are part of the boundary between two plates in the earth's crust.

The North American plate and the Caribbean plate in the south.

Both are in constant motion.

It is a place where the movements of the plates are stopped...

... and tensions are rising.

It is thus an earthquake area.

And Port Royal is in the middle of that area.

And what happened in 1692...

... was that the tensions that gradually built up over a long period of time...

... was released in an earthquake.

When the stresses in the earth's crust release...

... it sends a powerful seismic pressure wave into the environment.

June 7, 1692.

Doomsday is upon us.

In the churches the prayers of the day were held, work began at dawn.

People lived their everyday lives.

At a speed of 8 km per second...

... the seismic pulse travels towards Port Royal.

It is known that a man would drink sherry with the governor.

No warning was given.

Port Royal's alleys and houses were full of people

The quays were full of merchant ships.

The first sign was a bang...

... and a low rumbling among the mountains to the north.

Our sources indicate that the earthquake came in three pulses.

The real killer was what awaited.

SURVIVOR WITNESS

The quakes were so violent that people were overthrown.

Abysses were opened in the ground.

The ground shook and we saw the floor stones rise.

The ground rolled and rippled like waves on a troubled sea.

People ran for their lives from falling bricks.

But the city did not offer secure protection.

It was the worst possible situation.

Tall brick houses along narrow streets.

So you had to choose between the street or the houses.

Pure lottery.

The earthquake was just the beginning.

It does not explain why Port Royal sank in the sea.

The city sank for a completely different reason.

Behind Fort Charles is evidence of the terrible forces...

... under the sandy streets of Port Royal.

The building is called the "funny house"...

... because of the funny feeling in it.

The house is sloping and the floor remains...

... so you get strangely disoriented when you enter.

"Funny House" is one of the few surviving houses...

... from an earthquake in 1907.

Something similar happened here in 1692.

But in 1692 the earthquake was even stronger.

Here the house sank about 5.5 meters...

... straight down in the sand while people were left in them.

The climax of the Port Royal earthquake was something extraordinary...

... which we very rarely see.

The buildings that shook and collapsed...

... began to sink into the ground and people with them.

Researchers call it liquidation.

For the people of Port Royal, it was hell on earth.

The sandy ground where they built their houses became a deadly seesaw.

In a liquid operation, you have sand with a lot of water in it.

When it is shaken, it becomes a mourning, solid ground becomes liquid.

These rare images show the horrors of the liquidation action...

... in Niigata, Japan on June 16, 1964.

The energy from a huge earthquake separated the sediment in the earth...

... so that water could rush to the surface.

Earth turned into quicksand that sucked down the city.

Port Royal's unfortunate people had no idea...

... that solid ground could become liquid dead.

Just minutes into the earthquake, the second disaster came...

... when the ground cracked...

... and water and sand rushed forth.

The longer the ground shook, the more liquid the sand became.

Grand villas, churches, taverns...

... and even the Port Royals fort sank like rocks.

The houses that have been the most beautiful and magnificent...

... sank for a moment into the ground to never be seen again.

Some were caught half in the sand.

PORT ROYAL FARMERS

The earth swallowed them up to the neck and then closed again...

... and hugged them to death with their heads above the ground.

Many of them eat the dogs off.

Many perished in the quicksand.

But here's an incredible story of survival.

The French merchant Lewis Galdy was sucked into the ground.

He was thought to be dead. But in an aftershock he was spat into the sea.

He swam to the nearest boat.

Afterwards he became a very religious man.

Overall, 2/3 of Port Royal fell.

The disaster took 2,000 souls and hundreds of buildings.

The remaining ruins are incredibly well preserved.

The most fascinating thing I found...

... was how to lower a building...

... 4.6 meters from its place of origin...

... without a single floor stone being disturbed.

And the stones were not even bricked, they were just laid.

But here they were now, completely intact, but at a depth of 4.6 meters.

You get a sense of how it has sunk in one piece,

The walls and courtyards are intact.

It gives a very spooky feeling.

It was reported that the city sank in just a few minutes.

But the chaos was not over for it.

The drained city shows traces of the third disaster...

... who was on his way.

Port Royal was swallowed by the sea in a matter of minutes.

Survivors saw their families, homes and city...

... sink under the waves.

We have mapped the disaster area with advanced technology.

Thousands of archeological finds have been found here.

Each tells something about the moments before the fall of Port Royal.

People who cook at home. Preparing lunch.

Taverns were filled with thirsty customers.

In the drained city we find incredible evidence...

... because the earthquake gave Port Royal one last killing blow.

On the seabed lies the skeleton of a large ship.

She's in the middle of the ruins of a house on Lime Street.

Why is there a ship on a floor behind a building in Port Royal?

The strange discovery was excavated by Donny Hamilton in the 1980s.

Now Jon wants to know what it tells us about Port Royal's doomsday.

This is a floor plan of buildings five and four.

We found timber that turned out to be the ship's keel.

It was the building near the ship that surprised Donny the most.

Why was that wall not intact like the other houses?

The first thing we saw was that A, B, C and D should form a straight line.

But everything has been pushed forward.

The wall is not just offset. It has been broken to pieces.

And another wall was bent.

This is a collision site.

It is unusual to see exactly what happened so clearly.

But how could a ship in the harbor...

... have hit a house in the middle of town?

Could the ship's identity solve the mystery?

In the sources, Donny's team found a possible candidate.

An English warship of 23 meters.

She resembled this ship and was named HMS Swan.

We knew from the records that Swan was in port at the time of the earthquake.

And she fits in with the dimensions of the wreck.

It turned out that on June 7, 1692...

... HMS Swan lay at the quay in Port Royal for maintenance.

All clues point to a conclusion.

The ship that lay at the quay 60 m from this building...

... had now been let down on the building.

That is clear evidence of a tsunami.

The tsunami was the third disaster to hit Port Royal.

A witness says that the sea receded before the wave came.

It was a wave similar to those that devastated Japan in 2011...

... and Thailand in 2004.

The tsunami could explain what happened to HMS Swan.

We can now, for the first time, show her last journey.

Without ballast, HMS Swan floated like a cork...

... on the mighty wave that crashed over Port Royal.

She was thrown over the drenched city...

... was washed down Queen Street...

... before she crashed into a house on Lime Street.

She broke through its walls with considerable force.

Archaeologists have mapped out the fate of Port Royal.

But you have one last mystery...

... who can shed light on how the disaster happened.

One of Port Royal's largest buildings seems to be missing.

Fort James.

From maps we know that Fort James was at the harbor entrance...

... so it should be visible on the underwater map.

It surprised us that we did not find any height...

... where you expect something as big as a fort.

We can accept that it dropped but when you see the maps...

... so it seems to have disappeared completely.

Something else happened during the disaster...

... who can explain Fort James' disappearance?

The size of the building only makes it more mysterious.

It was, like Fort Charles, a strong defense...

... for England's largest settlement in the New World.

So what other brutal forces may have destroyed...

... its mighty fortress walls?

To find out, Jon wants to search for remnants at the bottom.

I want to go down in that area...

... and look for something that may belong to the fort.

If Jon finds anything, Simon Brown should...

... photo map the area properly.

We are looking for large blocks with straight sides.

Anything with a uniform shape.

Jon follows up on rumors of large boulders on the seabed.

He starts in deeper water...

... beyond the known boundaries of the sunken city.

The location of Fort James has always been a mystery.

We hope that with new technology...

... should get an impression of where the remains of the fortress are...

... and what happened to the fortress.

All remnants can be clues...

... until the end of the disaster that wiped out Port Royal.

You quickly make a discovery.

One of the marker buoys has come up. I heard Jon found something.

Could it be Fort James? The missing part of the city?

The earthquake that sank Port Royal does not explain why a large building...

... seems to be missing on the seabed.

But Jon Henderson may have found the remains of Fort James.

So it's time for Simon to explore the place.

If they released buoys...

... so they have probably found something they think is important.

Down here we have huge blocks of bricks and mortar.

You can see that they are handmade.

They have quite sharp edges.

And they have some right angles.

The blocks do not seem to be a natural feature of the seabed.

So the team documents and maps the discovery.

Can that explain how the fort went down?

They are all over the bottom.

They are large and massive lumps of brick and mortar.

Fort James is in pieces all over the seabed down there.

It is as if the building has sunk and broken.

Jon has located Fort James for the first time.

This is not where it should be at the bottom.

And there is very little left of it.

What does it reveal about the disaster?

This is one of the parts...

... which we believe was part of Fort James.

This is a picture of a large piece of wall.

A remnant of the mighty fort.

Unlike other buildings, it is not intact.

How come it was smashed to pieces?

At the earthquake it slid down into the harbor.

It had the whole weight of the city behind it.

It began to break. Spirit houses sank straight down.

But the fort was pushed over even before the tsunami...

... which then broke it.

The destruction of Fort James indicates that it was more than a tsunami.

It was the earthquake's final and cruel whim.

And that again was due to Port Royal's location...

... in Kingston's harbor.

The irony was that they were in a port, a protected place

which protected ships from storms but became fatal at the quake.

Kingston's harbor intensified the tsunami.

Imagine that the wave rushed into the bay and could not get out.

In the bay, the tsunami bounced against all beaches...

... and sent more waves towards the north side of the sunken city.

They broke up Fort James and spread it over the bottom.

It's like taking a bathtub and shaking it so that it splashes.

It only exacerbates the devastation.

Port Royal had been devastated by an earthquake, quicksand...

... and several tsunami waves.

The disaster cuts off the city from the mainland.

All that was left was a devastated island...

... and thousands of dead bodies.

For many days afterwards a large number of corpses floated...

SURVIVAL TESTIMONY

... around the whole harbor.

They caused such a stench...

... that the dead seemed to want to destroy the living.

When the news of the disaster reached Europe...

... it seemed like God had finally punished the sinful pirate city.

When the news reached the homeland...

... many thought that the English-speaking world was the most sinful city...

... got what it deserved.

It was seen as divine revenge and as an appropriate punishment...

... for the sinful Port Royal.

Through this awfulness, God causes them to reform their lives.

PORT ROYAL RESIDENTS

For there are no more wicked people in this world.

Port Royal never regained its former glory.

The pearl of the Caribbean trading towns had been wiped out

If the earthquake had not occurred here...

... the city could have developed like Manhattan or Hong Kong.

But in the end, it was Port Royal's life-threatening situation...

... on a fault line and quicksand that sealed its fate.

The truth was that the English built the city in the wrong place.

It was a tragedy, a catastrophe, caused by man.

Not by nature or God.

Jon Henderson's work is the first complete survey

of the sunken pirate city.

It can provide a place on the UNESCO World Heritage List...

... which can protect the place from nature.

The sea regains its place again.

It has swallowed it once and wants it back.

But thanks to science and incredible computing...

... the history of Port Royal lives on.

The most infamous pirate city of all time...

... was beaten to pieces by a huge earthquake...

... and sucked into the sea by life-threatening quicksand.

The last blow was dealt by several tsunami waves.

A triple disaster that ended...

... in the most sinful city on earth.