The Forts of Jamaica

The first fort built in Port Royal, and the oldest in Jamaica. It went up in the late 1650s under Cromwell’s protectorate and was originally called Fort Cromwell; in 1662 it was renamed for Charles II, restored to the throne two years earlier. The fort was altered repeatedly between 1656 and 1670.

Its armament tells the story of the island’s anxiety. Ten guns at the start, thirty-six by 1667, and one hundred and four by 1765, with a garrison to match. It is built in the shape of a ship, and when new it had water on three sides; the ground around it has silted up since, and it now sits inland.

Of the six forts at Port Royal, Fort Charles was the only one to survive the earthquake of 1692. Damaged but standing, it was reconstructed in 1699 by Colonel Christian Lilly, chief engineer of Jamaica. Horatio Nelson walked its quarterdeck, and a plaque there still records it.

Port Royal was called the richest and wickedest city in the world. Founded in the 1650s by the first British settlers, the town grew up around Fort Charles and filled with traders, shopkeepers, innkeepers, soldiers, buccaneers and pirates — along with carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, goldsmiths and silversmiths. By 1690 it held between eight and ten thousand permanent inhabitants, some houses standing three or four storeys high, with bars, taverns, restaurants, coffee houses and brothels.

Six forts defended it. Five were destroyed a few minutes before midday on Tuesday 7 June 1692, when an earthquake struck and a tidal wave swept the harbour, carrying one ship into the middle of the town.

The Giddy House is the other survival worth the trip: built in 1888 as the Royal Artillery store for the Victoria Battery, it was shoved to a 45-degree angle by the 1907 earthquake. Walking into it produces exactly the sensation the name promises.

Fort Augusta sits on the seaward side between Port Henderson and Passage Fort, covering the western approach to Kingston Harbour — the other jaw of the trap that Fort Charles closed from the east.

It has had the strangest afterlife of any fort on the register. The site now operates as the Fort Augusta Adult Correctional Centre, Jamaica’s women’s prison, which makes it one of the few eighteenth-century fortifications anywhere still in continuous government use for confinement of one kind or another.

All that remains of Fort Nugent is its Martello tower, built around 1806 — the squat, thick-walled circular design the British adopted across the empire during the Napoleonic wars.

The first fortification here is said to have been raised by a Spanish slave agent, James Castillo, and later reinforced by Sir George Nugent, governor from 1801 to 1806 and commander-in-chief of Jamaica, who gave the fort its name.

Rockfort stands beside the Jamaica Cement Company works, facing Kingston harbour at the eastern entrance to the city — the last hard point before the road runs out towards Bull Bay.

Its second life is unexpectedly gentle. The Rockfort Mineral Bath operates on the site, fed by a spring, and the Heritage Trust reopened it after a round of major upgrades. A gun position turned into a place people go to soak.

Built in 1782 to protect the bay between Port Henderson and the Hellshire Hills — the stretch of coast west of the harbour mouth where a landing force could have come ashore and marched on Spanish Town.

The date matters: 1782 was the year of the Battle of the Saintes, and the Caribbean was thick with French and Spanish fleets. Jamaica was building fast.

Built by the British in the middle of the eighteenth century to defend the north-north-westerly corner of the island, during the reign of George III and named for his consort, Queen Charlotte.

It is the best-documented fort on the register. The barrack could house fifty men. There were twenty-three embrasures cut for twenty-three guns, though only twenty were ever mounted. During the Napoleonic wars the armament was judged insufficient to hold the harbour, so in 1807 three 24-pounders on traversing carriages were installed on the seaward side.

The structure is rectangular cut stone with several openings towards the sea, and inside you can still see the remains of the circular bases the guns rotated on — the physical evidence of a field of fire.

By the record it appeared to be a large fort, housing four 12-pounder guns to cover the bay that would become Jamaica’s second city and its tourism capital.

It now sits inside modern Montego Bay, a few minutes from the Hip Strip — one of the easiest forts on the island to walk up to.

The fort at Savanna-la-mar has no name on record. It was never finished, and the Heritage Trust notes simply that it seems to have gone without one — so it has been called the fort ever since.

An unfinished, unnamed fort is its own kind of historical document: money voted, work begun, threat receded or funds ran out. It is the only entry on the register without a glossary page of its own.

Fort Dundas stands behind the Rio Bueno Primary School, carrying the date 1778 — built as the American War of Independence widened into a global conflict and the French entered on the rebel side.

Rio Bueno is a deep natural harbour on the Trelawny coast, which is why it was worth defending and why some hold it to be Columbus’s actual first landing point on the island.

Erected about 1750 at St Ann’s Bay, covering the anchorage beside the site of Sevilla la Nueva — the first Spanish capital, abandoned nearly a century before the fort was raised over the same water.

Built in the late seventeenth century and strengthened in 1780, like so many others, when French attack was feared. It sits right on the main road through Ocho Rios.

It is one of the few Jamaican forts with a recorded success. In 1795 an enemy vessel approaching Ocho Rios thought better of it and diverted to Mammee Bay instead — the fort did its job without firing on the town.

Rebuilt by Reynolds Jamaica, it holds two of the original guns that defended the coast at Mammee Bay.

Built during the War of Trade — the commercial conflict with Spain that began over a severed ear and ran into the wider European wars of the 1740s. Jamaica’s forts were, at bottom, insurance on the sugar trade.

Oracabessa is better known now as the stretch of coast where Ian Fleming built Goldeneye and wrote the Bond novels.

Erected at Port Maria in 1759 and named after General George Haldane, then Governor of Jamaica, with its guns strategically positioned over the bay.

Within a year it was on the wrong end of history. Tacky’s Revolt broke out in St Mary at Easter 1760, and the rebels are recorded as taking the fort’s store for arms and powder before moving inland — one of the largest slave uprisings in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, and it began by capturing a fort built to repel the French.

Little survives. The remains can be identified at Gray’s Charity, a home for the elderly in Port Maria.

Fort George stands on the Titchfield Peninsula in Port Antonio, the finger of land that divides the town’s twin harbours — as commanding a defensive position as exists on the island.

The peninsula is a heritage district in its own right, and the fort’s remains now sit within the grounds of Titchfield High School. Generations of Portland schoolchildren have taken their break beside eighteenth-century gun walls.

Probably built in 1758 and designed for nine guns, covering the bay on the island’s south-eastern shoulder.

Morant Bay’s place in Jamaican history came a century later, with the rebellion of 1865 led by Paul Bogle that ended in the execution of Bogle and George William Gordon — and, eventually, the end of the Assembly that had voted the money for forts like this one.

Built in 1745 at Morant Point, near Old Pera, directly opposite Fort William — the two together closing the entrance to Port Morant harbour from either side. It mounted nine guns and had a magazine and barracks attached.

Its last chapter is unusual. After the First World War the government rented out the land near the barracks and used the income to support St Thomas’s returning war veterans — a fort paying a pension.

As early as 1675 Port Morant had a platform mounting five guns to defend its harbour — among the earliest fortifications on the island outside Port Royal, and a sign of how valuable the eastern sugar country already was.

The fort stood at Prospect, opposite Fort Lindsay, guarding the western side of the harbour entrance. It is in ruins now.