Being built almost entirely of wood, the town had sustained but
little injury, but the massive concrete fort at the end of the
peninsula had slid bodily into the sea, six-inch guns and all. Some
twenty cocoa-nut palms it had taken with it were standing in the
water, their brown withered tops just peering above the surface,
giving a curious effect of desolation. A tramway used for conveying
ammunition bore witness to the violence of the earth-waves, for it
stood in places some ten feet up in the air, resting on nothing at
all; looking for all the world like a switchback railway at Earl's
Court. So many charges are levelled at the Royal Engineers that it is
pleasant to be able to testify that every building erected by this
much-abused corps at Port Royal had resisted the earthquake and was
standing intact. Port Royal, notwithstanding its situation at the end
of a peninsula, had in old days a terrible reputation for
unhealthiness, only surpassed by that of Fort Augusta across the bay,
the latter a veritable charnel-house. The neighbourhood of the
poisonous swamps of the Rio Cobre was in both cases responsible for
the loss of tens of thousands of British soldiers' lives in these two
ill-fated spots. They were both hot-beds of yellow fever.
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