Port Royal, the Wicked City

The account

At twenty minutes to noon on June 7, 1692, the sand under Port Royal turned to liquid and two-thirds of the pirate capital of the world slid into the harbour, taverns, warehouses, two thousand souls. A pocket watch pulled from the seabed had stopped at 11:43. The streets are still down there, laid out under the silt, the best-preserved sunken English town on earth.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The wickedest city on earth, the pirate haven that slid into the sea in the 1692 Jamaica earthquake; underwater archaeologists have mapped it off Kingston.
• It is a protected submerged site, famously preserving the exact moment of the quake, down to a pocket watch stopped at 11:43.
• The lead is the large unexcavated portions of the drowned town still in the harbor mud.