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SAVANNA-LA-MAR,
33 miles from Montego
Bay, is the chief town of Westmoreland parish of
which was formed in 1730, About a quarter of the
parish consist of the principal area of Sugar
cultivation, and next to sugar its most
important industry is cattle-raising, both for
dairy products and beef.
Savanna-la-mar was founded about 1730, before
which time the principal settlement was at
Queen's Town, a few miles inland at the
crossroads now called Cross Path or Banbury
Savanna la mar, 'the plain by the sea' is hardly
appropriate to the town itself, which is built
on a strip of land running down to the sea
between the mangrove swamps which hem it on both
sides. The town has suffered disastrously
from hurricanes, notably in 1748, 1780 and 1912.
In 1748, says
Bryan Edwards 'The sea bursting its ancient
limits overwhelmed the unhappy town and swept it
to instance destruction, leaving not a vestige
of man, beast or habitation behind. So
sudden and comprehensive was the stroke that I
think the catastrophe of Savanna-la-mar was even
more terrible, in many respects, than that of
Port Royal.'
 In 1790 the town
was completely destroyed again, with much loss
of life, when the sea rose, a mighty wave swept
up the beach for nearly a mile.......Famine and
pestilence followed.
At the best of
time Savanna-la-mar was not considered healthy;
a well-known treatise on the Flowers of Jamaica,
published in 1791 by Dr. Robert Jackson, was
based on the author's experience as physician
there for some years before the hurricane.
At
Savanna-la-mar there was not even a vestige if a
town (the parts only of two or three houses
having in partial ruin remained as if to
indicate the situation and extend of the
calamity) the very material of which it had been
composed had been carried away by the resistless
fury of the waves, which finally completed what
the wind began. |
