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1770-06-03

1770-06-03: (A Devastating Earthquake Strikes Port-au-Prince, Killing Over Two Hundred People in the Same Year the City Becomes the Colonial Capital, the Fir…

Haitian

1770-06-03: (A Devastating Earthquake Strikes Port-au-Prince, Killing Over Two Hundred People in the Same Year the City Becomes the Colonial Capital, the First of Many Seismic Catastrophes to Remind the Island That the Earth Itself Refuses to Be Governed): On June 3, 1770, at approximately 7:15 in the evening, an earthquake of 7.5 magnitude struck Port-au-Prince, killing over two hundred people. It was the same year the city had been designated the colonial capital, as though the ground itself were issuing a warning about the wisdom of building a seat of power on a fault line. The 1770 earthquake was not the first to devastate Hispaniola. Major tremors had struck in 1618, 1673, 1684, 1751, and 1761. But the destruction of a newly designated capital city carried a particular symbolic weight, one that the colonial administration chose to ignore rather than heed. The pattern of building, destroying, and rebuilding on the same unstable ground would define Port-au-Prince for the next two and a half centuries, culminating in the catastrophe of January 12, 2010, when the death toll reached into the hundreds of thousands.