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W Ralph Hall Caine, Cruise of the Port Kingston p 218
Hall Caine
had arrived on the 'Port Kingston' for a stay in Jamaica; he was an eye witness to the events of January 14 and succeeding
days. Although he was somewhat given to 'purple passages', his accounts of the earthquake are generally factual, it seems.
'Out of the confused mass of impressions, one recalls the pictures of a hospital thronged to over-flowing, of the
decks of the Port Kingston (the only British ship in harbour at the time) crowded with the dead and dying and suffering multitude,
of the mangled remains of the unknown and unrecognisable cast into great barges, to be later thrown into the sea a few miles
away as food for the sharks; of the half incinerated bodies that were to be met with at every turn, of the dead ranged in
rows along side streets; of the procession of carts to the cemetery at May Pen, a little way outside the town; but, most gruesome
of all, the great funeral pyres in Kingston itself a veritable inferno, into which the dead were cast in such vast numbers.
In this way one gathers fragmentary notions of the stupendous character of the disaster.'
[In the notes to its first pictures of Kingston burning,
published on February 16, the Gleaner pointed out that "The
black heap in the centre is a two hundred ton coal pile, upon which some
bodies of the dead were cremated."]
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