Jamaica History and Culture

The Richest Sugar Bowl of Jamaica

Oristan (now “Bluefields”) was founded in 1519 and was the second Spanish settlement after Sevilla Neuva which had been established on the North Coast a few years earlier. With one of Jamaica's most protected anchorages and with mountains descending to meet the sea at the Bluefields Beach, Bluefields Bay was seen as a highly desirable and healthy area. From the 1500s until the mid-1900s, Negril was viewed as a marshy and malarial swampland with its lack of elevation and absence of fresh water. The North Coast was also seen as being too swampy for successful habitation by the original Spaniards.

The British arrived to Jamaica in 1655 and evicted the Spanish Catholics. However those persons claiming to be of Jewish ancestry were permitted to remain. Kingston's original synagogue was built in 1744 and the nearby town of Savanna-la-mar is said to have ruins of a Jewish cemetery. The three older houses of the Bluefields Bay collection (Mullion Cove, San Michele, Milestone Cottage) came from descendants of early Jewish settlers.

In 1670, Henry Morgan was living in Bluefields Bay and used it as a gathering place for the fleet that he assembled to sack Panama in January of 1671. Returning to Jamaica in 1674 an incredibly wealthy man, he was then knighted and became Governor of Jamaica. Later in 1793, Captain Bligh, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, lived in the Bluefields Great House where he brought and planted Jamaica's first breadfruit tree.

By the 1800s, the Bluefields Bay area was the richest “sugar bowl” of Jamaica. On maps from that era, Bluefields appears as important as Kingston with map inserts showing only those two areas. Those maps clearly depict a seaside residence named “Hermitage” and 19th century maps show the site of San Michele as “Fort (ruin)”—likely a reference to a fortification with gun placements erected during the War of Jenkin's Ear (called French & Indian War in the U.S.).