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the war by adding to its forces men who would make good fighters on both land and sea. The Committee on Trade and Plantations reported favourably on the proposal, but the power seems never to have been granted.[505] In January 1692, however, the President of the Council of Jamaica began to issue commissions to privateers, and in a few months the surrounding seas were full of armed Jamaican sloops.[506] On 7th June of the same year the colony suffered a disaster which almost proved its destruction. A terrible earthquake overwhelmed Port Royal and "in ten minutes threw down all the churches, dwelling-houses and sugar-works in the island. Two-thirds of Port Royal were swallowed up by the sea, all the forts and fortifications demolished and great part of its inhabitants miserably knocked on the head or drowned."[507] The French in Hispaniola took advantage of the distress caused by the earthquake to invade the island, and nearly every week hostile bands landed and plundered the coast of negroes and other property.[508] In December 1693 a party of 170 swooped down in the night upon St. Davids, only seven leagues from Port Royal, plundered the whole parish, and got away again with 370 slaves.[509] In the following April Ducasse, the new French governor of Hispaniola, sent 400 buccaneers in six small vessels to repeat the exploit, but the marauders met an English man-of-war guarding the coast, and concluding "that they would only get broken bones and spoil their men for any other design," they retired whence they had come.[510] Two months later, however, a much more serious incursion was made. An expedition of twenty-two vessels and 1500 men, recruited in France and instigated, it is said, by Irish and Jacobite refugees, set sail under Ducasse on 8th June with the intention of conquering the whole of Jamaica. The French landed at Point Morant and Cow Bay, and for a month cruelly desolated the whole south-eastern portion of the island. Then coasting along the southern shore they made a feint on Port Royal, and landed in