=Carlisle Bay=, the scene of the principal military engagement with a foreign foe which has taken place in Jamaica during the British occupation, is on the south-west coast of the old parish of Vere. Much of the following account is taken from “A Narrative of the Descent on Jamaica by the French,” by Sir William Beeston, in the MSS. department of the British Museum. It is printed in “Interesting Tracts relating to the Island of Jamaica,” published at St. Jago de la Vega in 1800. A letter from the Council in England in answer to Beeston’s narrative is also in the British Museum, and a contemporary account of the occurrence sworn to at Bermuda on October 2, 1694, by Benjamin Thornton, master of the sloop _Content_, is in the Record Office at Bermuda. Beeston came to the island in 1660, was employed in various public capacities, and was lieutenant-governor from 1690 to 1700, and thenceforward Governor till 1702; he is chiefly famous for the defence, which he made, together with Colonel Long, against the attempt by Lord Carlisle to assimilate the government of Jamaica to that of Ireland. For some time prior to the engagement at Carlisle Bay the owners of the plantations on the sea coast of Jamaica had been much distressed by descents by French privateers (aided in some cases by disaffected persons from the island itself who threw in their lot with them) from San Domingo and the Leeward Islands, who plundered and murdered as occasion offered. Captain Du Casse—the Governor of San Domingo, perhaps best known in England as the opponent to Benbow in the engagement which ended in the latter’s death—being informed by two renegade Irishmen that the “island was easily taken; the fortifications at Port Royal were out of order and few men there, so that two hundred men would take that place, and two hundred more would march in any part of the country the people were so thin and so little used to arms,” and, being reinforced by three men-of-war from France, decided to make a descent on the island. In the meantime a Captain Elliott, of Jamaica, who had been taken prisoner into Petit Goave, on the west coast of San Domingo, by French privateers, and was probably the Captain Stephen Elliott who brought to England the news of the great earthquake at Port Royal in 1692, managed to escape to Jamaica in a small canoe, and give timely warning on May 31, 1694, that Du Casse himself, with twenty sail and 3000 men, was coming to take the island. For this he was subsequently rewarded by William III with a gold chain and medal of £100 value and £500 in money.