The following account, signed W.B., and written probably by William Burrows, who was Sir William Penn’s chief clerk in the Navy Office after the Restoration, is taken from the journal of the _Swiftsure_: The landing-places are two, and are only banks supported with stakes, a matter of twenty yards long towards the water; all the rest being trees and bushes, among which can be no good going ashore. At the more eastward, where we landed, we saw the ordnance the Spaniards left; the army having landed at the other, within that to the westward. A pretty parcel of ground is cleared within the landing-places. About a furlong and a half thence, the way leads into the wood, which continues till within a quarter of a mile of the town; all the way being even, without hills, and a fair path for eight to march abreast. At the issuing out of the wood begins the Savanna, which stretches about, and is very fair and plain to the westward of the town; so that I deemed there might be room enough for 50,000 men to draw up in battalia. The Rio Cobre has, since the conquest of the island, brought down so much sand and deposited it at its mouth that the site of Passage Fort is now some four or five hundred yards off the sea. In dry weather, it now meanders through a new course which it cut for itself in 1838, across the beach to the harbour, giving no idea of the power which it acquires in the rainy season. Here, as of old, is there “no good going ashore,” the slope of the beach being very gradual. In “The Present State of Jamaica” (1683) we read: “Going from Port Royal to St. Jago de la Vega, people land at Passage, where a fort was in Col. Doyly’s time, and there is about thirty houses that are storehouses, alehouses, and horse keepers, and hackney coaches; this being the greatest passage in the island, it is two leagues from Port Royal by sea, and six miles from St. Jago by land.” Totally destroyed by the earthquake of 1692, the village was but partially rebuilt, and was, when Long wrote his history (1774), of small importance, consisting of about fifteen houses, chiefly inhabited by wharfingers, warehouse keepers and the masters of wherries and hackney chaises, which plied with passengers to and from Port Royal and Spanish Town. Large ships could not lie alongside as there was not sufficient depth of water; and for this reason it was in a measure superseded by Port Henderson, where the depth of water is greater; but, with the abandonment of Spanish Town as the seat of government, both villages gradually diminished, and Passage Fort is to-day a mere fishing hamlet. Richard Hill, in his “A Week at Port Royal” (1855), says: