The early maps of Saint Catherine’s show that there have occurred deviations in the course of the Rio Cobre, that are not easily to be reconciled by abundant rains. Antecedent to the discovery of the West Indies, the embouchure of the river was perceptively in the ponds, shut in by the narrow belt of land on which Fort Augusta stands, the river having been at that time more of a surface stream, and striking to _the sea due south; the outlet curving northward_, and embaying Passage Fort. At the time of the conquest of the island by the English the river flowed in an opposite direction _due north_, coursing the foot of the Caymanas Mountains, and making the present lagoons in the upper part of that plain its channel, seeking the _sea southward_, through what is now an independent stream, called the Ferry River (Fresh River). In 1722, in the midst of an extraordinary rain-storm, this channel was suddenly quitted, and a straight line made _eastward_. The settling waters, as they reached the Harbour of Kingston, impeded by the easterly winds, regurgitated through the lakelet into which they gathered themselves, and digging out the soil at the foot of the mountains, made the present lagoons, increasing the sea-board lands of Hunt’s Bay 3000 feet (three thousand). In Spanish Town, the ancient capital, although there is nothing to speak to us of the native Arawâk, we can perhaps, better than anywhere else in the island, picture to ourselves the deeds of the Spaniards in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century; and especially the long struggles between the people’s or rather planters’ representatives and the government in the House of Assembly for a century and a half; together with the political and social entertainments at King’s House, as narrated for one short period in the graphic pages of Lady Nugent’s Journal, until, with the removal of the government to Kingston by Sir John Peter Grant, Spanish Town was shorn of its grandeur, to be only revived at rare intervals by such episodes as the consecration of the Bishop of Antigua in 1911. Jackson gives the following account of the town in 1643.