In the years between 1685 and 1707, Tutchin's separate poems were mainly occasional and satirical. Panegyric for William III dominates such an early piece as _An Heroic Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty_ (1689), and hatred for the Stuarts possesses a later poem like _The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd_ (1701). In _Civitas Militaris_ (1690) Tutchin engages in city politics. The elegy on the death of Queen Mary irritated Defoe enough to have "_T----n_" placed among the "Pindarick Legions" in _The Pacificator_ (1700). Two poems, however,--_The Earth-quake of Jamaica_ (1692) and _Whitehall in Flames_ (1698)--differ from the others in that they are Cowleyan "Pindaricks" moralizing on disasters. _The Earth-quake of Jamaica_ is reprinted here to illustrate Tutchin's descriptive talent. He starts with an actual event, the Jamaican disaster of June 7, 1692; and then, as the epigraph on the title page suggests, he presents a variation on Horace's rejection of "senseless Epicureanism," in Ode 34 of Book I. _The Earth-quake of Jamaica_ may have been worked over longer than was customary. It was published shortly before December 10, the manuscript date on Narcissus Luttrell's copy now in the Houghton Library. Some six months earlier, in the late morning of June 7, the earthquake had erupted in Port Royal, the "boom" port on the south side of the island. In three schocks lasting less than three minutes, the famed capital of the buccaneers had fallen. News of the disaster did not reach London until August 9. The earthquake then became one of the most widely discussed events. The _London Gazette_ ran stories on it, scientists like Sir Hans Sloane published eye-witness accounts in the _Philosophical Transactions_ of the Royal Society, the moralists declared God's wrath had come upon the wickedest place in Christendom, and "the actors of the drolls" in Southwark Fair even mockingly re-enacted the event until the Lord Mayor put a stop to the performances.[14] If contemporary accounts of the Port Royal earthquake are compared with _The Earth-quake of Jamaica_, the reader becomes impressed by Tutchin's way of adapting the well-known details to a moral comment on life. His scenes are indeed graphic, but they do not have the immediacy of such eye-witness accounts as the following, preserved by Luttrell: I cannot sufficiently represent the terrible circumstances that attended it; the earth swelled with a dismal humming noise, the houses fell, the earth opened in many places, the graves gave up some of their dead, the tomb stones ratled together; at last the earth sunk below the water, and the sea overwhelmed great numbers of people, whose shreiks and groanes made a lamentable eccho: the earth opened both behind and before me within 2 foot of my feet, and that place on which I stood trembled exceedingly; the water immediately boyled up upon the opening of the earth, but it pleased God to preserve me....[15]