20 Once-Powerful Ports That Nearly Vanished From History

In the late 1600s, Port Royal, Jamaica, served as the main center for England’s Caribbean trade, with much of its wealth derived from the sugar industry, slaves, and privateering. On June 7, 1692, an earthquake liquefied the earth supporting the town; two-thirds of the town slid down into Kingston Harbor and killed about 2,000 people. The other third remained standing and continued to serve as a British naval base. Trade nonetheless shifted down the coast to Kingston, whose harbor offered safer anchorage for merchant ships.

Established around 1400 at the Strait of Malacca in present-day Malaysia, Malacca became wealthy simply from taxing ships sailing through the straits. As the Portuguese chronicler Tomé Pires noted, there were some 84 languages spoken in its markets. The Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque took control of Malacca in August 1511, in order to control the lucrative spice trade. Following this, siltation and colonial wars gradually eroded its position.

Siraf on Iran’s Persian Gulf coast dominated Gulf trade from the 6th century through the 10th, connecting Abbasid merchants with India and Tang and Song China. The geographer Al-Istakhri wrote that Siraf’s wealthy people resided in multi-story mansions made from teakwood along the arid coastline. But a devastating earthquake and a week of aftershocks in May 978 destroyed the harbor and all its buildings, and trade moved first to Kish and then on to Hormuz.

The Duchy of Amalfi (in modern Italy’s Campania region) was an early Italian thalassocracy active in the 9th and 10th centuries. It had trading posts in Constantinople, Cairo, and Tunis, while its sailors used the influential maritime code known as the Tabula Amalphitana. Amalfi was also an early European adopter of the magnetic compass. Its power eventually declined after Norman conquest, attacks by Pisa, and a devastating tsunami in 1343.

In about 1300, the Kingdom of Hormuz relocated its capital to Jarun, a barren island in front of Iran’s coast with no source of fresh water, importing all its supplies and collecting tolls on horses, pearls, silk and spices transported from India to the Middle East. It was captured by the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque in 1515. The Portuguese were expelled in 1622 by an Anglo-Persian force organized by Shah Abbas I of Persia, and trade moved to Bandar Abbas on the mainland.

Dejima was a fan-shaped artificial island constructed on a tiny piece of reclaimed land, 1.5 hectares, in Nagasaki Bay in 1636. Under the restrictive sakoku foreign policy, it served as the residence and trading post for Dutch East India Company merchants, who stayed there from 1641 to 1853, exchanging Japanese copper for European books and scientific instruments. But Dejima wasn’t Japan’s only open door: Korea traded through Tsushima, China traded through Nagasaki itself, and the Ryukyu Kingdom traded through Satsuma. Eventually, land reclamation connected Dejima to the rest of Nagasaki.

Óc Eo was a port of the Funan Kingdom in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta between the 1st and 7th centuries. It was connected to several inland centers by a network of engineered canals. The French archaeologist Louis Malleret excavated the site in 1942-1944 and found, among Indian and Chinese (Han Dynasty) artifacts, two Roman gold medallions of emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Many scholars believe that the site was the port of Kattigara described by the Greco-Roman geographer Ptolemy, though this is an interpretation of the archaeological evidence rather than a proven fact. It fell into decline after the collapse of the Funan Kingdom in the 7th century.

Muziris, India’s premier Malabar Coast port for pepper trade, is mentioned in the Vienna Papyrus, a document from the 2nd century, which outlines a loan for a single voyage from Muziris to Alexandria at a cost exceeding seven million sesterces. Roman author Pliny the Elder criticized the money going to India for luxury items. In 1341, a flood of the Periyar River silted the harbor and erased it. Historians disagree as to whether Muziris’s site was in Pattanam or nearby Kodungallur.

Located in the Kingdom of Dahomey (in modern Benin), Whydah was Africa’s second-largest slave-exporting port during the 18th century. British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants operated licensed stations under the Kingdom’s authority. More than a million enslaved Africans left from Whydah between 1650 and 1860. It had no natural harbor, so vessels anchored offshore, and enslaved people and goods were carried in locally built surf boats across the sandbars.

Dunwich, Suffolk, England, was one of the leading wool and grain ports in the 12th and 13th centuries, on par with medieval London. The town was built on soft sandy cliffs that readily succumbed to the elements. After storm surges in 1286 and 1328 wrecked whole neighborhoods and silted up the river mouth, modern sonar scans have revealed the remains of stone buildings, including entire churches, lying under the waves. This wasn’t a local legend; the destruction was well documented.

The Swahili island sultanate of Kilwa Kisiwani off the coast of present-day Tanzania controlled the flow of gold from Great Zimbabwe through the port of Sofala for 200 years. When the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited it in 1331, he described it as “one of the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world.” Archaeology shows it had indigenous Swahili founders and rulers, and not the Persian settlers that colonial writers once claimed. It was sacked by the Portuguese commander Francisco de Almeida in 1505.

In 1134, a storm surge breached the dunes and left a deep tidal channel, the Zwin, that linked Bruges (now in Belgium) to the sea, allowing Baltic Hanseatic merchants to connect with Italian traders. The city was also an early center for banking: the term Bourse, meaning stock exchange, is derived from the Van der Beurze family, a prominent merchant family that had a trading inn in Bruges. By 1500, despite dredging, natural silting had made it impossible for ships with a deep draft to navigate the Zwin to reach the port, and trade shifted to Antwerp.

In about 2200 BCE, Lothal, on the Gulf of Khambhat, Gujarat, became one of the Harappan civilization’s major manufacturing sites, trading its beads, ivory, and cotton with Mesopotamia, whose merchants called traders from Lothal Meluhhans. Indian archaeologist S.R. Rao found a huge burnt-brick basin at Lothal in 1954 that many believe to have been a tidal dockyard, but others claim that it served as an irrigation reservoir. Over time, river changes clogged the basin, and people left Lothal around 1900 BCE.

In ancient times, Ostia, located on Italy’s Tiber River, was Rome’s chief seaport, where vast cargoes of grain from Egypt and northern Africa were unloaded. Two emperors, Claudius and Trajan, constructed a complex of deep-water harbors, Portus, nearby to accommodate ships that could not navigate the river. Once the Western Roman Empire collapsed, maintenance ceased, malaria proliferated, and the Tiber’s sediment filled the ports. The site now lies some three kilometers inland from the current shoreline.

Hedeby, located at the head of what is now Germany’s Schlei fjord, was Denmark’s largest Viking-age settlement between the 8th and 11th centuries. Merchants hauled goods across a fifteen-kilometer isthmus on the Jutland peninsula to the mouth of the Treene River, avoiding the treacherous reefs surrounding the tip of the landmass. The Andalusian Jewish traveler Ibrahim ibn Yaqub wrote about the town around 965 and left one of the few surviving descriptions of its size and harsh customs. The Norwegian king Harald Hardrada torched Hedeby in about 1050; Slavic Wends completed the destruction in 1066.

Berenike was founded in 275 BCE as a war-elephant port for the Ptolemaic king Ptolemy II Philadelphus on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. It eventually became one of the world’s leading spice ports during the Roman era. In 1999, archaeologists excavated a 7.5 kg jar of Indian peppercorns from Berenike, and in a separate excavation in 2022, they discovered a Roman-era marble statue of Buddha. As trade patterns changed and the harbor filled with sand, Berenike was abandoned by the sixth century.

Quanzhou, a port city in southeast China’s Fujian province, was the main terminus of the Maritime Silk Road during the Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368), shipping porcelain, silk, tea, and spices. Medieval traders called it Zaiton; the great European and Arab travelers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta left accounts of it; and from Zaituni, the Arabic adjective form of that name, comes the English word satin. However, Quanzhou’s dominance ended in the late 14th century when the Ming Dynasty banned private overseas trade, and the harbor was filled with silt from nearby rivers.

In Panama, the Atlantic terminus of Spain’s treasure fleets was the town of Portobelo, established in 1597. After the silver from Potosí had been carried across the isthmus on mules, it was deposited here for 40 days each year during the fairs, when traders exchanged it for European wares. The town was sacked by the Welshman Henry Morgan in 1668, but the trade continued for several more decades until the British admiral Edward Vernon raided Portobelo in 1739, eventually prompting Spain to scrap its fleet system.

Jamestown, a town on the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, was founded in 1659 by the British East India Company to replenish ships with fresh water, citrus fruit, and vegetables en route home from Asia, preventing scurvy. Over 1,000 ships docked there annually at its height. Then, in 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal allowed ships to sail directly from Europe to Asia, bypassing Africa entirely. Almost overnight, trade at Jamestown fell to a trickle.

Founded by Phoenician settlers in the 9th century BCE near modern Tunis, Tunisia, Carthage dominated trade throughout the western Mediterranean in silver, tin, dye, and grain. Carthage’s two harbors, together known as the Cothon, were a marvel of engineering: one for commerce, and the other a circular enclosure that could house up to 220 warships. It was destroyed in 146 BCE by the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus. A popular legend claims the Romans salted Carthage’s fields so nothing would grow there again, but the story is not attested in any ancient source.

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