Hurricane Beryl roars toward Mexico after leaving destruction in Jamaica and eastern Caribbean

Hurricane Beryl ripped off roofs in Jamaica, jumbled fishing boats in Barbados and damaged or destroyed 95 per cent of homes on a pair of islands in St. Vincent and the Grenadines before rumbling toward the Cayman Islands and taking aim at Mexico's Caribbean coast after leaving at least 10 dead in its wake.

"It's terrible. Everything's gone. I'm in my house and scared," said Amoy Wellington, a 51-year-old cashier who lives in Top Hill, a rural farming community in Jamaica's southern St. Elizabeth parish. "It's a disaster."

A woman died in Jamaica's Hanover parish after a tree fell on her home, Richard Thompson, acting director general at Jamaica's disaster agency, said in an interview on local news.

Nearly 1,000 Jamaicans were in shelters by Wednesday evening, Thompson added.

The death toll climbed to at least 10, but it is widely expected to rise further as communications come back online across drenched islands damaged by flooding and deadly winds.

The storm, the earliest to develop into a Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic, weakened to a Category 3 by early Thursday but remained a major hurricane. Its eye was forecast to pass just south of the Cayman Islands overnight.

Mexico's popular Caribbean coast prepared shelters, evacuated some small outlying coastal communities and even moved sea turtle eggs off beaches threatened by storm surge, but in nightlife hot spots like Playa del Carmen and Tulum tourists still took one more night on the town.

Mexico's navy patrolled areas like Tulum telling tourists in Spanish and English to prepare for the storm's arrival.

Early Thursday morning, the storm's centre was about 800 kilometres east-southeast of Tulum. It had maximum sustained winds of 205 km/h and was moving west-northwest at 32 km/h. Beryl was forecast to make landfall in a sparsely populated area of lagoons and mangroves south of Tulum in the early hours of Friday, probably as a Category 2 storm.

Then it was expected to cross the Yucatan Peninsula and restrengthen over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico to make a second strike on Mexico's northeast coast near the Texas border.

The storm had already shown its destructive potential across a long swath of the southeastern Caribbean.

Beryl's eye wall brushed by Jamaica's southern coast Wednesday afternoon knocking out power and ripping roofs off homes. Prime Minister Andrew Holness said that Jamaica had not seen the "worst of what could possibly happen."

"We can do as much as we can do, as humanly possible, and we leave the rest in the hands of God," Holness said.

Several roadways in Jamaica's interior settlements were impacted by fallen trees and utility poles, while some communities in the northern section were without electricity, according to the government's Information Service.