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 a thousand 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 slightly 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.

Late Wednesday night, the storm's centre was about 905 kilometres east-southeast of Tulum. It had maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometres per hour and was moving west-northwest at 32 kilometres per hour. 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.

WATCH | Hurricane Beryl thrashes Jamaica: 

Hurricane Beryl pounds Jamaica, churns toward Mexico

Hurricane Beryl pounded Jamaica with heavy rains and 200 km/h winds, knocking out power to much of the capital. Now churning toward Mexico, Beryl has already killed at least nine people and caused widespread destruction across the eastern Caribbean.

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.

The worst perhaps came earlier in Beryl's trajectory when it smacked two small islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Michelle Forbes, the St. Vincent and Grenadines director of the National Emergency Management Organization, said that about 95 per cent of homes in Mayreau and Union Island have been damaged by Hurricane Beryl.

Three people were reported killed in Grenada and Carriacou and another in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, officials said. Three other deaths were reported in northern Venezuela, where four people were missing, officials said.

One fatality in Grenada occurred after a tree fell on a house, Kerryne James, the environment minister, told The Associated Press.

Additional confirmed fatalities so far include at least three in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a senior official told Reuters.

The last strong hurricane to hit the southeast Caribbean was Hurricane Ivan 20 years ago, which killed dozens of people in Grenada.

In Cancun Wednesday afternoon, Donna McNaughton, a 43-year-old cardiac physiologist from Scotland, was taking the approaching storm in stride.

Her flight home wasn't leaving until Monday, so she planned to follow her hotel's advice to wait it out.

"We're not too scared of [it]. It'll die down," she said. "And we're used to wind and rain in Scotland anyway."