Considering that every Great House was surrounded by hundreds of these alien dark people, most of them dumbly resentful of their condition, it is to me a little surprising that the white man ever brought out his wife and children to share his home. And yet he did sometimes. Of course, nothing is more certain than that we grow accustomed to a danger that is always threatening. There are people who take matches into powder factories and those who dwell on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna. From the earliest days the Jamaicans had been used to forced labour, they were very sure they could not work the plantations without it, and that the slaves had to be broken in and guarded, came all in the day's work.
The first difficulty after the buying of the slaves was what they called the “seasoning.” The earlier settlers first used the word, but it came to be applied specially to the settling down of the slaves, though it seems to me simply to mean the survival of the fittest. A certain number of newly arrived slaves were sure to die. It was not the climate that killed them, but the breaking in of a free savage unaccustomed to work, at least not to work with the regularity, and at the times the white man expected of him. He was an exile, he was lonely, he was driven to this hated work with the whip, he could not understand what was said to him, he could not make his wants known, and soon realised it would avail him little if he did, and he pined and died.
In Lesley's time, and I am afraid long after, the slaves were grossly underfed.
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“'Tis sad,” he writes, “to see the mean shifts to which these poor creatures are reduced. You'll see them daily about twelve o'clock when they turn in from work scraping the dunghills at every gentleman's door” (I do like that touch) “for bones which they break extremely small, boil and eat the broth.” He adds that he hardly cares to speak of their sufferings because of the regard he had for their masters. And then he goes on to do so. He says that the most trivial error was punished with a terrible whipping, “I have seen some of them treated in that cruel manner for no other reason but to satisfy the brutish pleasure of an overseer.... I have seen their bodies in a Gore of Blood, the Skin torn off their backs with the cruel Whip, beaten, Pepper and Salt rubbed on the Wounds and a large stick of Sealing Wax dropped leisurely upon them. It is no wonder if the horrid pain of such inhuman tortures incline them to rebel; at the same time it must be confessed they are very perverse, which is owing to the many disadvantages they lie under, and the bad example they daily see.”
A man had a right to kill his slave or mutilate him if he ran away, but a man who killed a slave out of “Wilfulness, Wantonness, or Bloody mindedness,” was to suffer three months' imprisonment and pay £50 to the owner of the slave. It was merely a question of value, the slave was not considered. If a servant killed a slave he was to get thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, and serve the owner of the slave after his time with his master had expired four years. That is to say, he had to pay for the loss of the slave's services. Indeed the negro's life in those days was by no means safeguarded, for if a man killed by night a slave found out “of his owner's grounds, road, or common path, such person was not to be subject to any damage or action for the same.” That is to say, the wandering slave was a danger to the community, and might be killed on suspicion as might some beast of prey. There was a law, too, that all slaves' houses should be searched once a fortnight for “Clubs, Wooden Swords, and mischievious Weapons.” Any found were to be burnt. Stolen goods were also to be sought, and “Flesh not honestly come by”; for slaves were forbidden to have meat in their possession. The punishment was death, and in the slave book of Rose Hall after this law had fallen into desuetude there is an entry under Monday, 28th September 1824: “Killed a steer named 'Porter' in consequence of his leg being broken, sunk him in the sea to prevent the negroes from eating it, and having the like accidents occur.” It does seem hard so to waste the good meat that the negroes craved, poor things, as children nowadays crave sugar. For a negro does not regard meat as food even now. It is a treat, a luxury.
In Kingston and other towns the notice ran, “No person whatever shall fire any small arms after eight at night unless upon alarm of insurrection which is to be by the Discharge of Four Muskets or small arms distinctly.” The whole atmosphere was one of fear. No negro or mulatto was permitted to row in any wherry or canoe without at least one white man, and all boats of every description had to be chained up and their oars and sails safely disposed, and so important was this rule considered that any master of a craft who broke it was fined £10. There was a punishment of four years' imprisonment for stealing or taking away any craft, and it is clear this had reference not to its value but to the assistance such craft might be to the common enemy.
A negro slave striking any person except in defence of his master's property—observe he had none of his own—was for the first offence to be severely whipt, for the second to be severely whipt, have his or her nose slit and face burnt in some place, and for the third it was left to two Justices or three freeholders to inflict “Death or whatever punishment they shall think fit.”
When slaves were first introduced the master seems to have had absolute power of life and death, and indeed long after, when it was beginning to dawn on the ruling race that the black man had some rights, it was still difficult to punish a cruel master, because no black man's evidence could be received against a white man. This rule, too, sometimes worked both ways.
There was once an overseer who was cruelly unjust to the book-keeper under him. As we have seen, the underlings subsisted very largely on salt food. This overseer, disliking his book-keeper, decreed that his salt fish should be exposed to the hot sun until it was rotten and then cooked and offered to him in the usual way. The young man protested, and the overseer declared he had fish out of the same barrel and found nothing wrong with it. Finally the exasperated book-keeper came up to the house and in desperation shot his tormentor. But he was never brought to justice, because there were only slaves present and no white man could be convicted on the testimony of a slave.
When we read the slave code we do well to remember not how men are punished nowadays, but how they were all punished, black and white, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first part of the nineteenth centuries. Laws were made for the rich, and the poor man without influence must go under.
And having said all this, it perhaps seems curious to add that we ought always to remember that the average planter treated his slaves as well as he knew how. Even now we are always advancing. The housemistress of 1921 has to give her maids of right what the housemistress of 1900 would have thought ridiculous, even as a privilege. It was to the planter's interest that his slaves should be in good health and contented, but what none of them understood was that no man should be subject to the whim of another. The wrong was in enslaving a man. How should they understand it? Slavery had been a custom from time immemorial. Even in this twentieth century I have heard one of the best and kindest women I know mourning, “But if the poor are all so well off what shall we do for servants?” She found it difficult to believe that Providence would not arrange for someone to serve her. So the planters, I am sure, believed that Providence had placed the black man in Africa specially for their use. Why he was not contented with his lot, and a “good” slave, they could never understand. And yet the black people didn't even mind dying, to such sore straits were the poor things reduced.
“They look upon death,” declares Lesley, “as a blessing.... 'Tis indeed surprising to see with what courage and intrepidity some of them will meet their fate and be merry in their last moments.”
He had seen more deaths than we of the twentieth century can contemplate with equanimity, and many runaways trying to better their lot. It was probably easier for the first slaves to run away than at the time we come across them in the slave books of Worthy Park and Rose Hall. The lonelier parts of the island were abandoned because of these runaway negroes, who banded themselves together and were a constant danger to the isolated settler. And a place in fertile Jamaica abandoned soon becomes densest jungle, affording a still more useful shelter to people accustomed to such surroundings. Even though the life of a savage in the woods was a hard one, it was better than the almost certain fate that awaited them if they came in and gave themselves up. I conclude it was only when a slave found himself alone that he returned of his own free will. If he found companions he stayed.
This of course it was that made of the Maroons such an ever present danger, free as they were among a black population that outnumbered the white ten to one. The settler had always an enemy within the gates.
“This bad success,” mourns the historian when the whites have failed to overcome the Maroons, “encouraged Gentlemen's slaves to rebel.”
The trouble was that to keep the slaves under, a great quantity of arms and ammunition had to be stored on the plantations, and when they rose this was likely to be turned against their owners. Did one of those overseers at Worthy Park ever toss restlessly on his feather bed and wonder what would be his fate if some of those slaves, the “ill-disposed” or “skulkers,” rushed his hot room and possessed themselves of that store of powder?
It is only natural that history should mention the rebellions that made their mark, and never those that were nipped in the bud. But those that had a measure of success were numerous enough. There were no less than four between 1678 and 1691, in the three last of which many white people were murdered. One of these was at Sutton's, a plantation near the centre of the island.
I have been to Sutton's. A long low house it is, not the first house, the slaves burned that, behind it are the green hills and in front red lilies grow beneath the bananas after the rain. The women who were born there say it is the loveliest plantation in an island of lovely plantations. And here at the end of the seventeenth century, 400 slaves, stark naked savages with hoes and machetes in their hands, stormed the house, and by sheer weight of numbers bore all before them. They murdered their master and every white man there, and seized all the arms kept to be used against them. Fifty muskets and blunderbusses and other arms they took, great quantities of shot and four small field pieces—(in such fear they had been held)—and then they marched on, raiding other plantations and killing every white person they could lay their hands upon.
Why they did not keep their freedom I do not know, but once the whites were roused they had no chance. They fled back to Sutton's, and driven out of that they fired the cane pieces. Then a party of whites came up behind and completely routed them. Many were killed, some escaped to the hills, but 200 laid down their arms and surrendered. Very unwisely. For though some were pardoned our chronicler declares that most of those who submitted “met with that fate which they well deserved.”
In the eighteenth century there were at least nineteen terrible disturbances, sometimes called rebellions, sometimes conspiracies, to murder the whites, and in the thirty-two years of the nineteenth century that elapsed before the apprenticeship system that heralded the freeing of the slave was introduced, there were no less than six rebellions, conspiracies and mutinies, to say nothing of the isolated murders that must have been done and were not worth recording as history.
Not only were these rebellions sanguinary but they were expensive. The cost of putting down the last in 1832 was £161,596, without taking into account the damage sustained by property and the loss to the community of the lives sacrificed. If the black man suffered, white Jamaica too paid very heavily indeed for her slaves.
The Great Rebellion that was long remembered in Jamaica was the rebellion of 1760, and it broke out in St Mary's Parish on the Frontier Plantation belonging to a man named Ballard Beckford. The adjoining estate was Trinity, belonging to Zachary Bayley, the maternal uncle of Bryan Edwards the historian, but in his book we only get a tantalising account that sets us longing for more details.
Of the leaders, “their barbarous names,” says Bridges, forgetting that the white man had probably supplied those names, “were Tacky and Jamaica,” and Tacky was a man who had been a chief in “Guiney.” That, though Edwards did not know it, meant that he had been accustomed to a certain amount of savage grandeur; had been dressed in silk of bright colours, and wore a necklace of gold and anklets and armlets of the same metal. On his fingers and bare black toes had been rings of rough nuggets. He had been wont to ride in a hammock, as King George rides in his State coach, and with an umbrella carried by slaves high over his head; to the great discomfort of the slaves, but it had marked his high estate. He would move to the accompaniment of barbaric music and on great feast days, such as that of his accession, his “stool,” the symbol of his power, really a carved wooden seat, was literally drenched in the blood of many unfortunate men and women. I remember passing through an Ashanti town on the day of the Coronation of our present King. There was a great feast and all the minor chiefs for miles round had come in to celebrate and all the stools were soaked in blood—sheep's blood.
“Not long ago,” said the great chief, “it would have been men's.”
“Oh!” said the young doctor who was with me, “sheep's is better.”
“Perhaps,” said the African potentate doubtfully, and it was clear he was thinking regretfully of the days when there really would have been something like a decent sacrifice.
In Tacky's days, too, when the chief died, a great pit would be dug, his bier lowered into it and round it would be seated a large number of his harem who would accompany their lord and master as attendants to the shades, and lucky indeed might they count themselves if they had their throats cut first and were not buried alive.
Even so late as 1908 in Tarkwa I remember a chief—not a great one—dying, and at the same time there came to the District Commissioner a woman complaining that her adopted daughter, an euphemism for a household slave, had disappeared. And the District Commissioner said he was certain, though he could not prove it, that the girl had been stolen and sacrificed that the soul of the chief might not go unaccompanied on his last journey, as that troublesome British Government had set its face against the sacrifice of wives.
Clearly Tacky could not have objected to slavery as an institution, he only objected to it as applied to himself. And he was accustomed to bloodshed.
On those two plantations where the rebellion started were over 100 Gold Coast negroes, and the historian declares they had never received the least shadow of ill-treatment from the time of their arrival there. Like Tacky, he was not so far advanced as to realise that the holding of a man in slavery was in itself gross ill-treatment. We can hardly blame him if he did not think ahead of his times, though we more enlightened may hold a brief for Tacky and those Guinea men, brutal as they undoubtedly were.
Mr Bayley, it appears, inspected his newly purchased Africans, was pleased with the stalwart crew and gave out to them with his own hands not only clothing but knives. Then he rode off to Ballard's Valley, an estate a few miles distant.
The Guinea men lost no time in making a bid for freedom. At daybreak, in the morning, Mr Bayley was wakened by a servant with the information that his Trinity negroes had revolted; and the people who brought the information shouted that the insurgents were close upon their heels. Mr Bayley seems to have been a man of action and equal to the occasion. A council was held at Ballard's Valley, the house that could be most easily defended in the neighbourhood was selected, and Mr Bayley mounted his horse and accompanied by a servant rode out to warn every place he could reach. But first, being very sure the revolted slaves—his slaves at any rate—had nothing to complain of, he rode out to meet them. I can imagine that gentleman of the eighteenth century in shirt and drawers, in the dewy tropical morning, his broad straw hat over a handkerchief on his head, a knife at his belt and pistols at his holsters, mounting his horse in hot haste at the verandah steps and riding straight down the hill with his bond-servant behind him shouting to those who watched his departure, perhaps protesting at his rashness, that he would bring the ungodly villains to their bearings.
But he had barely started before he heard the wild ear-piercing Koromantyn yell of war, and saw below him on the hillside a body of stark-naked negroes marching in rude order for the overseer's house not half a mile away. He looked back. The other gentlemen were mounting in hot haste, making for the rendezvous, rousing the country as they went and then—a brave man was Zachary Bayley—he rode towards the body of negroes. They did not notice him at first, and with the confidence of the white man he went towards them waving his hat and shouting. Truly a brave man, for 100 Ashantis armed with muskets and knives, yelling, shouting, foaming at the mouth, with fierce eyes and white teeth gleaming, men young and strong, chosen for their strength, are not to be lightly faced. Had they all come on he could not possibly have escaped, but the negroes were always keen on plunder, and apparently only a few turned aside from their main objective, the overseer's house, and met him with a discharge of muskets. His servant's horse was shot under him—shocking bad shots they must have been to do so little damage—and the chronicler declares they both narrowly escaped with their lives. I'd have liked him better had he told me how. I expect the overseer's house was more interesting than a man who, if put to it, would certainly show fight. At least he found discretion the better part of valour, and the rest of the Koromantyns went on to the overseer's house. At Trinity the overseer was a man named Abraham Fletcher, who had earned the respect and love of the negroes, and he had been allowed to pass through the ranks of the revolting slaves and escape scot-free. I don't know whether he was the man who brought the news to Ballard's Valley. But they showed no such mercy here. All the white men in that overseer's house they butchered before they were fairly awake, and then passed on towards Port Maria. There were some among them evidently who knew the ropes. The fort at Port Maria must have been guarded with singular carelessness, for they slew the sentry, and seem easily to have possessed themselves of all the arms and ammunition they could manage, and then they went through the country slaying and burning.
Luckily they stayed to burn. It gave Zachary Bayley time to ride round to all the plantations in the neighbourhood.
We can imagine the excited, determined man on the galloping horse dashing up the hills to the Great Houses, his breathless arrival and the warning given, the name of the place of rendezvous.
“But we can't”—the protest might begin. But the other knew theymustget there.
“I tell you the slaves have risen. The overseer and book-keepers at Cruikshank's have been murdered! Get your horses. There's not a minute to be lost!”
“But my blackguards———”
“Damnation! The Koromantyns I tell you, man! Hurry along that girl of yours and her child! I saw the place burning! I heard the poor beggars' frantic shrieks and I couldn't help them, Cruikshank has cleared out. For the love of God, stir yourself!”
“But the girl is———”
“I tell you they killed Nancy and a child at her breast, and she a mulatto, and dark at that! Not a drop of white blood! Hurry! Waste not a second! Is that the nearest road to Brimmer Hall?” He stretches out his whip. “Tell the others you saw me, and I'll be back as soon as I can. But—my God, man, if you want to save your bacon, hurry!” and his horse turned with a clatter and he was away again, leaving dismay and consternation behind him.
And well they might fear. From the butchery at Ballard's Valley, where they had drunk rum mixed with the blood of their victims in true barbaric triumph, the revolting slaves marched to Port Maria, and thence along the high road into the interior, the other slaves joining them as they went, and they spread death and destruction, murdering the people and firing the canes. The galloping horse on an errand of mercy did not reach Esher and other estates, they were roused too late by the Koromantyn yell, and the Ashantis behaved like the bloodthirsty savages they were. In that one morning they butchered between thirty and forty whites and mulattoes, sparing not even the babies in their mother's arms.
Gladly would I know something more about it, but the historian was not an artist, and doubtless in those days everybody knew exactly what happened. In the heat of the day the whites would be lolling idly in the great hall, second breakfast just finished, and there would come the pad, pad of bare feet on the polished mahogany floor.
“Missus! Missus! Run! Dem Koromantyns! Dem bad slaves!”
Some one would look from the window. The noise that had been as the other noises of a morning's work swelled in the sea breeze, and there was a commotion, naked figures rushing here and there and—What was that? That white man running with his face all bloody. Could it be the new bookkeeper?
Even at this day there are people who will tell you what tradition has told them that the negroes would come on in a body, fling themselves like an avalanche on the Great House and cut down ruthlessly all before them. Or if they found the white people fled, they satisfied their desires by broaching the rum casks and breaking open the stores. This possibly saved many lives, for while the enemy were thus engaged the fugitives made the best of their way to some place of safety. They did not always succeed in reaching it, for the slaves knew the woods far better than their masters, a thousand times better than their mistresses, and they hunted them, beat the bush for them, as beaters beat for pheasants, cut down the men with the machetes they themselves had supplied or beat them with conch shells—and the women, nothing could be more terrible than the fate of the poor girl cowering on the hillside among the dense jungle, its very denseness betraying her presence to eyes keen as those of these savages trained to hunt.
Edwards gives no details of what happened to the women slain in this rebellion, but a little later on he speaks of the rebellion in Hayti and he tells how a superintendent who had been popular and good to his slaves was treated by them when they rose, and he adds the ghastly details of what happened to his wife, who was expecting almost immediately the birth of her baby. They are too terrible to give here, though I do not count myself over-squeamish, but it made me understand why Zachary Bayley fled at full speed along those rough hillside tracks to warn the planters.
There is another horrible story told of a Jamaican planter whose slaves rose against him, slaves whom he trusted and to whom he had been kind. They rose in the night led by a runaway he had rescued from starving in the woods. They gagged him and then proceeded to torture him, “by turns wounded his most tender and sensitive parts till his soul took flight.” They violated his wife and killed her with the rest of the family and every white man on the plantation.
This is what the white people feared subconsciously all the time. What the girls feared when they let down their hair and undressed for the night, when they drew together the shutters and shut out the gorgeous tropical moonlight, what the master of the house feared when he stirred in his sleep, uneasily, roused because the dogs were barking, what the mother feared as she hushed her baby's crying to listen, and wonder if that were the tramp of unshod feet over in the direction of the breeze mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he tore across the country in the dawn of the tropical morning.
By noon he had collected 130 men, “white men and trusty blacks.” We do not know the proportion of white men to “trusty blacks,” but we do know that the white men were all imbued with the same awful fear, the fear lest all the Koromantyns in the island, and there were thousands of them, should revolt. These men Bayley led in pursuit of the rebels.
The wasteful savages had dissipated the advantage they had gained. They might have held the whole colony up to ransom, but instead they were actually found at Haywood Hall roasting an ox by the flames of the buildings they had set on fire.
I should like to know more precise details, but Edwards only says the whites attacked them with great fury, killed eight or nine on the spot, took several prisoners and drove the rest into the woods. Here, of course, sustenance could not be found for so large a party all at once, and they were obliged to act wholly on the defensive. The ruling class when they were thoroughly aroused had this in their favour, they had some sort of discipline, the blacks had none. Sullenly enough they had retired to the woods, and there Tacky the chief who had instituted the revolt was killed by one of the parties which constantly harried the wretched fugitives, and before long some died, some made good in the recesses of the mountains and the rest were taken.
But before they were conquered the revolt had spread across the island to Westmoreland.
“In St Mary,” writes Bridges, “they were repulsed, broken and disheartened. In Westmoreland they were flushed with early victory; murderous success crowned their first efforts; they beat off the militia, increased their ranks to a thousand effective men, and after a tedious struggle they could be subdued only by the exertions of a regiment of regulars, the militia of the neighbouring parish and the Maroons of the interior. The most cruel excesses that ever stained the pages of history, marked the progress of these rebels; and the details which would elucidate barbarity scarcely human, almost chills the warm hope of civilisation ever reaching the bosoms in which ferocity is so innate.”
Edwards takes some trouble to show us what the civilisation of the times meant and what might be hoped from it. It was better to die than be taken, for there was little to choose between black and white in fiendish cruelty. The white gentleman ran the ignorant savage close.
“It was thought necessary,” says Edwards, “to make a few examples of some of the most guilty. Of three who were clearly proved to have been concerned in the murders at Ballard's Valley, one was condemned to be burnt and the other two to be hung up alive in irons and left to perish in that dreadful situation.”
There is in the Jamaican Institute a set of the irons used for such a sentence. When found, they had the bones of a skeleton in them, the skeleton of a woman!
They burnt the man after the fashion that Hans Sloane described. He uttered not a groan when they applied the fire to his feet, and saw his legs and feet reduced to ashes with the “utmost firmness and composure. Then getting one of his hands loose he seized a burning brand and flung it in the face of his executioner.” Truly a man it seems to me who might have been worth something better.
In the case of the other two, Fortune and Kingston, the whole proceeding was gone through with a ghastly deliberation that makes us shiver now although it happened a hundred and sixty years ago. They were given a hearty meal and then they were hung up on a gibbet which was erected on the parade of the town of Kingston. Edwards declares that from the time they were hung up till the moment they died they never uttered a complaint. A week later they were still alive and as the authorities thought that one of them had something to tell his late master, Zachary Bayley, who was on his plantation, Edwards was sent for, but though he had an interpreter he could not understand what the man wanted and he only remembers that one of them laughed immoderately at something, he did not know what. They must have had water, for one lived for eight days and the other one died on the morning of the ninth day.
“Throughout their torture,” remarks Bridges, “they evinced such hardened insolence and brutal insensibility that even pity was silenced.” What did he expect them to do? They could not expect any mercy, so why should they express regret except for having failed?
But did Bridges really believe, “that their condition was gradually rising in the scale of humanity and the tide of Christianity, which in the wilds of Africa never could have reached them, was here flowing with a gentle but accelerated motion.” God save us from the Christianity preached by some of its advocates.
Here I may put it on record that the slaves, no matter to what torture they were subjected, never betrayed each other. In all the tale of conspiracies and rebellion seldom are we told of a slave having betrayed the secret of the proposed rising, and when one did there was generally strong reason for it. Once a girl begged that the life of her nursling might be saved. The man of whom she begged the baby's life refused—all the whites must die. So she saved the baby she loved and its mother and father by betraying the rebellion. Then again, sometimes I think a girl might tell to save the life of her white lover, the book-keeper or the overseer of the estate.
One would think that living amidst a hostile people every white man would be most careful in his comings and goings, careful even of what he said, for though at first the negroes did not understand English, the house servants soon learned it, and we may be very sure that the doings and sayings of the people up at the Great House were reported daily in the slave village and listened to with as great avidity as to-day we read the news of the world in the daily papers.
Besides, all the slaves were not hostile. The Creoles, born to the conditions in which they found themselves, were more contented. They regarded slavery as their natural lot, and it was only by slow degrees that the talk of emancipation grew. But it did grow and the rebellion of 1882, a very devastating one, which ran like wildfire through Westmoreland, Hanover, and St James', was caused mainly because at the Great Houses and the “Buckras'” tables the white people talking carelessly before the black servants, to whom they never gave a thought, declared emphatically that all this talk of emancipation was so much rubbish.
And at Christmas time, the angry, disappointed, misguided slaves rose. I have always taken particular interest in this rebellion, because I once enjoyed the hospitality of Montpelier, one of the loveliest pens in Jamaica, where much money has been spent, and beneath the trees on the green grass rest white Indian cattle bred for draught purposes. Mr Edwards, the owner, told me that he used to hear stories in his youth of how the slaves burned the houses, and mills, and cane pieces, and the night was alight with blazing fires. Major Hall and his wife, high in the hills at Kempshot, received warning just in time, and through the darkness made their way to Worcester, lying far below.
It must have been terrible, stumbling down that stony mountain path through the darkness, with the dread fear that the enemy might reach Worcester before them. Neither husband nor wife returned, nor was the house rebuilt, and not till nearly fifty years afterwards did Mr Maxwell Hall, seeking through the country for a site on which to build an observatory, choose a hill on Kempshot Pen just above the place where the old house had stood. Where the country was not dense jungle it was occupied by negro cultivators, the most destructive cultivators perhaps in the world, of the old house there was not one stone left upon another, nothing remained but the Mango Walk. It stands there still, the only monument to the white people who once lived on that spot. The trees have long given over bearing, but the avenue is a thing of beauty, and to the very tops has grown a lovely creeper which strews the ground beneath with heavily scented white bellshaped flowers.
It has nothing to do with them, of course, but in my mind that beautiful Walk stands for the slave rebellions, the terrible times that are past and gone but hardly forgotten. In judging the relations of the white man and the black, in weighing the causes of discord between them, in considering the shortcomings of both, we must always remember that past when they lived together bound by a tie galling to both which has left behind it a legacy of bitterness that only time and success on the part of the black man can sweeten.
Considering the size of Jamaica, it seems strange to say that in the fastnesses of its mountains there lived a body of men, just a handful of them, who actually defied the British Government and all the arms they could bring against them, not for a year or twenty years, but for close on one hundred and forty years!
It seems incredible; but when I went to live at the Hyde I began to believe it, once I had gone up to Maroon town I quite understood it, and before I had left Jamaica, having spent three months at Kempshot, I saw what an ideal country was this for guerilla warfare such as the Maroons waged. The story of these black men is one that deserves to be remembered and set down beside the tale of the Doones in Devonshire, or the Highland Chiefs who held the glens of Scotland for the Stuart king.
The origin of the term “Maroon” is somewhat obscure. There are people who say it is derived from a Spanish word meaning wild, and there are others who declare that Maroons simply meant hog-hunters, for upon these animals the free-booters lived.
Bryan Edwards says the Spaniards left 1500 slaves behind them. Bridges is sure that every Spanish slave was killed or taken within eight years of the conquest of the island. But this parson of the Church of England is a gentleman whom the more we read him the less we like him. He was a time-server and a sycophant on his own showing. His evident intention was to please the planters, and though that in itself is not a crime, it is certainly a sin, when a man undertakes to write a history, to look only for the good on one side, and to be very sure of the evil on the other. In the days of Bridges (he wrote in 1828), the island was divided into planters and slaves, and the man who drank the planters' punch, who was entertained in their houses, who laid himself out to be so invited—“sucked up” as Australian school-boys used to say—was hardly likely to consider the slaves anything but the dregs of humanity. It flattered the vanity of the planters to think that within eight years of the driving out of the Spaniards their slaves were subdued as well. It is hardly likely they were. It seems to me that that little band of men, hidden away among the cockpit country of St James and Trelawny, and in the mountains of Portland and St Thomas, probably began with the slaves left behind by the Spaniards, and were recruited by all the more adventurous spirits who managed to escape from their loathed bondage. For I do not believe that the black people, as some people say, were happier as slaves. Rather do I agree with Burke who, in the great debates on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, said: “That nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man.”
The cockpit country of Jamaica is an amazing country still. I paid it a visit by the courtesy of Mr Moralez, the father of the lovely girl who owned the little canoe, and she came with me to show me points of interest, for she had lived in Montego Bay all her life.
It was a glorious morning in December, and December mornings in Jamaica are more likely to be delicious than a May morning in England or Australia. There is something in the soft, cool air that no mere pen can describe. Everywhere is green, dark green of pimento, light green of akee or dogwood, vivid green of cane. Crushing in the sugar mills has begun, and all is activity as you pass the works on the estates. On the roads, marching along with loads on their heads, mostly of green banana for it happened to be a Monday, were throngs of people, mostly women. They tramp miles—old women, young women, boys, and little girls who step out on sturdy little black legs and swing their short and scanty frocks, and are smiling under a load that surprises me, for they are proud that they, too, may join the throng of wage-earners, small wage-earners when we compare results with other labourers in the outside world, but still, slaves no longer, and earning money that is their very own.
The road winds with hairpin curves up the steep hills. Sheer up on one side, very often built up with stone on the other—there is rock in plenty—and sheer down into the valley below. Soon we were on mountain land, untouched by the hand of man, and crawling up one side of a mountain we could look over to the breakneck mountain side across the cockpit that lay between, for the cockpits mentioned so often in the history of Jamaica are what we should call gullies in Australia, and glens in Scotland. Precipitous holes are they, and far below us and far above us we could see tree-ferns such as I have not seen since I left Australia, and all the steep mountain sides are bound together with undergrowth and creeper, growing so densely that I can quite well believe a man who said you could progress only at the rate of a quarter of a mile a day when you had to cut your way through. There are trees, of course, wonderful trees, festooned with vines, but we could only see them from a distance, the trees on the other side of the mountain; close at hand we saw only the tangle of greenery growing round the trunks. And the trees grow tall and straight in their struggle towards the light and sunshine. There is mahogany, the lovely wood we all know—I pride myself on my mahogany wardrobes; there is mahoe, nearly as fine; there is bullet wood, hard as its name implies and too good for the sleepers into which it is made, and wherever there is space enough for it, it looks splendid standing out against the blue on some mountain spur, there is the symmetrical broad leaf which is akin to what they call the almond, though it is certainly not the almond of Italy. And again, close at hand, there is maiden-hair and coral, and other ferns like a conservatory grown wild, growing beside little springs of crystal clear water that spurt out among the rocks; and there are creamy ginger lilies turning their delicate faces to the light, and other lilies, gorgeous as a tulip, red splashed with orange, true daughters of the sun. And always is the feathery bamboo wildly luxuriant, growing as if this were its original habitat, which it is not, and the innumerable creepers which bind all these things growing riotously with the richness of life that prevails in the tropics. Oh, a splendid land! But I do not wonder that here for over a hundred years the Maroons were masters, and raided down into the pens and estates that encroached on their grounds with impunity. They say that the Maroons were not friendly with the slaves. But that was not always true. Maroons and slaves were the same colour, and that is a great bond—how great a bond we only realise when we have left a land where everyone is white, and at length see in any one of our own colour at least a potential friend. So I think it must have been with the Maroons till the white men made of them slave-catchers, and even then the unalterable tie must have sometimes held good.
I have lived in Trelawny and in Montego Bay, places close to the Maroon Country, though twenty miles in Jamaica up steep acclivities, down abrupt slopes, across mountain passes, is twenty times as far as it would be in another land. But the Hyde was close to the cockpit country. We went just a little way behind into the hills and we soon came to a place where no wheeled vehicle could pass, where we must of necessity walk along the bridle track cut in the side of the steep mountains that rose up on either hand, though perhaps a very surefooted horse or mule might have carried us in safety. And all the houses round about those hills had loopholes in their walls.
“For the Maroons.”
The people have forgotten long ago the old-time fear; only when you see a curious loophole in the lower masonry of a house, a house on the hillside to which you mount by many winding stone steps—a fine staircase in any land—and you ask what is that for, the dwellers say, “The Maroons.” But sometimes it was for general defence, defence against the picaroons that infested the seas, against the slaves who might rise at any time. But round about Montego Bay and in the hills in Trelawny close against the cockpit country those slots in the masonry were certainly against the Maroons.
Dallas says that many of the slaves who rose at Suttons in Clarendon made their way to the Maroons in the heart of the island, and after that their numbers were occasionally recruited from among the plantation negroes. They got provisions from the provision grounds, and the settlers who lived a little back from the towns in places like Balaclava (which was not Balaclava then), Ulster Springs, on the mountain sides as at the Hyde, Catadupa, and quaintly named Lapland, were kept in a perpetual state of alarm.
There was a time when I thought to be kept in a perpetual state of alarm would make life impossible, and I wondered at pioneers who first crossed Kentucky—“that dark and bloody ground,”—at the estate owners and pen-keepers who dwelt among their discontented slaves in places where the Maroons might easily raid; indeed I wonder still. But now, in a measure I understand. During the war I lived not far from Woolwich arsenal, that magnet for German airships. Were people there afraid?
Some of us were, I suppose, but the vast majority grew accustomed to the alarms. So few people were killed even if they came every night, so few houses were wrecked though the night sky was illuminated with search-lights that we became inured to them. And so I suppose it was with these people who lived on the borders of the Maroon Country. The pens and estates close to the mountains were their homes. Here they must live, and they hoped that the raiding Maroons would not come their way, that their slaves would stand by them, and that they would be able to beat them off if they did; that anyhow, if the worst came to the worst, help would come to extricate them before the savages were able to work their wicked will upon them.
Still, of course, the Maroons must have retarded the settlement of the country as Dallas says they undoubtedly did.
“By degrees they became very formidable, and in their predatory excursions greatly distressed the back settlers by plundering their houses, destroying their cattle, and carrying off their slaves by force.”
“At first,” says Dallas, “they contented themselves with isolated cases of depredation, but growing bolder, became such a danger that the colonists resolved to reduce them.”
“Isolated cases of depredation” are very hard on those isolated cases. But when raids like this have been repeated twice or thrice, then even the colonist who did not come into contact with the Maroons realised that something must be done. The Maroons concentrated themselves under Cudjoe, whom we read was “a bold, skilful, and enterprising man,” who, on assuming the command, appointed his brothers Accompong and Johnny leaders under him, and Cuffee and Quao subordinate captains. Many of these negroes seem to have been Koromantyns, runaway slaves, whom Dallas describes as “a people inured to war on the coast of Africa.” Ashantis all I doubt not.
Cudjoe had a great reputation. From the Maroons in the Eastern Mountains a body calling themselves Cottawoods broke away, and with their women and children joined Cudjoe by the rugged, inaccessible mountain paths and valleys, and Dallas tells of another body of black men who also cast in their lot with him.
“These,” says he, “were distinct in every respect, their figure, character, language, and country being different from those of the other blacks. Their skin is of a deeper jet than that of any other negro, their features resemble those of Europeans, their hair is of a long and soft texture like a Mulatto's or Quadroon's; their form is more delicate, and their stature rather lower than those of the people they joined; they were much handsomer to a European eye, but seemed not to have originally possessed such hardiness and strength of nerve as the other people under Cudjoe; and although it is probable that the intercourse with the latter had existed between seventy and eighty years, and an intermixture of families had taken place, their original character was easily traced in their descendants. They were called Madagascars, but why I do not know, never having heard that any slaves were brought from the island of Madagascar. They said that they ran away from the settlements about Lacovia in the parish of St Elizabeth soon after the planters had bought them. It does not appear that their numbers were great, but they were remarkably prolific.”
Bridges says in much more grandiloquent language that a slave ship from Madagascar with slaves that had Malay blood in their veins was wrecked on the coast, and the slaves escaping joined the Maroons. But one thing is clear, that the blood of a good many races ran in the veins of these freebooters who held the heights for so long. It is quite possible there was even a little admixture of white blood, but not very much, for one thing was certain, they hated the whites—naturally.
At first it seems Cudjoe was only regarded as a leader of runaway slaves; later, as his successes grew and settlement among the mountains became more and more difficult on account of his depredations, they decided he was a Maroon. Hidden in the inaccessible fastnesses of the interior, the troops sent against him were foiled again and again. It was rough on those soldiers dressed in the absurd fashions of the time so unsuitable for the tropics, but once they got beyond the parade ground, I doubt not they accommodated themselves to circumstances lightly clad in shirt and breeches. There is in the Jamaican Institute a fearsome erection of black felt and brass which says it is the headgear of a militia regiment in the eighteenth century, and is kept there as a monument to the unutterable folly of those who arranged for their fighting forces in the tropics. If everything else was ordered on like lines, it is not surprising that a foe who could take advantage of every stick and stone and tree, could and did easily make all the discipline a thing of naught.
At first the Maroons had only desired to plunder, but since indiscriminate plunder could not be allowed in a community that was striving to be civilised, and they found themselves driven farther and farther into the woods and mountains by assailants who were probably not very tender towards those who fell into their hands, they began reprisals.
“Murder,” says Dallas, “attended all their successes; not only men but women and children were sacrificed to their fury, and even people of their own colour if unconnected with them. Over such as secretly favoured them, while they apparently remained at peace on the plantations they exercised a dominion... and made them subservient to their designs. By these Cudjoe was always apprised in time of the parties that were fitted out.”
I can imagine the planters talking at their tables, the house servants waiting with unmoved or even sympathetic faces, and yet carrying the news to the field labourers. That would be enough. At night one of them would steal off to the mountains that are so near to every estate in Jamaica. They might not even wait for the night. A strange black man would not be noticeable and he might lie hidden in any hut. Knowing the numbers that were coming against them, something of their plans, and best of all knowing the country so thoroughly, it was an easy matter for Cudjoe and his lieutenants, escaped slaves, or descendants of slaves as they were, to circumvent the plans laid against them. Again and again the white assailants were caught in ambush, were slain, and—worse still for those who came after them—Cudjoe supplied his men with arms and ammunition from what they left behind them. It was, as a matter of fact, fairly easy for the Maroons to get arms and ammunition. The times were such that of necessity every man went armed and must be able to get ammunition easily.
“There was no restriction,” says Dallas, “in the sale of powder and firearms, and there can be no doubt that Cudjoe had friends who made a regular purchase of them under pretence of being hunters and fowlers for their masters.... Nay, a Maroon himself might, carrying a few fowls, and a basket of provisions on his head, pass unnoticed and unknown through the immense crowd of negroes frequenting the markets in the large towns.”
And these wild men, too, had learned, taught in a hard school, to be careful. They never threw a shot away as the white men did. Every bullet with them was bound to find its billet. The marksmanship of the Maroons became proverbial. Oh, we can see easily enough how it was that Cudjoe managed to protract the war for years.
Things were getting desperate, something must be done. They had not nearly enough soldiers.... But in a country like Jamaica, where slave risings were to be feared, whose coasts were harried by picaroons and corsairs, which might even expect descents by the French and Spaniards, there were the militia, and they raised easily enough independent companies and rangers to cope with the difficulties that faced the country. They even raised a body of negroes called Blackshot, favoured, of course, above the rest of their race, a body of Mulattoes who might perhaps reasonably be supposed to side with the whites, and also they brought over from Central America a body of Mosquito Indians. Both the Blackshot and the Mosquito Indians, wild or half wild men themselves, proved of great assistance. They found out the provisions grounds of Cudjoe and the Maroons, and many were the skirmishes as they drove the freebooters back, back into the recesses of the mountains I went up that sunny December morning; but it is on record that even when the Maroons were defeated it was always the assailants who lost the more heavily. But indeed, seeing the country now that is partly opened up, so that you may stand on a well-made road and look down into the most desperate cockpit, I know that it must have taken an amazing valour to have penetrated at all in the old days.
“There are,” says Dallas, “parallel lines of cockpits, but as their sides are often perpendicular from fifty to eighty feet” (looking down with the jungle clear from the top I should have said they were deeper), “a passage from one line to the other is scarcely found practicable to any but a Maroon.... There are trees in the glens and the entrance of the defiles is woody. In some water is found.” They were almost impregnable those fastnesses. But out of these defiles the Maroons had to come in search of provisions and the sharp-sighted guides, Mosquito Indians and other black men on the white men's side, easily detected the paths all converging on the same place. It might be a defile so narrow that for half a mile men could only pass through in single file. The Maroons knew as well as their assailants that these paths that led into their impregnable defiles were tell-tale, and they made use of them. Always they were informed of the approach of a body of militia and soldiers. It was a fact hardly to be concealed, and in the dense vegetation surrounding the entrance to the particular cockpit to be attacked they established a line of marksmen, two sometimes if the width of the ground admitted of it. They were well hidden by the roots of trees, by the thick screen of greenery, by the rocks and stones. As soon as the assailants, panting, breathless, fatigued from the terrible climb that lay behind them, approached from their concealment they let fly a volley, and if the forces, who did not lack courage, turned to fire at the spot where they saw the smoke they received a volley in another direction; prepared to charge that, they received a volley from the mouth of the glen, and then the enemy having done all the damage they could retired unhurt and triumphant in proportion as their assailants were bitter and downhearted, for always they left some of their number dead on the field and carried away wounded.
But the harrying nevertheless worried the Maroons. They had to find some place where they could grow their provisions and keep their women and children in safety, for it was not always possible to raid the plantations exactly when they wanted once the white men were on guard. Deeper and deeper into the mountains they retreated, but Cudjoe was a man of judgment. Taking up his position in the cockpits on the borders of St James and Trelawny, among some of the steepest, mountainous country in Jamaica, he commanded the parishes of St James, Hanover, Westmoreland, and St Elizabeth. He could thus obtain abundant supplies, and with his brother Accompong in the mountains overlooking the Black River, where even though there were more defenders for the plantations there were still more abundant supplies to be had, he made his people very excellent headquarters. At the bottom of the Petty River cockpit they had a supply of water and ground whereon they could grow yams and cassava and corn, so that they always had something to fall back upon and they therefore could choose their own time for coming out. So great a general was this poor runaway negro that in eight or ten years he had united all the stray bands of wandering slaves and terrorised the country-side.
“In their inroads,” says Dallas, “they exercised the most horrid barbarities. The weak and defenceless whenever surprised by them fell victims to their thirst for blood; and though some were more humane than others, all paid implicit obedience to the command of a leader when that was given to imbrue their hands in blood; murder once commenced no chief ever had power to stay the hand of his meanest follower, and there is hardly an instance of a prisoner being saved by them.” The Maroons have been accused of torturing their prisoners, but Dallas is sure they were so keen on killing that when they did take an unfortunate they were only too eager to cut off his head with their cutlasses or machetes, and doubtless many a wounded man was so despatched. We can hardly blame them for showing no mercy. They were only untaught savages and assuredly no mercy was ever shown them.
By 1739 the position of affairs was intolerable, and Governor Trelawny was determined to rid the colony of the ever-present menace. A considerable number of the soldiers and militia were collected and sent up these heights to surround all the paths to the Maroon settlements. And then, seeing there was little prospect of frightening the Maroons into submission, it was decided to make peace and to range the enemy on the side of the whites. For it must be remembered there were three parties in Jamaica, all antagonistic, whites, slaves, and Maroons. This idea was hailed with enthusiasm, as it seemed that the holding of the Maroons within bounds was likely to be no easier as the years went on, and their conquest was wellnigh impossible. In fact, they were better as friends than as enemies. Whatever they had done was best forgotten, and the Government declared themselves ready to cry quits.
The difficulty was to get within touch, and to make these people who had been hunted and harried all their lives believe this extraordinary thing. They could hardly be expected to realise the position, and it was just as well they should not. For in the face of a slave population that were as tinder beside the flame, failure would be fatal. The prestige of the white man would be gone.
And for this same reason, whatever was done must be done quickly. Colonels Guthrie and Sadler in command were instructed to move with what despatch they might. But, though the Maroons were as weary of the war as their opponents, it was difficult to get speech with Cudjoe and to make him believe that peace was in the air when they did get speech with him. For he was a cautious man, this negro leader.
When he saw the force brought against him he collected his men in a spot most suitable for his mode of warfare, placing them upon ledges of rock that rose almost perpendicularly to a great height surrounding a plain which narrowed into a passage upon which the whole force could bring their arms to bear. This passage contracted into a defile half a mile long, and it would have been the simplest thing for the Maroons to cut off a party entering it, for it was so narrow that party must march in single file. For long afterwards it was known as Guthrie's defile. In the dell behind, secured by other cockpits behind it again, were collected the Maroon women and children, and on the open ground before the defile the men had erected their huts, which were called Maroon Town, or Cudjoe's Town, and in a moment they could have flown to the rock ledges. And even if the town had been burnt it would not have been a very grave loss, just a town of wattle and posts, such as they build even now on the Gambia, with a grass or palm leaf thatch. And all around were stationed men in the hills with horns made generally of conch shells, and in those days a negro could say a good deal with a horn, even as in Africa now he can send a message hundreds of miles by tapping a tom-tom.
So Colonel Guthrie advanced towards this redoubtable hill stronghold, seeing nothing but dense greenery and outcrops of rock, and hearing all round him the sound of negro horns, now soft and low, welcoming, beseeching, now loud and threatening, daring him to come farther, now with a shrill wild clangour, warning those behind that the white man was come in force. But he advanced very slowly, making all the signs he could that he came in peace. On he came, on and on, and there must have been some amongst his followers who feared lest he risked too much, and some who, seeing he had got so far unmolested, would gladly have risked all and made a dash for the huts, whose grey smoke they could see streaming up in the clear morning air above the dense greenery.
But Colonel Guthrie held them all, and, stretching out his hand, he called out that he came in peace, that he had come by the Governor's orders to make them an offer of peace, and that the white people eagerly desired it. If the Maroons had only known it, it was a great confession of failure on the part of the arrogant whites. Back came the answer in negro jargon that the Maroons too desired peace, and they begged that the troops might be kept back. They had reverted to savagedom, these people; the men were warriors and hunters, having from two to six wives, who tilled the ground as well as bore the children. I can imagine what a danger they must have been, set in the midst of a slave population; for one thing, they were always ready to carry off the black women. And now Colonel Guthrie had come to put an end to it all.
He shouted that he would send someone to them to show the confidence he had in their sincerity, and to explain the terms of peace.
To this they agreed, and Dr Russell was elected for the purpose, and a brave man he must have been.
“He advanced very confidently towards their huts,” says the historian, “near which he was met by two Maroons, whom he informed of the purport of his message and asked if either of them were Cudjoe.” They were not Cudjoe, but they promised him if no one followed him he should see the negro leader. The horns had ceased. All on that mountainside were awaiting the great event. The two men called out in the Koromantyn language, and upon all the surrounding rocks and ledges and fallen trees appeared the warriors. Very like the Ashanti of to-day they probably were with fierce dark faces, their wool brushed back above the sloping forehead and gleaming white teeth, with necklaces of seeds or bones or beads about their necks and machetes, and sometimes long muskets in their hands. And the white messenger stood there and addressed them, they were supposed to understand English and probably did understand the gist of his speech. He said that Cudjoe was a brave and a good man, and he was sure he would come down and show a disposition to live in peace and friendliness with the white people.
The negro chief had driven them to woo him with soft words, and he did not understand the greatness of his victory, or perhaps he would have driven a harder bargain.
Several Maroons came forward, amongst them one whom it was easy to see was their leader. And behold the great negro chief who had kept the country at bay, for whose reduction regiments had been sent from England, was a monstrous misshaped dwarf, humpbacked, with strongly marked African features, “and a peculiar wildness in his manner.” He was clad in rags. He had on the tattered remains of an old blue coat, of which the skirts and the sleeves below the elbows were missing, round his head was a dirty white cloth, so dirty it was difficult to realise its original colour, a pair of loose drawers that did not reach the knees covered his substantial short legs, and he wore a hat that was only a crown, for the rim had long since gone. A bag of large slugs and a cow's horn full of powder was slung on his right side, and on his left, hung by a narrow leather strap under his arm, a sharp knife, or as they called it then, a “mushet” or “couteau.” A miserable savage after all was the great negro chief, and all his person was smeared with the red earth of the cockpits. Neither he nor his followers had a shirt to their names, though all had guns and cutlasses.
And the squat, dwarf-like chieftain who had held up the island was nervous. Facing the white man, who looked down upon him, he shifted uneasily as a negro would, and at last Russell offered to change hats with him—a brave man indeed, but the island was in straits! Upon this the Maroons came down armed, and Colonel Guthrie and the other white men came forward unarmed, and Colonel Guthrie held out his hand. The emotional African seized it and kissed it—he must have been a slave once, he knew so well what the white men expected—and threw himself on the ground, embracing Colonel Guthrie's knees, kissing his feet, and asking his pardon. He was humble, penitent, abject, clearly he did not understand the situation. And the rest of the Maroons, following the example of their chieftain, prostrated themselves, and the long dreaded black freebooters were won over to the side of the white people.
Then and there upon that mountain-side it was decreed that henceforward all hostilities between the Maroons and the whites should cease “for ever,” they said grandiloquently, that all the Maroons except those who had joined during the past two years should live in a state of freedom and liberty, that even the exceptions should have full pardon if they were willing to return to their former masters, and even if they did not wish to return, “they shall remain in subjection to Captain Cudjoe, and in friendship with us.”
Oh, it was a glorious victory—for the Maroons!
They were to have all the lands round Trelawny Town and the cockpits, with liberty to plant and dispose of their increase, and they might hunt wherever they thought fit, provided they did not come within three miles of “any penn, settlement, or crawle,” which seems to have been a privilege they could easily take, whether the white people liked it or not.
In their turn, they bound themselves to help put down any rebellion, or to help against any foreign invasion, a white man was to live amongst them, and they were to bring back runaway negroes. And finally, it was required of them that Captain Cudjoe and his successors were to wait on the Governor or Commander-in-Chief at least once a year.
And there was another Maroon victory, this time scored by the Windward Maroons in the east of the colony. These were under Quao, and as communication with Cudjoe's party was difficult, they knew nothing of the peace that had been made. A party of soldiers was sent out against them; these soldiers were new to the hills. For three days they wandered through the densely wooded mountain-land, and then they came upon the footsteps of men and dogs, saw the smoke of fires, and arrived at seventy houses with a fire burning in each, and jerked hog still broiling upon the coals.
It never occurred to them that such houses were of little value, easily made, for the material lay all around, and that the woods abounded in pigs. They were better used to the parade ground than to the woodland, and they saw nothing strange or sinister in the fact that those in flight had left a trail that even they could follow, and so they went on blindly, till suddenly, as they were laboriously making their way down to the sea, the Maroons fell upon their rear.
“The militia fled,” says Dallas, “and the baggage negroes to the number of seventy threw down their loads and followed. The regulars took shelter under the perpendicular projection of a mountain that overhung the stream, whence they could hear the Maroons talking, though they could see nothing of them. In this situation, almost hid from the enemy, they remained four hours up to their waists in water, exposed to the heat of a vertical sun and apprehensive of being taken alive and tortured.”
They had fired at the smoke of the Maroon guns, and by this means got rid of all their ammunition, but they were safe enough where they were so long as the enemy did not come directly in front. At last, when a shot was fired from that direction it seemed to them they must get away at all costs, and they made a dash across the river which brought the whole of the Maroon marksmen upon them. Their dead they abandoned, which was right enough, but they abandoned their wounded also. Harassed, fatigued, defeated men, they fled back to the quarters in St George's they had left with such high hopes three days before.
And those who were left behind? The Maroons probably came down and butchered them, but one man certainly told them of the peace made with Cudjoe's Maroons in the west. It seemed to them hardly likely, but they debated whether they should spare his life and send him to the Governor an emissary, to say that they too would like to come in on the same terms. Poor soldier of the eighteenth century, whose name even we do not know. Quao and his leading men were rather in favour of sending him. But the soldier's evil star was in the ascendant. There arose an Obeah woman, and she declared that the powers of darkness demanded the life of the white man who had fallen into their hands, and they struck off his head with a machete.
Again the Government decided this was an enemy who were too strong for them, and three months later Captain Adair went out with another party, not to fight but to make peace. By the purest accident they captured a horn-man, and him they told of the offer, dealing with him gently, probably greatly to his surprise. And from him they heard how the Maroons had discussed the news told by the luckless soldier. Since by a miracle it was true, he agreed gladly to lead the soldiers to their town, only impressing upon them how impossible it would be to take it by force. Captain Adair gave himself up to the guidance of the horn-man. And the story of Cudjoe and the Western Maroons was repeated, only Captain Adair had not so great a difficulty in convincing the savage warriors of his good intention. The massacred soldier had helped him greatly there.