Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

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.

“After some parley they agreed to exchange a captain for the purposes of settling preliminaries.”

That savage leader must have been an artist. There was a touch of true drama in the way he staged the scene. No sooner had these things been agreed upon than the Maroons, each with a stroke of his machete, cleared more than an acre of light brushwood on the side of the mountain and so exposed to the view of the soldiers the whole body of savage warriors ranged on the slope in order of battle.

Standing thus, the two parties came to an agreement, and not till that was done were the soldiers allowed to enter the town with their drums beating.

The horn-man was right. It would have been wellnigh impossible to take that town, for as they climbed up one steep hill and down another they noted the holes dug to cover the defenders, and the crossed sticks for resting the guns with which they had enfiladed every angle, that from the steepness it was necessary to make in ascending.

But the white men by favour were in the town and they left there a Lieutenant Thicknesse as a hostage, and he told afterwards that Quao's children could not refrain from striking their pointed fingers at his breast as they would have done knives, calling “Buckra! Buckra!” The women, he says, wore by way of decoration necklaces of human teeth, which they declared were white men's, and the jawbone of the unfortunate who had brought the first intelligence of Cudjoe's peace adorned one of their horns, a truly Ashanti way of making memorial of a slain ambassador.

And thus the white men came to terms with the Maroons of the east as they had done with those of the west, and the weary island breathed freely and sighing, said at least they had disposed of one danger—and so they had—for more than fifty years. That is to say, the white people of Jamaica had adapted themselves to the thorn which was for ever in their side.

The Maroons, they say, far excelled in strength and symmetry all the other negroes in Jamaica. They were blacker, taller and handsomer. Once they were at peace, the life of a Maroon was far from being unhappy, even though white men lived among them nominally to rule them. Their mountain homes were cool and healthy, fully ten or fifteen degrees of temperature below that of Montego Bay or Falmouth, and the surroundings were lovely.