Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

This was strongly resented and the Maroons threw out their new superintendent, and we can imagine the excitement and dismay in Montego Bay when the dismissed man came riding down the mountains. The inhabitants doubtless looked with relief upon the grey stone walls of the fort that overlooked the bay, and took care to have in order those stout stone houses with walls over two feet thick. I have lived in one of them. Those walls certainly would have been a protection against a savage foe.

The militia were called out and moved forward into the woods. So small is the island, so close they were, that Maroon Town can only have been about seventeen miles from Montego Bay, even taking into account all the hairpin-turns, and it was nothing like that as the crow flies.

It can hardly have been pleasant to have a band of bloodthirsty savages so close, and here the sycophant Bridges, who for some reason does not spare Lord Balcarres, the new Governor of the island, and blamed him for the second Maroon war, becomes quite poetical on the subject of the meeting of the militia with the enemy.

“The militia,” he says, “moved forward to the supposed scene of action and were met in the woods by a Maroon of exquisite symmetry and noble address, who descended the side of the mountain with the step of an antelope, and giving a wild and graceful flourish to his lance presented a letter requesting a conference with the chief magistrate of the district and with certain other individuals whom it named. The proposal was accepted and their terms heard.”

They wanted their superintendent back and they got him, and they had all the children in their town baptized as an evidence of good faith; they went further still, and when the authorities requested their leaders to come in, they came in, thirty-nine of them, came in peace, and those same authorities, who vowed all they desired was peace, promptly bound the hands of all but old Montague the chief behind them, marched them through the streets of the town with crowds of slaves jeering at them and shut them up in Montego Bay jail. To be behind any walls must have been hard; for these free mountaineers to be confined in an eighteenth century jail in summer in the tropics must have been a purgatory for which we can have no words. One of them put an end to his life by tearing out his bowels. Yet so utterly blind were the authorities that they took two of the men and sent them back to their own people “to induce them to surrender!” It doubtless came as a surprise to the whites that these two messengers instead of recommending instant surrender did exactly the opposite. At any rate, “upon the report they made of the reception and treatment of the thirty-seven, the Maroons, far from following the others” (I am quoting Dallas) “immediately set fire to both their towns.” When they surrendered in 1739, their numbers did not exceed 600, but when the second war broke out they had increased to over 1400, and when we remember that they dwelt among impregnable mountains and held the back settlers at their mercy, we can understand in a measure the divided councils that led to the war. Many men thought nothing was too bad for a Maroon, and it would be safer to extirpate them. They would have treated them as we treat dangerous vermin, killed them whenever and wherever they got the chance. We have only to read Bridges thirty years later to know how some of the colonists thought of the men with African blood in their veins.

“They had not been watched with that vigilance which African perfidy requires,” says Bridges, speaking of the slaves in one place, and what applied to the slaves applied still more to the Maroons. Everyone felt they must be coerced. They were a danger to the country, and while I sympathise with them very strongly, I think they were. Undoubtedly, apart from any particular provocation, if Jamaica were to be held as a slave country, these 1400 free black people dwelling in the heart of her mountains had to be subdued at any cost. They were talking of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, and doubtless the planters feared the effect of such talk both upon their slaves and the Maroons, should they come to hear of it.

“These insolent savages must be subdued,” said the colony with the Governor at their head, and accordingly, unmindful of the lessons of over fifty years ago, set out to subdue them by the old methods. But there were roads up to Maroon Town now, roads made and kept open by the Maroons themselves, roads winding and narrow, cut along the hillside among the tropical greenery; the mango and easily-grown bamboo, the beautiful ackee with its bright green leaves and brilliant red pods, orange trees, the dark green coffee with its fragrant white flower, and annotto with its clusters of ruby berries. But the soldiers noticed none of these things. They went up and up, and they must have found it very hard work in August.

Their leader, Colonel Sandford, knew little enough about bush fighting, but he was joined by Mr Robertson, the Commanding Officer at Fort Dalling and the owner of a pen in the neighbourhood, and he brought with him a Trelawny Town Maroon named Thomas, who undertook to act as guide to the white forces and faithfully carried out his pact. Colonel Sandford got so far that he saw the Maroons on the heights between their town and Schaw Castle, a pen in the mountains, and probably would have been content with his success had he not received from Lord Balcarres an order to take New Town. The way was a long defile between the mountains, and just at the hour of sunset he entered it at the head of his dragoons. The enemy let them get well into the defile, the column was half its length, and when it had gone two-thirds of the way they let off, all down the left of that column from one end to the other in the darkening light, a tremendous volley of small arms, they themselves being hidden from sight by trees and rocks. It was the old, old tactics of Cudjoe that you would have thought the island men at least might have expected. But in Cudjoe's day there had been no roads. Perhaps it was that well-made road that deceived them.

There was only one thing to be done; they must reach the open spaces round the town out of reach of these marksmen hidden behind the trees. They quickened their pace, urged on by the cries of the wounded and groans of the dying. Luckily, in the uncertain light the marksmanship had not been very good, or I do not know how anyone could have escaped. Then, just as they reached Old Town there was another shot, and Colonel Sandford fell. He was dead. And the wildest panic ensued. At least this is what Dallas says. There was but one thought uppermost in their minds—to get away. Undoubtedly they could have held the town had there been anyone whom they trusted to lead them, and undoubtedly they made no such effort. There was no one whose orders they would obey. The darkness gave them just the help they needed. In the murk and pouring rain they squelched their way down the slippery mountain paths, sure that dragoons were totally unfitted for mountain warfare, and so overjoyed at their escape from a handful of savages that they fired off their muskets, made a tremendous row, and generally misbehaved themselves. It is all very well to think scorn of them now, but the densely-wooded mountains were terrible, they had seen their leader fall and they were certainly both by training and equipment totally unfitted to cope with savages on the warpath.

That night there was a riotous scene. Lord Balcarres, we are told, having slipped on a plank made slippery by the rain had “a contusion over the eye,” if he hadn't been a lord and the Governor it would have been a black eye, and it might well have been attributed to another cause. But it did not add to his beauty, and the soldiers rushing into the camp wild with delight at having escaped, made such an uproar that only the Governor could cope with it. The night, indeed, was disgraceful to both sides, for the Maroons, instead of following up their very great success, retired to their town and recruited their spirits with such copious draughts of rum as made them “frantic and desperate.” Sixty of them by their own account lay in a state of insensibility till two o'clock the next day, when with the assistance of the women and the less intoxicated men they were removed to the cockpits of Petit River. Had the troops gone up that morning, more than a fourth of the young Maroon men must have fallen into their hands.