Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

It was a wrong move. The Governor, dreading lest the Maroons should raid the little town, had had the prisoners moved to a vessel in the bay for their better security, and the men returned reporting that they were in a ship and were evidently going to be taken away. From that time no more Maroons visited Colonel Fitch; they were prepared to die for their freedom.

But in true barbaric fashion they saw to it that a goodly company should attend them across the river. Colonel Fitch, preparatory to an assault, set gangs of slaves to clear the ground with companies of militia to guard them, and the Maroons laid an ambush and killed ten of the slaves and six of the militia, so that I presume clearing away undergrowth was popular neither with soldiers nor bondsmen. This certainly set the slaves against the Maroons. The militia were already as hostile as was possible.

I cannot say too often it was an awful country. There was a certain Captain Lee who commanded an advance post set in the dense jungle and fenced by high palisades, and he complained that from the hillsides above the Maroons could shoot into it, and he asked Colonel Fitch to move it. Accordingly Colonel Fitch, bent on seeing things for himself, with Colonel Jackson and several other officers, and accompanied by two Accompong Maroons went to inspect. The Accompongs did not like the job. They declared the Maroons were too close, and pointed out where they had thrown away the heads of wild cocos and eddoes, broad-leaved plants, and the leaves were not yet withered. But the white men, with incredible folly which perhaps does them credit, were unwilling to go back before they had accomplished something, and, persuading Colonel Fitch to allow them to go ahead, Colonel Jackson and one or two others went on, still accompanied by the unwilling Accompongs, and followed slowly by the Commanding Officer till they came to a place where the road forked. They were descending now so steep a declivity that they could only go one at a time, holding on by their hands. Then history repeated itself. There was a tremendous volley of small arms, an officer named Brisset was seen staggering among the bushes, both the Accompongs fell dead, and Colonel Jackson ran back on ground lower than the path. We can see him stooping low to escape possible shots, taking all advantage he could of the cover till he came back to Colonel Fitch, seated on a fallen tree, his arm supported by a projecting stump and his head resting on his hand. Once more the Maroons had got the Commander-in-Chief. The blood was trickling from the middle of his waistcoat, and the short red and brown striped linen jacket which he wore stuck out behind “as if a rib had been broken.” Such was Colonel Jackson's description. He was mortally wounded. Jackson caught his hand.

“It is Jackson, your friend Jackson. Look at me,” and he drew out a dagger, saying that he should not fall alive into the hands of the Maroons and he would die with him rather than leave him. Remember, they all feared torture. The dying man turned his face towards his friend (he was at peace with all men now, even with the Maroons) and looked at him kindly, though he was past speech, and then Jackson heard the cocking of guns, click, click, click, one after another, horribly close, and called to the soldiers to lie down, and tried to drag his friend down beside him. But Fitch resisted, turning his head as if he too would have spoken to the men, and so, though little harm was done to the men who had obeyed the order promptly, their dying leader was shot again through the forehead and there was no need for Jackson to consider his condition any longer.

It was a great victory for the Maroons. Several of the party were killed and many more wounded, among them the Captain Lee, who had come in because his little palisaded fort was hardly tenable. Colonel Jackson collected the men from Lee's post and took them all back to Colonel Fitch's quarters, where one died the next morning and Captain Lee a day or two later. Eight altogether were killed and seven wounded, but none were more regretted than Colonel Fitch. We are told he was tall and graceful, and a charming young man.

“He threw around his hut,” says Dallas, using the language of the time, “a certain elegance that bespoke the gentleman. His private virtues endeared him to his friends to whom his death was a deep wound.”

Great was the consternation in Jamaica, for riot was let loose in the mountains. Seventy men were dead and twenty-three were wounded. Listen to the tale of rapine. Brook's House was burnt; Schaw Castle was burnt; Bandon was burnt; Shand's was burnt; Stephen and Bernard's House was burnt; Kenmure was burnt and twelve negroes carried away. Darliston trash-house was burnt; Catadupa, Lapland, and Mocha were burnt and two negroes carried away. There is a little block-house of stone on Lapland with loopholes in the walls, a most substantial place, but the roof has not been on in the memory of anyone living, and I wondered very much whether this was the Lapland that was burnt by the Maroons; and we passed by Mocha, connected by an aerial rope railway on which were slung cars that descended with bananas to the country below. All these steep hillsides are flourishing fields of bananas now. Catadupa is lovely as its name, and there are one or two cottages there in which winter visitors may stay, revelling in a climate where the days are delightful, the nights gorgeous, and the mornings and evenings divine.

Those freebooters did well. Not a man of them is known to have suffered. No wonder the colony was roused to a simmer of excitement. I wonder—as probably some of the colonists wondered—why the slaves did not rise in a body, join these men of their own colour and make a bold bid for freedom.

General Walpole was put in command, and he began entirely different tactics. He taught his men to take cover as the Maroons did, so that there are accounts of actions in which a great deal of powder was expended and no man was killed on either side, and he began to clear the country round the mountains, but as for trying to keep the Maroons penned in he knew better. “It would have been just as feasible as to pen pigeons in a meadow.” He employed working negroes under cover of strong advanced parties to clear the heights that surrounded his camp, the approaches to the Maroon defile, and an eminence near to his headquarters, which almost looked into a cockpit. And always he kept the soldiers on the move, harrying the Maroons successfully on the whole, but once a sergeant and ten men took a wrong turning, a thing easy enough to do in the mountains, and got into the Maroon defile, and presently the men who were waiting for that sergeant to bring them some more ammunition heard heavy firing, and not one man returned to tell the tale.

And the soldiers kept clearing the country, and the Maroons kept breaking out in unexpected places, and raiding “like wild creatures of the forest, they found issues at every point.”