Mortified by his failure, Balcarres hurried up reinforcements of militia and stores, the conveyance of the latter proving, from the difficulty of the country, to be a frightful task. On the 18th August he reoccupied the new town, unopposed, and on the 23rd moved with three columns under Colonels Fitch, Incledon, and Hull, against the old town. The march was made at daybreak and in profound silence; and the old town was duly captured, as Balcarres fondly imagined, by surprise. The real fact was that the Maroons, disliking the insecurity of the towns, had evacuated them a week before and withdrawn into the cockpits, leaving only a small alarm-post outside. These Maroon sentries fired a few shots and wounded three men, two of them troopers of the Seventeenth, and quietly retired upon their main body. Balcarres then established a post and a block-house on the site of the new town, occupied every approach, and set himself to destroy all the Maroon provision grounds, with the idea of cooping them up and starving them out. He might as well have tried to pen a swarm of mosquitoes in a lion’s cage. The Maroons quietly passed out and burnt and plundered an estate house six miles in rear of Balcarres’s headquarters.
At the end of August the rainy season set in, and transport became a matter of extreme difficulty. Balcarres himself returned to Port Royal, and left to Colonel Fitch the duty of completing the cordon round the Maroon district. Fresh obstacles cropped up at every moment. The principal planters to the south-west of the Maroon district, by which side access to it was easiest, were relations of Major James, who took up his grievances warmly and laid themselves out to thwart the Governor. 1795. One of these, a local Major-General, eighty years of age, and recently married to a wife of twenty, took offence because Balcarres appointed a regular Major-General to command the field force over his head. Another local Major-General suddenly abandoned operations with his militia in the middle of a concerted movement, on the remarkable ground that he had promised his wife to return to her in a week, and had already been absent ten days. It was only with the greatest difficulty that the troops, exposed to most arduous service and every possible hardship, could be kept supplied with food. Frequently they passed the whole day without a morsel to eat. To discourage them still further, the militia went home and left the regulars to do all the work; and, finally, the climax came when the commanding officer, Colonel Fitch himself, 12th Sept. was caught in an ambuscade, and with two other officers shot dead.
The control of the operations was now entrusted to Colonel Walpole, who at once hastened to Trelawney with all speed. He found the troops sickly and dispirited, and worn out with incessant duty. It was pretty clear that the idea of confining the Maroons by a cordon was an absurdity, and that the destruction of their provision ground only drove them oftener afield to massacre, plunder, and destroy. After weeks of hard work the small British force had lost two field officers and seventy men killed in action alone, to say nothing of wounded, and men dead from sickness and fatigue, while not a single Maroon was certainly known to have been killed. The situation was becoming serious: the negroes had begun to join the Maroons; the French might come at any moment; and then there would be every likelihood of a general revolt of the blacks against the whites, such as had already taken place in the Windward Islands. Walpole soon altered the whole plan of operations. He began by redistributing his posts, so as to command the mouths of the cockpits, employing negroes to clear away the jungle from the approaches and from the heights above them. 1795. He then set to work to train some of his men in the tactics of Maroon warfare, the essence of which was that men should work together in pairs or groups, one man taking charge of another’s arms when he required both hands for climbing, and that above all they should take advantage of cover. Walpole had three infantry regiments with him; but the men that he chose for this work were the 17th Light Dragoons, and he did not regret his choice. So the two troops of the Seventeenth were dismounted and turned into mountaineer marksmen.
Colonel Walpole soon put his men into good heart by playing off the Maroon trick of ambuscades against themselves; for he lay in wait for one of their foraging parties, cut it off, and destroyed it to a man. A week later he sent a party of the Seventeenth along the right crest of the main cockpit in order to try and discover some fresh entrance into it. The party soon encountered the Maroons and became hotly engaged. The whole force of the Seventeenth numbered but forty men, of whom a fourth had been left in reserve under the command of a sergeant. Unfortunately, when called up in support, this sergeant led his handful of men straight into the mouth of the cockpit, where, of course, there was a bullet ready for every one of them. The main body, however, kept together, and was brought off in good order when compelled to retire by want of ammunition. Of the forty men one sergeant and three men were killed, and nine men wounded—a pretty heavy loss. None the less the Maroons were considerably dismayed by this bold attack, for hitherto they had been accustomed to lie hidden while the white men poured harmless volleys into the unresisting mountains. Still more dismayed were they when Walpole, having cleared the heights of jungle, managed by hook or by crook to get a howitzer in position and began to drop shells into the cockpit. In a very short time the Maroons were driven out of this favourite position, and compelled to withdraw to the adjoining cockpit. This was a serious matter for them, for the abandoned cockpit contained a spring of water. Walpole at once followed them up with the howitzer and drove them out of their second retreat. 1795. The Maroons then withdrew to a stupendous height so as to be out of reach of the shells. But a young cornet of the Seventeenth, Oswald Werge by name, saw one of the Maroon women leave the height to draw water, followed her unseen, and thus discovered the one path that led to the Maroon position. By this path the Seventeenth advanced, and again drove out the Maroons, who now retired down a very steep precipice into a third cockpit, where there was a spring of water. The Seventeenth occupied the abandoned height, and a detachment of the 62nd Foot under Colonel Hull marched into the virgin fortress of Cudjoe. They were the first white men who had ever penetrated into it, but they could never have entered it if the Seventeenth had not cleared the way.
What time was occupied by these operations, and with what loss to the Seventeenth, I have unfortunately been unable exactly to determine. There seems to have been a critical action on the 15th December, to which General Walpole makes allusion, but whereof no account can be found. All that is known is that thirty men of the Seventeenth, together with ten of another regiment (probably the 62nd) were posted so as to intercept the Maroons in one of Walpole’s concerted movements, the whole detachment being under the command of a subaltern, who was not of the Seventeenth. The Maroons, however, managed to surprise this party, and shot down a certain number, including the officer, who, being disabled by his wound, made over the command to Sergeant-Major Stephenson of the Seventeenth. Stephenson was quite equal to the occasion. Far from being dismayed, he rallied his men and made a counter attack on the Maroons with a vigour that astonished them. Such conduct would have been creditable at any time, but it becomes particularly conspicuous when we think of the scare that had been created in Jamaica by the reputation and first successes of the Maroons. Stephenson was offered a commission in the infantry for his gallantry on this occasion, but stuck to his own regiment, in the hope of gaining a commission in the Seventeenth.
18th Dec.
Three days after, Colonel Hull, still following up the Maroons with his little force of the Seventeenth and 62nd, fell in with them strongly posted on a precipitous hillside. 1795. The British halted on the acclivity over against them; and both sides opened a heavy fire. After about a dozen of the Maroons had fallen they ceased firing and began to blow their horns, as if desirous of seeking a parley. Thereupon the English fire was checked, and the Maroons were then told that the Colonel would grant them peace. 18th Dec. For a long time they refused to believe it until Mr. Oswald Werge, of the Seventeenth, coolly threw down his arms, scrambled down to the valley below, and invited the Maroons to come and shake hands. It was an act of uncommon courage, for both sides, true to Maroon tactics, kept themselves carefully under cover; and therefore the first man to show himself, however pacific his intention, stood a good chance of being shot down. Werge’s coolness, however, saved him. The Maroons took courage. One of them came down and shook hands with him, and presently exchanged hats with him, which was the Maroon symbol of perfect friendship. Thereupon it was agreed that hostilities should cease, and that Colonel Walpole should be sent for; and it was stipulated that neither British nor Maroons should advance until his arrival. Still neither force trusted the other; and, accordingly, the two tiny armies lay on their arms, weary, and worn and thirsty, to glare at each other through the livelong night. In the valley between them was a well; but in order that neither force should take an unfair advantage, it was agreed that British and Maroons alike should post two sentries over it. At length, however, the Maroons, unable longer to endure the agony of thirst, begged that the British sentries might be withdrawn while they drank, and engaged to withdraw their own in turn that the British too might drink. So both sides came down to the well and drank; and then the guard was posted again, and the rest returned to their arms. It must have been a strange scene, this of the rival sentries over the spring in that savage rocky glen—on the one side the wild negro of the mountain, his splendid athletic form barely concealed by a few foul rags, on the other the trooper of the Seventeenth, 1795. bronzed, and lean, and haggard after months of harassing work, with his blue jacket faded, his white facings weeks soiled, his white breeches and Hessian boots sadly the worse for wear; but always erect and alert, and proud in the consciousness that he had beaten the dreaded Maroons on their own ground. There must have been good discipline in these sixty-four men of the Seventeenth and the fifty of the 62nd, seeing that with all the burden of a tropical climate on their backs they had outstayed the native mountaineers in the deliberate endurance of thirst within sight of water.
This action ended the war. The Maroons surrendered to Walpole, and submitted to beg His Majesty’s pardon on their knees, while Walpole on his side promised that they should not be sent out of the island. This promise was violated by the Jamaica Government, whereat Walpole was so disgusted that he not only refused a sword of honour from the Jamaica Parliament, but resigned his commission. Thus the Seventeenth never had a chance of fighting under this gallant officer again. When he took charge of the operations the Jamaica Government was in such despair of quelling the Maroons that it actually imported a hundred bloodhounds from Cuba to hunt them down. When the hounds arrived the war was virtually over; and Walpole, in a letter to Lord Balcarres, has recorded to whom the credit was due:—
I must not omit to mention to your Lordship that it is to the impression made by the undaunted bravery of the 17th Light Dragoons, who were more particularly engaged on the 15th December, that we owe the submission of the rebels. The Maroons speak of them with astonishment. Mr. Werge was particularly signalised with the advanced guard, and the sergeant-major of that regiment is strongly recommended for his spirit and activity by the Commanding Officer, Mr. Edwards, who is in every way deserving of your Lordship’s opinion.
