Where The Twain Meet by Mary Gaunt

Author:Mary Gaunt [Gaunt, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anboco
Published: 2017-03-20T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII—THE MAROONS

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.

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