Black Rebellion | Page 2

early as 1663, the Governor and
Council of Jamaica offered to each Maroon, who should surrender, his
freedom and twenty acres of land; but not one accepted the terms.
During forty years, forty-four Acts of Assembly were passed in respect
to them, and at least a quarter of a million pounds sterling were
expended in the warfare against them. In 1733, the force employed in
this service consisted of two regiments of regular troops, and the whole
militia of the island; but the Assembly said that "the Maroons had
within a few years greatly increased, notwithstanding all the measures
that had been concerted for their suppression," "to the great terror of his
Majesty's subjects," and "to the manifest weakening and preventing the
further increase of strength and inhabitants of the island."
The special affair in progress, at the time of these statements, was
called Cudjoe's War. Cudjoe was a gentleman of extreme brevity and
blackness, whose full-length portrait can hardly be said to adorn
Dallas's History of the Maroons; but he was as formidable a guerrilla as
Marion. Under his leadership, the various bodies of fugitives were
consolidated into one force, and thoroughly organized. Cudjoe, like
Schamyl, was religious as well as military head of his people; by
Obeah influence he established a thorough freemasonry among both
slaves and insurgents; no party could be sent forth, by the government,
but he knew it in time to lay an ambush, or descend with fire and sword
on the region left unprotected. He was thus always supplied with arms
and ammunition; and as his men were perfect marksmen, never wasted
a shot, and never risked a battle, his forces naturally increased, while
those of his opponents were decimated. His men were never captured,
and never took a prisoner; it was impossible to tell when they were
defeated; in dealing with them, as Pelissier said of the Arabs, "peace
was not purchased by victory;" and the only men who could obtain the
slightest advantage against them were the imported Mosquito Indians,
or the "Black Shot," a company of Government negroes. For nine full
years this particular war continued unchecked, Gen. Williamson ruling

Jamaica by day and Cudjoe by night.
The rebels had every topographical advantage, for they held possession
of the "Cockpits." Those highlands are furrowed through and through,
as by an earthquake, with a series of gaps or ravines, resembling the
California cañons, or those similar fissures in various parts of the
Atlantic States, known to local fame either poetically as ice-glens, or
symbolically as purgatories. These Jamaica chasms vary from two
hundred yards to a mile in length; the rocky walls are fifty or a hundred
feet high, and often absolutely inaccessible, while the passes at each
end admit but one man at a time. They are thickly wooded, wherever
trees can grow; water flows within them; and they often communicate
with one another, forming a series of traps for an invading force. Tired
and thirsty with climbing, the weary soldiers toil on, in single file,
without seeing or hearing an enemy, up the steep and winding path they
traverse one "cockpit," then enter another. Suddenly a shot is fired from
the dense and sloping forest on the right, then another and another, each
dropping its man; the startled troops face hastily in that direction, when
a more murderous volley is poured from the other side; the heights
above flash with musketry, while the precipitous path by which they
came seems to close in fire behind them. By the time the troops have
formed in some attempt at military order, the woods around them are
empty, and their agile and noiseless foes have settled themselves into
ambush again, farther up the defile, ready for a second attack, if needed.
But one is usually sufficient; disordered, exhausted, bearing their
wounded with them, the soldiers retreat in panic, if permitted to escape
at all, and carry fresh dismay to the barracks, the plantations, and the
Government House.
It is not strange, then, that high military authorities, at that period,
should have pronounced the subjugation of the Maroons a thing more
difficult than to obtain a victory over any army in Europe. Moreover,
these people were fighting for their liberty, with which aim no form of
warfare seemed to them unjustifiable; and the description given by
Lafayette of the American Revolution was true of this one,--"the
grandest of causes, won by contests of sentinels and outposts." The
utmost hope of a British officer, ordered against the Maroons, was to
lay waste a provision-ground, or cut them off from water. But there was
little satisfaction in this: the wild-pine leaves and the grapevine-withes

supplied the rebels with water; and their plantation-grounds were the
wild pineapple and the plantain-groves, and the forests, where the wild
boars harbored, and