Jamaican Maroons in the Eighteenth Century (by Aidan Ptak)

Figure 1. Map of Jamaica’s prominent colonial settlements. Kingston and Montego Bay were the prominent white settlements on the island, with all other marked locations being Maroon settlements.^[1]

Ever since the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Caribbean, many slaves would be able to escape to, and then survive within, remote areas that were inimical to European colonial projects for their rugged, mountainous terrain and dense foliage. The Spanish colonists would call them cimarrones, or wild animals. As the English and later British Empire established its own slave-based plantation colonies in the Caribbean and swiftly experienced this phenomenon itself, English colonists would adapt this term into the English maroon.

While maroon communities exist across the Caribbean, the maroons of Jamaica are distinguished by their ability to achieve formal recognition of their autonomous status through force of arms through the 1739 Treaty of Peace and Friendship^[2], a document that retains a deep meaning among the Jamaican Maroons today and forms the basis of modern claims of Maroon sovereignty in the Jamaican polity.^[3] In doing this, the Maroons secured for themselves a place in the British Empire and the racial hierarchy of the colony of Jamaica distinct from that of slaves, and the Maroons would frequently defend this place through eager collaboration against those on Jamaica who were still enslaved.

Jamaica’s maroons were not a political or cultural monolith. On the island, individual maroon societies were divided by the island’s geographical contours into “two large polities”^[4] – eastern, Windward, and western, Leeward. According to Barbara Kopytoff, “this separation allowed the two societies to follow independent and somewhat different lines of development,”^[5] with the Windward Maroons, “descendants of the ‘Spanish negroes’ and subsequent gangs of runaways”^[6] settling into the structure of a looser confederation with no centralized leadership as their Leeward counterparts, “composed largely of the Akan- and Twi-speaking ‘Coromantee’ from the Gold Coast, lived in an autocratic, kinship-based polity in Ashanti style”^[7] and would coalesce behind the leadership of a singular figure, most famously Cudjoe of the First Maroon War, who would become the conflict’s, and the resulting treaty’s, chief figure.

Notably, the treaty of 1739 “acknowledged specified rights for Maroons, but did not grant sovereignty or independence to them.”^[8] Jamaica’s maroons were not recognized as their own distinct polity, but as an autonomous collective that was inextricably bound to the British Empire. While the maroons were allowed to have their own leadership and enforce their own laws, the British were able to unilaterally resolve any succession disputes over that leadership as well as appoint colonial agents to oversee Maroon communities^[9], and most notably, the Maroons were treaty-bound to capture and return any escaped slaves to British rule. This provision would be followed ruthlessly. “The Maroon expertise at catching and returning rebels and runaways made them soundly detested by their former allies. As R. C. Dallas put it in 1803, “by the generality of the slaves they were hated,”^[10] and in turn, between the two Maroon Wars “Jamaican maroons had developed a self-identity separate from and antagonistic toward slaves” ^[11]

The most infamous instance of this was Maroon involvement in the 1760 Tacky’s Revolt. It would be Maroons who would ultimately capture Tacky, kill him, and according to some sources, ritualistically devoured spiritually significant parts of his body. Ultimately, the Maroons were able to exercise their own autonomy, both in their justice and their culture, and “as the enslaved recognized, [displayed that] these British cannibals were clearly beyond the control of colonial authorities in ways that even ordinary white British subjects were not,”^[12] but they did this through the ultimate act of collaboration with the Empire that they once fought. When a subset of Maroons would come to blows with the British again in the Second Maroon War, it was over the humiliation of having two of their own endure corporal punishment from an enslaved man, but even this attempt would be put down with the help of other Maroon communities who aided the British to safeguard the place that their Treaty had guaranteed for them.^[13]

While the anecdote of ritualistic cannibalism comes from reports outside of Maroon society and is dubious at best, it does speak to a very real trend of deep mysticism present in Maroon society at this time, broadly categorized under the term obeah. Obeah also encompassed a much broader function within Maroon and broader Afro-Caribbean society, serving “as an alternative system of medicine, spiritual sustenance, and justice among Afro-Caribbeans.”^[14] According to Kopytoff, “among both Windward and Leeward maroons we find obeah men or women, magical practitioners in contact with special supernatural powers, serving as public oracles and counselors,”^[15] and these obeah men or women often took prominent roles of leadership within Maroon communities, with Nanny, another prominent leader during the First Maroon War, becoming the namesake of her own town^[16] As mentioned, obeah was not limited to Maroon communities – indeed, Tacky himself was considered to be an obeah practitioner^[17], but “Maroons were acknowledged leaders in these [obeah] arts, and their magic was held to be more powerful than that of any other claimant.”^[18]

Ultimately, the Maroons were able to establish their unique identity as subjects of the British crown – however, in order to do this, Maroons would come to embrace the very racial hierarchies on Jamaica that their ancestors had escaped from and distance themselves from those who were still enslaved in Jamaica. This divide continues to the present day, where Maroons insist on their sovereignty from the wider Jamaican body politic on the basis of their colonial treaties with the British Empire.

WORKS CITED

Edwards, Bryan. “Observations on the Disposition, Character, Manners, and Habits of Life, of the Maroon Negroes of the Island of Jamaica; and a Detail of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the late War between those People and the White Inhabitants.” In Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, edited by Richard Price, 230-246. Anchor Books: Garden City, 1973.

Kopytoff, Barbara. “Colonial Treaty as Sacred Charter of the Jamaican Maroons.” Ethnohistory 26, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 45-64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/481467.

Kopytoff, Barbara. “The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies.” The William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 287-307. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1921836.

McKee, Helen. “From Violence to Alliance: Maroons and White Settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795.” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 27–52. doi:10.1080/0144039X.2017.1341016.

Reeder, Tyson. “Liberty with the Sword: Jamaican Maroons, Haitian Revolutionaries, and American Liberty.” Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 81-115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90000622.

Vasciannie, Stephen. Maroon Claims to Sovereignty in Jamaican Territory. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Wilson, Kathleen. “The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 45-86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40212041.

TIMELINE CITATIONS

Timeline Image: E. Smith, Old Cudjoe Making Peace, from History of the Maroons (1803) by Robert Charles Dallas, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_Cudjoe_making_peace,_illustration_from_The_History_of_the_Maroons_(1803.jpg.

1729 – The Maroon War Begins:^[19]

1732 – String of Slave Escapes:^[20]

1734 – Nannytown Destroyed:^[21]

1739 – The Treaty of Peace and Friendship:^[22]

1741 – New History of Jamaica:^[23]

1760 – Tacky’s Revolt:^[24] Francois-Anne David, Soulèvement des esclaves à la Jamaïque en 1759, from Histoire d’Angleterre représentée par figures (1800) by Nicolas Lejeune, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soul%C3%A8vement_des_esclaves_%C3%A0_la_Jama%C3%AFque_en_1759_(cropped).jpg.

1774 – History of Jamaica:^[25] Edward Long, History of Jamaica (1774), book cover, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Edward_Long_History_of_Jamaica_book.jpg.

1792 – Jefferson’s Letter to Lafayette:^[26]

1795 – The Second Maroon War Begins:^[27] Unknown artist,  ‘Trelawney Town, the Chief Residence of the Maroons,’ from The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801), https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/%27Trelawney_Town%2C_the_Chief_Residence_of_the_Maroons%27_RMG_E9983.tiff/lossy-page1-2560px-%27Trelawney_Town%2C_the_Chief_Residence_of_the_Maroons%27_RMG_E9983.tiff.jpg.

1796 – The Second Maroon War Ends:^[28] F. J. Burgoin, The Maroons In Ambush On The Dromilly Estate In The Parish Of Trelawney, Jamaica, 1795, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Maroons_In_Ambush_On_The_Dromilly_Estate_In_The_Parish_Of_Trelawney,_Jamaica_in_1795.jpg.