by Ben Hughes
Epilogue
THE PENULTIMATE PERIOD of the Nine Years’ War saw the English take the offensive in the Caribbean. In late 1694 Beeston launched a retaliatory raid against Hispaniola. The meager forces the governor had managed to scrape together—three men-of-war, two barks, and a fireship—were unable to achieve anything significant. Having bombarded the coastal village of Esterre on October 11, and burned some privateers’ huts on the beach at Cow Island, they returned home. Captain William Harman, the commander of the flagship HMS Advice died on October 16 of the wounds he had received.1
In mid-1695, the reinforcements sent out to the Caribbean from England were deployed in a second offensive against Hispaniola, organized in concert with the Spanish. After a voyage plagued by disease and infighting between the chief navy and army commanders, Commodore Robert Wilmot and Colonel Luke Lillington, the expeditionary force proceeded to the capital of Santo Domingo where a plan for a joint attack on French Hispaniola was arranged with the Spanish governor, Gil Correoso Catalán. On May 24, the combined army crossed the border into French territory. Having dispersed the heavily outnumbered defenders led by Laurens de Graff, the allies occupied Cap François on May 29, and the town of Port de Paix was besieged on June 25. The French defenders surrendered on July 15. The victors fell out over the spoils, thus bringing an end not only to the expedition but also to Beeston’s hopes that the entire French colony would be conquered once and for all.2
The raids which had characterized Jamaica’s involvement in the war prior to du Casse’s invasion continued following the departure of Wilmot’s fleet for England in September 1695. At the forefront of several minor actions was the former lieutenant of the Guernsey, Edward Moses. As commander of the 48-gun HMS Reserve, Moses launched a successful raid against Petit Guavos in March 1696. Having forced the French to destroy a 20-gun ship, he captured a sloop on his return to Jamaica. Later that year, Moses captured an 18-gun French privateer off Port Morant. In the action he had six men killed and twelve wounded and was shot through the shoulder and thigh.3
The final year of the war saw the arrival of a large French expeditionary force. Commanded by Admiral Bernard Jean-Louis de Saint Jean, Baron de Pointis, it consisted of twelve men-of-war, including an 84-gun flagship, the Sceptre, and a number of transports on board of which were 1,750 soldiers equipped with a large siege train. Pointis’s aim was to secure a major prize before a peace treaty, then being negotiated back in Europe, could be concluded. Despite Governor du Casse’s preference for an attack against Portobelo, Pointis chose the Spanish city of Cartagena as his principal objective. Considerably less formidable than it had once been, the city was captured on May 4, 1697, with the loss of only sixty men. Plunder worth nine million French crowns was extracted from the inhabitants before the French sailed away, leaving Cartagena to be reoccupied by the Spanish. The Treaty of Ryswick, signed that September in the Dutch Republic, brought an end to the Nine Years’ War. By the terms agreed to, most of the territories captured during the conflict were returned to the countries that had occupied them prior to the outbreak of war.4
BY THE TIME HOSTILITIES broke out again between the English and the French in 1702, another old threat to the Jamaican plantocracy had remerged. The Windward Maroons, having “mightily increased in their numbers” through the steady arrival of a number of runaways, not least during the French invasion of 1694, had become “so bold [as] to come down armed and attack” and “destroy . . . one or two” isolated settlements in St. Thomas.5 Beeston’s temporary replacement as governor, the earthquake survivor and former colonel of the Port Royal militia Peter Beckford, “sent out 4 parties in pursuit of them.” One, consisting of just twenty men, “came up with the . . . [Windwards’] main body of 300” in the Blue Mountains in September 1702. After an engagement of five or six hours, during which three of the militia were wounded and several of the maroons killed or captured, the surviving fugitives, having expended all their ammunition, fled deeper into the mountains. “They had . . . a Town and above 100 acres of land well planted with provisions,” Beckford later informed the Lords of Trade. “This had been their nest . . . I believe for some years, but we have burnt their settlements, and I have ordered one of the parties to post themselves there, and the other three to pursue . . . they shall not rest till they are totally destroyed or reduced.”6
Meanwhile, Cudjoe and the rest of the Coromantee escapees from Sutton’s had established themselves in the wilds of the Cockpit Country. Merging with the remnants of previous groups to have rebelled, such as the survivors of Lobby’s Rebellion in 1673, Cudjoe’s band formed the nucleus of the group that would come to be known as the Leeward Maroons. They had endured a peripatetic existence throughout the 1690s. On the run from the militia and bounty hunters, Cudjoe had been forced to abandon several temporary strongholds. Nevertheless, the survivors endured and by the end of the decade, a strong, autocratic polity had emerged which would pose more of a threat to the island’s plantocracy in the long term than their less-well-organized Windward peers. Governed by a mixture of strict military discipline and traditional Akan law, the Leeward Maroons combined their expertise of West African medicinal plants and crops with local knowledge picked up from earlier escapees and, perhaps, from the island’s last surviving Tainos. Essentials that could not be acquired—principally arms, ammunition, and slave women—were captured in raids on the remote plantations of St. Elizabeth and Westmoreland Parishes (the latter having been established in 1703). Other goods could be acquired in the slave markets held throughout the island most Sundays. While the women, especially those seized as concubines, endured a lowly existence of domestic and agricultural drudgery, the men formed a proud warrior caste. Roaming their territory, hunting and fishing and honing their martial skills, they communicated over long distances with signal drums, conch shells, or cow horns. Around 1700 one of Cudjoe’s many wives gave birth to a son. Also named Cudjoe, in time the child would go on to become the new leader of the Leeward Maroons. His exploits were to eclipse even those of his father.7
In 1703 Port Royal suffered a further setback. At about noon on January 9, a fire broke out in a wharfside warehouse. The flames spread rapidly in the densely packed streets. Gunpowder stores added to the blaze, while the American shingles with which a number of houses had recently been roofed proved highly flammable. Leaping from building to building, the conflagration engulfed the entire town. Dozens were burned to death. Only the forts were spared due to the efforts of their garrisons. In the aftermath, while the survivors were accommodated in the warships of Rear Admiral Whetstone, whose fleet was based at Port Royal to fight the French in the War of Spanish Succession, the Council met in an emergency session. Provisions were granted for the relief of the poor; orders were given to prosecute looters; boats and carts were impressed for porterage. Offers of help came in from neighboring colonies, while the Council debated whether to rebuild Port Royal or abandon it. On January 24, a bill was passed which prohibited the town’s reconstruction. Kingston, which had thus far failed to grow as anticipated in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1692, was declared the chief seat of trade in Port Royal’s stead.8
The old town refused to die. A number of residents opposed the bill. Led by the redoubtable Peter Beckford, they put in a counterproposal for its rebuilding. Citing the relative difficulty of access for shipping at Kingston, as well as its unhealthy location – “between a great swamp . . . of standing stinking water . . . and the Trade Winds [which] blew noisome smells from the ships, swamps and mangroves,” they also raised the old fear that if Port Royal were abandoned, its seafaring inhabitants would desert the island and resettle with the French. In defiance of the Council’s bill, several ex-residents started to rebuild.9 By May, fifty houses, four or five taverns, and a butcher’s shop had been constructed; by August some three hundred families were in residence. Port Royal continued to grow over the first decade of the eighteenth century and eventually the Council’s bill prohibiting its reconstruction
was overturned by an edict by Queen Anne.10
THOMAS SUTTON died on November 15, 1710. Although he had never fully recovered from the financial losses he incurred during the rebellion of 1690, since the French invasion of 1694 Sutton’s tarnished reputation had improved somewhat. While he was never to rejoin the Council, he had been elected as one of Vere’s two Assembly members in 1695 and was chosen as an Assembly member for Clarendon Parish and speaker of the Assembly in 1698. He was elected Assembly member for Port Royal in 1703 and again in 1706 and one of the streets of the new city of Kingston was named after him.11 When he died at the age of seventy-two, Thomas Sutton was interred in the Parish Church at Vere. In his will, which he had composed three years before, Sutton left his plantation at Withywood and the fifty acres he owned at Yarmouth to his “beloved wife,” Judith; the rest of his lands he bequeathed to his eldest son and heir, John, whom he desired to be educated in England. Sutton’s daughters, Sarah and Anna, were left £100 each, while his daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Pennant, was granted £150. At his death, Sutton owned forty-seven slaves. It was a far cry from the days before the revolt when he had been the island’s principal exponent of plantation slavery, with five hundred chattels subject to his will.12
IN THE SECOND and third decades of the eighteenth century, Port Royal suffered two further blows. On August 28, 1712, a severe hurricane damaged much of the shipping in the roads. Exactly ten years later, after two days and nights of “prodigious Lightnings and Thunder,” an even more crippling hurricane swept the island for fourteen hours.13 “The calamity wee are under is unexpressible,” the governor, Nicholas Lawes, a former Council member under Inchiquin, informed the Lords of Trade the following month. “Many of our houses are blown down . . . most of the shiping in our harbours are destroyed and many hundreds of people particularly at the town of Port Royall have lost their lives by the fall of houses and inundation of the sea . . . the damage done to the Plantations throughout the whole country is inconceivable. H.M. fortifications has likewise suffered very much . . . The King’s house and most of the publick buildings . . . are almost irrepairable.” Roughly four hundred were killed in Port Royal alone, perhaps the most tragic deaths being those of two hundred slaves, newly arrived from Africa, who drowned when the Guineaman they were shackled on board of foundered in the storm.14
Meanwhile, in the Cockpit Country, Cudjoe’s son and namesake had come of age. “A bold, skilful, and enterprising man,” characterized by his ruthlessness and bent for realpolitik, Cudjoe inherited his father’s mantle as the new leader of the Leeward Maroons in the mid-1720s. It was a complex time in the history of Anglo-Maroon relations. As all available land in the south of Jamaica had long since been allocated, new planters were beginning to exploit the fertile plains of the island’s northern coast, a move which brought them into competition with both the Leeward and Windward Maroons. “Murders were daily committed, plantations [were] burnt and deserted” and soon all the residents were living “in dread both of the Rebels [and of] mutinies in their own Plantations.” Throughout the mid and late 1720s bands of militia and armed bounty hunters and volunteers were dispatched into the mountains to hunt the rebels down.15 The letters of the Duke of Portland, governor from 1721–1726; acting governor John Ayscough (1726–1728); and Governor Robert Hunter (1728–1734), make frequent references to the difficulties of such operations.16 Nevertheless, some successes were achieved. In June 1729, Simon Booth, a civilian headhunter of some repute, “did kill one man and two women” in the Porus region on the border of Clarendon and Manchester Parishes. “[They] were marked TS, with a heart,” an official report noted, “which was Sutton’s work and [were] supposed to [have] be[en involved] in Sutton’s rebellion . . . and out ever since.” Booth also took several other captives, among them “an old negro woman of Colonel Sutton’s, and out since that rebellion; besides seven children, the eldest not above seven years old.”17
By 1730 the Windward and Leeward Maroons had become so powerful that the security of the island was seriously threatened. “[They] are grown to the height of insolence,” Governor Hunter warned the Assembly that June. “[The] frontiers . . . are no longer in any sort of security, [and] must be deserted, and then the danger must spread and come nearer [to the main areas of white settlement].” A further cause for concern were the rumors of Spanish collusion. In return for military aid, it was said that the maroons were planning to turn over the colony to the governor of “Cracas” once the British had been expelled. By 1731 Governor Hunter was warning that the maroons’ numbers had reached anything up to 10,000. Although it may have been an exaggeration, the figure is indicative of how serious the situation had become. London reacted swiftly to the news. Two regiments of regulars were dispatched to Jamaica from Gibraltar, their mission to bring an end to the maroon threat once and for all.18
The First Maroon War, as it was later called, proved much more difficult than the English government had anticipated. The Jamaican terrain was inhospitable; tropical illnesses decimated the ranks of the unseasoned regulars; and Cudjoe’s and the Windward Maroons’ use of hit and run tactics and their refusal to stand and fight unless assured of victory exasperated the redcoats and island militia alike. Additionally, the maroons were kept abreast of the enemies’ movements via a network of informers among the plantation slaves, while their knowledge of their territory was only matched by their adversaries’ ignorance. Although the regulars burned several abandoned settlements and killed and captured a few stragglers, in the opening years they failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough while also suffering frequent defeats themselves.19
In April 1734, with Jamaica once again under the leadership of acting governor John Ayscough following Hunter’s death, the pro-government forces achieved their first victory of note. After a five-day battle with heavy casualties on both sides, the Windward Maroons’ capital of Nanny Town, situated in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, was captured.20 The surviving Windward Maroons split into two groups, one of which undertook an arduous cross-country trek across the spine of Jamaica to link up with Cudjoe’s men in the Cockpit Country. The details of the two groups’ meeting, recorded in an anonymous account held among the papers of eighteenth-century Jamaican historian Edward Long, provide a rare insight into Cudjoe’s mindset. As well as insisting that he did not possess sufficient supplies to support the newcomers, Cudjoe reportedly blamed them for provoking the war with the whites by their “great indiscretion” previous to the arrival of the British regulars, “and told them it was a rule with him always not to provoke the white people unless forced to it.” Cudjoe also showed the Windward Maroons “several graves where he said people were buried whom he had executed for murdering white men contrary to his orders and said the [Windward Maroons’] barbarous and unreasonable cruelty and insolence to the white people was the cause of their fitting out parties who would in time destroy them all.”21
As the war dragged on, the whites considered suing for peace. In 1734, having been advised by the Board of Trade to pursue such a course, Governor Hunter sent a delegate named Bevil Granville into the mountains. When Granville eventually found a maroon with whom to negotiate, however, he was informed that they would never trust a white man. A second attempt made two years later proved equally unsuccessful, and it wasn’t until 1738, under the governorship of Edward Trelawny (1738–1752), that Cudjoe agreed to come to terms. In February of the following year he met Colonel John Guthrie, a local militia commander said to be respected by the maroons for his honesty and skills as a woodsman, in a valley between the two sides’ armed camps. After protracted negotiations, a fifteen-point treaty was signed on March 1, 1738.22
The terms ensured the liberty and freedom of Cudjoe and all his followers and granted them the possession of a swath of land totaling 1,500 acres. The maroons were also given hunting rights throughout the island as long as they kept at least three miles from all white settlements. They were granted permission to trade in white markets providing licenses were fir
st obtained, and were given access to Jamaican law should their rights be infringed by a white resident. Cudjoe was given autonomy over all legal proceedings concerning his own people, apart from those guilty of murder, and two white ambassadors were permanently based in Cudjoe’s capital of Accompong Town to act as intermediaries. To maintain the rights conceded them, the Leeward Maroons were required to aid the English in any future wars against external enemies and to return any runaway slaves who might seek shelter with them. On learning of this final clause, several of Cudjoe’s followers plotted to overthrow their leader. They viewed the treaty as a shameful and unnecessary submission and a betrayal of those who would seek their freedom in the future. Learning of the scheme, Cudjoe had the four ringleaders arrested and sent to Spanish Town for trial. Two were condemned to death. The others were sentenced to transportation. As an act of good faith, Governor Trelawny returned the four men to Cudjoe to do with as he wished. Cudjoe hung those who had been condemned to death and returned the other two, insisting that they be transported as initially prescribed. Trelawny, suitably impressed by his new ally’s zeal, promptly complied.23