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in Spanish Town, and the Maroons broke loose on the surrounding plantations in a sudden wave of arson
and slaughter. A formidable expedition was launched against them, and for a year the Second Maroon
War followed the same distressing course as the first. The Redcoat columns were ambushed everywhere.
They would advance into the woody defiles of the Cockpit Country, and the Maroons, warned by their
scouts and disguised in leaves from head to foot, would stealthily surround them. When the troops were
deeply engaged in these natural labyrinths, they were suddenly attacked from all sides by staggering vol-
leys. And, again and again, the troops were forced to retreat with appalling losses. The Negroes were
such skilful marksmen that, while the soldiers blazed away recklessly and ineffectively into the forest,
scarcely one of the Maroon shots went wide. Again, their knowledge of every inch of the mountains put
them at an advantage, and their system of scouts and inter-communication was faultless. They were able
to signal long and complicated messages to each other by blowing the horns or conch-shells that all of
them carried and for which they had evolved a primitive but most efficient morse code. Months dragged
by and, at each new attempt to subdue them, the troops were driven back in disorder. Losses were heavy,
and several of the best officers were killed, while scarcely a Maroon had even been sighted. A general
gloom settled over the colony.
The war was finally brought to an end by the importation from Cuba of two dozen Spanish chasseurs
and sixty couples of maroon-hounds: huge mastiffs specially trained for man-hunting, of an aspect so
terrifying that when they were led ashore, snarling and baying though securely muzzled, the streets of
Montego Bay were empty in a second. These brutes were not actually used in a single instance, but their
moral effect among the Maroons was devastating. The Negroes had been victorious so far, but they were
exhausted by the war, and, when General Walpole made an honourable peace offer, they began to sur-
render and throw down their arms. The leaders, fearing some trick, failed to give themselves up till a few
days after the expiry of the stipulated time, and this delay gave the government the pretext to revoke their
promise that the Maroons should not only be pardoned, but permitted to remain on their land as before.
Lord Balcarres, the Governor, and the Assembly decided that the rebel Maroons, though still in posses-
sion of their freedom from slavery, should be deported from the island.
But General Walpole, the commander of the British troops all through the campaign, had acquired a
strong liking and respect for them, and when he learnt that the government proposed, on a legal quibble,
to go back on their promise, he refused the sword of honour that was offered him by the Assembly, angrily
declaring that the Maroons had relied on his word of honour that they would be fairly treated (without
which they would still be armed and at war), and that he had been forced into the position of 'a deceiver
or a catspaw.' He resigned his commission in the Army on the spot and left Jamaica in disgust.
Five hundred of the Trelawny Maroons were shipped to Nova Scotia. A blaze of glory, rather than
any disgrace, surrounded their departure. The authorities were feeling rather unboastful about the hounds
from Cuba, the Spanish chasseurs, the questionable justice of their final decision and General Walpole's
resignation. The behaviour of the Maroons in Nova Scotia was on the whole exemplary. When they ar-
rived, the Governor, Prince Edward, George III's younger son, inspected them and voted them a fine body
of men and a plucky lot. They only remained in that unsuitable climate a season or two—that winter the
colony had the heaviest fall of snow for many years—and they were finally embarked for Sierra Leone;
back to the continent from which, a dozen generations earlier, their ancestors had all originally come.
Here, when Dallas, in 1803, finished his account of their adventures, they were settled on the land and
doing well. They sank back into the life of Africa, and history makes no further mention of them.
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