Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
napped or captured in the forests by Africans with the express purpose of selling them to the West Indian
slave-merchants.
Edwards and Dallas give much the same account of the Koromantees. They were remarkable for
their extraordinary strength and symmetry, their distinguished appearance and proud bearing. They were
blacker and taller and handsomer than their fellow-slaves; vigorous, muscular and agile, intelligent,
fierce, ruthless in war, fanatically attached to the idea of liberty, and strangers to fear. Large numbers
of them, apart from the Maroons, were scattered about the colony. They were excellent workers in the
cane-fields, but prone to revolt. An uprising of Koromantee slaves occurred on one of the Beckford es-
tates in 1760, led by a slave called Tacky, who, it was rumoured, had been a chief in Guinea. (His claim
was almost certainly well-founded. The name Tackie is used right down to the present day by the king
or chief of Accra.) There was much bloodshed and arson and the hills resounded with the terrible 'Koro-
mantee war-yell.' When the revolt was suppressed, the ringleader was burnt alive. Two of them were
hung to perish in irons, another was condemned to have his legs slowly burnt off. All endured their fate
with stoicism. The two that were starved to death in chains, Dallas writes, talked and laughed with their
fellow-tribesmen almost until the moment of death, and the one that was sentenced to suffer the leg pun-
ishment succeeded, when his legs were half burnt away, in releasing one arm from his bonds and flinging
a burning brand in the face of his executioner.
In the library of the Jamaica Institute in Kingston I found and copied, from some old book whose name
I have unfortunately lost, the following note on Nanny, the wife of Old Cudjoe: 'The notorious Nanny
… was ten times more ferocious and bloodthirsty than any man among the Maroons. She was possessed
of supernatural powers, and spirited away the best and finest of the slaves from the outlying estates. She
never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her
and returned them with fatal effect in a manner of which decency forbids a nearer description.' This is
the only recorded instance of a Maroon turning his back on the foe.
The hospitable Colonel seemed as sad as we were at our departure. Why didn't we stay a couple of weeks
or a month? Why not indeed? Alas, we had to return to Kingston to see if our telegrams to Havana had
at last resulted in the granting of our Cuban visas. Three Maroons aged fourteen or fifteen were detailed
to carry our luggage to the railway station five miles away. They hoisted our bags on to their heads, and
trotted off down the hill as though it were a pleasure-outing rather than an intolerable grind. We followed
them down the steep path. It was 6 a.m., and a slight shower had washed the woods to a clear and bril-
liant green. Their voices, singing, 'Give me back me shilling with de Lion upon it' and then 'Linstead
Market,' sailed up the pathway.
Looking back, we saw a tall figure leaping down the slope, gun in hand and cutlass flying. It was Em-
manuel. We waited for him to catch us up. He put something into Joan's hand that looked like a great log
of wood. 'There,' he said, 'she said she liked the Maroon yam. Here is a piece from my garden to eat in
London….' He waved his gun in the direction of the city as though it lay the other side of the forest: the
vague metropolis of which he had spoken in the Maroon mountains with such wonder; palaces and flut-
tering banners and spires and the King and Queen driving diamond-crowned over airy bridges in coaches
of solid gold. He halted half-way up the slope. 'From my garden,' he shouted down to us, 'the finest yam
in Jamaica.'
The train from Montego Bay and Ipswich steamed into the station. What pleasure to be in a train again!
to pull the armchair round to the window—for the seating in the Jamaica Government Railway is sybar-
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