Part 32

Tradition has it that Eve was the woman in charge of the children of the slaves who went out to work during the day, and that she met her death by being drowned in a pond on Hyde Hall.

Arawâk kitchen middens are to be found at =Stewart Castle=, the locality being known as Indian Town to this day, and at _Wales_; while at =Pantrepant= are Arawâk rock-carvings. =Kettering= was named about 1840 by the well-known Baptist missionary William Knibb after his birthplace in Northamptonshire.

John Kenyon, the poet and philanthropist (1784–1856), was born in Trelawny, where his father owned extensive sugar plantations. His mother was a daughter of John Simpson of Bounty Hall in the same parish. Both died while he was a boy at Fort Bristol School, Bristol. He it was who first introduced Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, a distant relative and _soi-disant_ cousin.

To Kenyon Browning dedicated his “Dramatic Romances and Lyrics”; and Mrs. Browning dedicated to him “Aurora Leigh.”

X ST. JAMES

The parish of St. James, which was one of the second batch of parishes formed in Jamaica (the others in the batch being St. George, St. Mary, St. Ann and St. Elizabeth), was so named by Sir Thomas Modyford in 1664–65, probably after James, Duke of York; and he may at the same time have intended, as Roby suggests, to perpetuate the memory of his brother, Sir James Modyford. The parish of Hanover was made out of parts of Westmoreland and St. James in 1725–26, and Trelawny was made out of parts of St. Ann and St. James in 1770. In this parish is the site (probably at Spanish Quarters) of the first town built by the Spaniards in the island, Melilla; and from this parish, from Cabo del Buen Tempo, sailed with Columbus the first Jamaican who ever went to Europe—probably the first willing emigrant from the New World to the Old. The origin of the name of the chief town, Montego Bay, has been variously ascribed, firstly to the bay in Portugal into which the Mondego river falls; secondly to Francisco de Montego (or Montijo), who assisted Grijalva in his discoveries in New Spain; and thirdly, with the greatest probability, by Long to _manteca_, the Spanish word for butter. He adds, “This part abounding formerly with wild hogs, the Spaniards probably made here what they called hog’s butter (lard) for exportation.”

At the time of the formation of St. James’ parish (1665) the “north side” was represented in the Assembly by Abraham Rutter and Samuel Jenks. In 1673, jointly with St. Ann, St. James returned a member, Captain Richard Guy. In that year, when there were in the twelve inhabited parishes of Jamaica 17,268 persons, the parish of St. James had only 146, of whom 22 were negroes. In 1675 St. James returned two members on its own account, Richard Guy and Samuel Jenks.

Four years later, when the Assembly decided that £1300 should be raised for the fortifications of the island, St. James was asked to contribute £5 only. In 1711–12 the parishes of St. James and St. George were exempt from taxation, “they having no towns, few inhabitants and little commerce.” In 1724 the first Road Act for the parish was passed, the road going from The Cave in Westmoreland to the west end of St. James; and a court of quarter sessions was established four years later.

At =Montego Bay= was printed the third known book printed in Jamaica—an almanack for the year 1776. St. James remained a poor parish till about the middle of the eighteenth century, but by 1782 Montego Bay was called “next to Kingstown the most flourishing town in the island.”

In 1733 a bill was passed “for appointing a proper plan for building a church.” This church was probably built, but all traces of it are now lost. In 1738 barracks were built, and were supplied by the churchwardens with a pack of hounds, to be used in defence and offence against revolted slaves. In that year Montego Bay was made a free port. In March 1738–39 articles of pacification were signed at Trelawny Town by Cudjoe, the Maroon chief.

In 1795 the Legislature passed an Act incorporating a company to be formed by subscription under the title of “The President, Directors and Company of the Close Harbour of Montego Bay,” with power to raise £10,000 capital, and to make a harbour at “Meagre Bay, being a part of Montego Bay,” for the protection of shipping and to create rules and regulations for its management; which company, said to have been the first formed in the West Indies for the execution of any public undertaking, existed for about half a century, and for a time paid dividends.

In January 1800 (to quote from the “Columbian Magazine,” Kingston, 1800):

one of those dreadful swells of the sea from the N.W. did much damage, although the misfortune has been greatly decreased, by the extent of the Moles erected, yet it has been very considerable.

Of the two channels through the reef, which were intended to be filled up by the Moles, the largest only is made, and the other is hardly, as yet, commenced. Vessels lying immediately behind the Mole, and not near to the Southern channel, which is still open, lie secure and easy; but the vessels moored near the South channel into which an immense sea poured, and the small craft near the shore, round which the waves coming in at the South channel washed, were, and still are in the greatest danger.

There were twenty-four vessels of all sizes in the Close Harbour; of these the ship _Clyde_, belonging to Kingston, which was anchored near the Southern channel, is totally lost; but a brig still nearer, fortunately escaped the first day, and has since been able to shift to a safer birth (_sic_). Five small vessels from the great action of the swell near the shore, or from bad tackling are also lost.

In the Outer Harbour were two vessels, one a Spanish schooner, prise to the _Experiment_ lugger, is lost; and the other, an American brig, after losing an anchor, and driving some hundred yards, has got into a situation where the undertow gives her a more easy birth.

It is certainly a distressing consideration to the community that after the expense of upwards of 16,000_l._ in building the Moles, so much damage has happened to the shipping, within them, and this danger cannot be completely guarded against, so as to protect the whole of the harbour, until the Southern Mole is finished, or nearly joins to the shore; but there is this consideration, that a great number of valuable lives were saved, not a seaman having lost his life, and upwards of 250 negroes being safely landed on Tuesday evening, from the Thomas Guineaman.

Reference to the Close Harbour ceases in the Jamaica almanacks after 1848.

In 1798 two thirds of the town of Montego Bay was destroyed by fire, the loss being estimated at £500,000. And in 1831–32 the parish was the scene of one of the worst outbreaks of slaves recorded in the island’s history. On one night sixteen incendiary fires took place, and many lives were lost in quelling the outbreak. Martial law was declared, and the commander of the forces, Sir Willoughby Cotton, took the field in person.

The foundation stone of the present parish =Church of St. James=, was laid on May 6, 1775, and the building was opened for public worship in 1782. It is Georgian in character, and typical of many churches erected in the West Indies by those who, probably doing the best they could with the money and knowledge at their disposal, considered that a building was rendered ecclesiastical by putting rounded heads to ordinary domestic windows, and did not hesitate to combine the Classic and Gothic styles. In this case, however, the building, which is one of the best of its kind, is helped by a tower, its most pleasing feature. Hakewill called it the handsomest church in the island. The church is dedicated to St. James the Great, the patron saint of Spain, whose name was given to the Spanish capital of the island. The parochial seal, or seal of the churchwardens, in establishment days, is—Argent, a palmer’s staff erect; from its rest, dependent by a leathern thong, a gourd bottle, all proper. On a bordure gules, five pineapples of the second. The circumscription is “Sigill Aedilium Sancti Jacobi in Jamaica.”

The earliest baptism recorded in the existing register of St. James is dated January 1, 1771; the earliest marriage, May 5, 1774, and the earliest burial July 6, 1774.

The rectors have been, so far as they can be traced:

1771–74. Rev. Joseph Stoney. 1774–87. Rev. J. Grignon. 1787–95. Rev. Francis Dauney. 1795–1805. Rev. Francis Rickard. 1805–13. Rev. David Duff. 1814–27. Rev. Henry Jenkins. 1827–47. Rev. John M’Intyre, M.A. 1847–62. Archdeacon Thomas Price Williams, D.D. 1862–81. Rev. David R. Morris. 1881–85. Rev. W. H. Williamson. 1885–87. Rev. George Whyte. 1887–97. Rev. F. H. Sharpe. 1897–1904. Rev. J. W. Austin. 1905. Rev. J. Messiah, B.A.

Of the monuments in the church, the best is that of =Mrs. Rosa Palmer=, by John Bacon, R.A., of the year 1794. It is, after the Rodney and Effingham monuments at Spanish Town, the best work by Bacon in Jamaica. She to whose memory it was erected, the wife of John Palmer, custos of the parish, died in 1790, aged 72 years. This monument has been for years connected with the legend of Rose Hall, about ten miles to the east of Montego Bay. Into this legend, of cruelty to slaves and murder of her several husbands by a certain Mrs. Palmer, it is not necessary to enter. Controversies have raged having for their object the identity of the figure on the monument; some maintaining that it was the good, others the bad Mrs. Palmer. As a matter of fact it represents neither, but is merely an emblematic figure, such as Bacon was very fond of putting into his memorials, and in all probability the head on the vase represents the features of Rosa Palmer. Mr. Joseph Shore, in his work “In Old St. James” in 1911, solved the mystery. The good Mrs. Palmer was Rosa Kelly, daughter of the Reverend John Kelly of St. Elizabeth, who married John Palmer as her fourth husband, and was his faithful wife for twenty-three years; her other husbands being Henry Fanning of St. Catherine, George Ash of St. James, and the Honourable Norwood Witter of Westmoreland. The wicked Mrs. Palmer was Annie Mary Paterson, who married in St. James in 1820 John Rose Palmer, grand-nephew and successor at Rose Hall and Palmyra of John Palmer. She ended her ill-spent days in 1833.

Other good monuments in the church are to Dr. George Macfarquhar, also by Bacon (1791), to Dr. William Fowle, an early work of Sir Richard Westmacott (1796), and to Mrs. Sarah Newton Kerr, by Henry Westmacott (1814). The works by John Bacon the younger are hardly worthy of mention.

In 1911 a handsome three-light window by Jones and Willis was erected at the east end of the church. The centre light represents the Crucifixion, the side-lights the Resurrection and the Ascension. One of the side-lights was presented by Mr. W. F. Lawrence, whose family owned Fairfield and other estates on the north side for many years.

Space will not permit of more than a brief _résumé_ of the history of a people in Jamaica around whom much romance has sprang up. This romance is, however, apt to be a little modified by a closer acquaintance, for the modern representatives show little of that physical enterprise and endurance for which their ancestors were famous.

[Illustration:

BLOCK HOUSE, MAROON TOWN ]

The term Maroon—said to be a corruption of the Spanish _Cimarron_, wild, untamed, and applied to those negroes, originally fugitive slaves, who lived and still live in the mountains and forests of Guiana and the West Indies—first occurs in the English language in 1628, in “Sir Francis Drake Revived”: “The Symerons (a blacke people, which about eightie yeeres past, fled from the Spaniards their Masters).” So, too, in 1655, when Penn and Venables arrived, the negroes left their masters and betook themselves to the mountainous parts of the island, with a natural desire to escape from serving alien owners; and when the Spaniards vacated the island, assumed to themselves, as they had every right to do, not the _rôle_ of rebels, but of a people resisting to the utmost of their power the invasion of the island by the English. And thenceforward, their forces swelled from time to time by runaway slaves of the newcomers, they were for many a long year a source of anxiety to the planters living in their neighbourhood, and, indeed, to the colony in general. It may be mentioned that Bridges, in his History, gives a different origin to the Maroons, but he quotes no authority in support of either of the following statements, and the first is certainly untrue. He says:

It has been supposed that the present race of Maroons derive their origin from the Spanish slaves who remained in the fastnesses of the island after its conquest; but these were all disposed of and accounted for to a man in less than eight years after that event. The Maroons of Jamaica owe their peculiarity of feature to the mixture of the Malay caste, which they derived from the crews of a Madagascar slave-ship wrecked upon these shores.

That the Maroons of Jamaica were a real menace in the early days is evident from the fact that General Robert Sedgwick, in writing home to Thurloe, more than once referred to them with apprehension.

The name of their first chief known to history still lives in Juan de Bolas, in the St. John district of St. Catherine, round which hill the Maroons were scattered in Doyley’s time; but de Bolas in time surrendered to the English, and was made colonel of the black regiment, and trouble ceased for the moment. The next Maroon chief of whom we read is Cudjoe. In 1690 there was an insurrection, in the parish of Clarendon, of negro slaves who found a secure retreat in the interior of the country, contenting themselves for a time with predatory excursions against neighbouring estates. When later an armed force was sent against them, they elected as their chief Cudjoe, who appointed his brothers, Accompong, whose name still lives in =Accompong= in St. Elizabeth (Akjampong was the name of an Ashantee chief who figured in the Ashantee War of 1872) and Johnny, as leaders under him, the greater part of his men being Coromantees. He was, in about 1730, joined by a party of Cottawood negroes from St. George (now merged in Portland), and later by a party from St. Elizabeth. From the similarity of their mode of life, Cudjoe and his followers about this time became known as Maroons, the same as the original Spanish runaway slaves. Up to this time forty-four Acts of the Assembly, Long tells us, had been passed, and £240,000 expended for the suppression of the Maroons. On the commencement of hostilities against them, their mere wish for plunder became a desire for revenge. In 1733 the Government resolved to establish advanced posts to hold the Maroons in check, one at Cave Valley being intended to guard Cudjoe. These posts were garrisoned by independent companies, confidential negroes (termed black shot), mulattoes, and some two hundred Indians specially imported from the Mosquito Coast, who, fighting the Maroons with their own weapons, destroyed their provision grounds. Dogs, provided by the churchwardens of the parishes, were also used for defence and for tracking purposes. Realising that his quarters were accessible to the rangers, Cudjoe removed into Trelawny, on the north-west side of the Cockpits. Finding them difficult to subdue, and fearful of the risk of defeat of an organised attack on them, the Governor, Edward Trelawny, was persuaded—at a time when, though he was ignorant of it, the Maroons were prepared to surrender—to offer terms of peace to the Maroons, the offer being made through Colonel Guthrie, of the militia, and Captain Sadler, of the regulars, who had been placed in command of the troops it had originally been intended to send against them. Dr. Russell was selected as delegate to represent the English. In order to placate Cudjoe he exchanged hats with him. Later, Colonel Guthrie came forward, and under Cudjoe’s tree in Guthrie’s defile were concluded “Articles of Pacification with the Maroons of Trelawny Town, March 1, 1738,” by which the Maroons received full pardon, with privilege to possess for ever 1500 acres between =Trelawny Town=, which was then so called after the Governor, Edward Trelawny, and the Cockpits, with right to hunt; the Maroons on their side undertaking to take part in any action of the Government against rebels, and to hand over runaway slaves to their masters. A similar treaty was made with Quao and the Windward Maroons in July 1739, and the five Maroon settlements of Jamaica were established—Trelawny Town, Accompong, Scott’s Hall, Charles Town and Moore Town, the last three being in the eastern part of the island. Later, some of the land was alienated from Trelawny Town, and 1000 acres were attached to Accompong. It was really this treaty, which kept the bodies of Maroons as a distinct tribe in the strongest parts of the country, instead of encouraging their being merged in the general negro population, that was the cause of all the subsequent trouble.

We next in the history of the Maroons come to the rebellion in 1795, by the Trelawny Town Maroons—sometimes spoken of as the Maroon War—when James Montague was their leading chief. Their neighbours at Accompong sided with the Government.

The immediate cause of (or rather excuse for) the rebellion was the flogging at the workhouse at Montego Bay by a runaway negro (whom the Maroons themselves had captured) of two Maroons who had been convicted of stealing pigs. Previous to this the Maroons had become discontented through the removal of their superintendent, which removal they themselves had helped to bring about, and disapproval of his successor; and they also desired new land in place of that allotted to them, which they said was both worn out and insufficient. But Balcarres, the Governor, always held that the origin of the war lay “in French principles and the unjustifiable mode of warfare adopted in these islands by the ruling power in France.”

At the first outbreak the whole island was put under martial law, and the Governor himself, a veteran of the American war, went to the seat of war and took command—his headquarters being first at Vaughan’s Field and later at Montego Bay and Castle Wemyss—only leaving the scene of operations to meet the Assembly from time to time in Spanish Town. Of a nature prone to show his military prowess, and moved by fear of the influence of the rebellion taking place in Haiti hard by, and the presence of a number of questionable immigrants in Jamaica from that island, as well as by his prejudice against the _imperium in imperio_ which the Maroons possessed under the treaty of 1738, he gave the rebels, the Maroons of Trelawny Town (1660 in number all told) only four days in which to surrender. Thirty-eight did so; but on August 12 hostilities commenced by a detachment of dragoons falling into an ambuscade, five officers and thirty men being killed. It is said by some that the Maroons chose their time for rising when they did, as they knew that with the departure of the July fleet but few troops would be left in the island; and it was only by the prompt action on the part of the Governor in stopping the _Halifax_ packet for three weeks and in detaining a convoy of troops on its way from England to St. Domingo (where it was sadly needed), which had actually sailed from Port Royal, that forces were available to meet the rebels. These forces numbered some four hundred men of the 13th, 14th, 17th, and 18th Light Dragoons, the 83rd Foot, and the recently raised 130th Foot. A tiresome campaign then followed, in which twenty actions were fought, the seat of the struggle being the wild Cockpit country. By another ambuscade Colonel Fitch and two other officers lost their lives.

At the time of the meeting of the Assembly in September the rebellion was not so near quelled as the Governor had hoped.

Lieutenant-Colonel Walpole, of the 13th Light Dragoons, who on the death of Colonel Fitch had succeeded to the command of the forces, and was made a major-general by Balcarres and given very full powers, altered the whole plan of campaign, teaching the troopers of the 17th Light Dragoons, who had had experience in colonial warfare with Tarleton in America, to fight on foot and to work in twos, so that each could hold the arms of the other while climbing had to be done—and by fighting the Maroons in their own way paved the way for their surrender. But the difficulty of the operation may be judged by the fact that Walpole, after months of experience, wrote to Balcarres that there was “little chance of any but a Maroon discovering a Maroon.”

When “cultivation was suspended, the courts at law had long been shut up, and the Island seemed more like a garrison under the power of the martial law than a country of agriculture and commerce,” one hundred bloodhounds and forty chasseurs were imported from Cuba to aid in tracking the Maroons. The news of the arrival (on December 14) of the hounds had such an effect that without seeing them the Maroons sued for peace a week or so later, only stipulating that they should not be executed or transported. The treaty was ratified on December 28, but they were only given till January 1 to come in and deliver up the runaways. In the end they were transported on the grounds that they had not surrendered by the date named (the last did not come in until March 21) and that they had not surrendered up the runaway slaves that had joined them; and Walpole, considering that the Governor and House of Assembly had broken faith with the Maroons, whom he had promised should not be expatriated, refused a sword of honour offered him by that body and resigned his commission in the army, which, however, he had contemplated selling before the trouble with Balcarres began. That being so, it is odd to read in the “Account of Expenses incurred in the late Martial Law” “Present of swords to Lord Balcarres and General Walpole, £1950.” The regard one feels for Walpole’s indignation at what he terms “this guilt and infamy,” and his skill in quelling the rebellion, is marred when one learns that he Wrote to Balcarres on December 24, 1795: “Two Maroons (Smith and Dunbar) have come in from Johnstone’s party, to beg the King’s mercy, and the whole are to be here on Saturday, to construct their huts within our posts. I have allotted them a spot between Cudjoe Town and the Old Town; there they are to remain until the Legislature shall dispose of them. If I might give you an opinion, it should be that they should be settled near Spanish Town, or some other of the large towns in the lowlands; the access to spirits will soon decrease their numbers, and destroy that hardy constitution which is nourished by a healthy mountainous situation.” It is evident that his indignation was aroused by the false position in which he had been placed, and not by any humanitarian feeling towards the Maroons. It is also evident that Balcarres was satisfied in his own conscience that his