Slavery and the Jamaican Maroons

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The introduction of black slaves in the western world was the beginning of a new culture, more economic wealth and prosperity for whites and for blacks a life of poverty, enslavement and oppression. The life and times of the Jamaican Maroons is a story of an indomitable foe, a people whose survival depends on their wit and tenacity, form a part of this terrible saga in the history of blacks in the New World and where we are today. The struggle of the Maroons of Jamaica against the British colonial authorities, their subsequent collaboration with and betrayal by them. A story that took a circular voyage from West Africa to Jamaica, then to Canada and in the end returned to Africa. The Maroons of Jamaica originally came from West Africa. Some of them were IBO, a tribe from eastern Nigeria. The slave trade between 1590 and 1840 concerned three different cultures from three different continents involved in an elaborate system of barter in enslaved Africans. Europeans comb African countries looking for gold, ivory, spices and cheap labour for their plantations in the Americas; traveling routes first navigated in the 15th century. The Henrietta Marie was typical of the small merchant ships and traders that ply the Atlantic on their way to the Americas and the West Indies at the turn of the 18th century. In 1699, the ship left the port of London on her second slaving voyage, carrying cargo of European manufactured goods for trade in West Africa. She journeyed to the African coast where her cargo is exchanged for enslaved Africans and ivory, from there the ship sailed to Jamaica, where the captives is exchanged for sugar and logwood. Laden with new world goods, the Henrietta Marie! Began her long and ardours voyage home to London,... ... middle of paper ... ... Africans, but a life born of necessity. Indeed, the early Maroons were "thorns and pricks" in the side of the British, they plunder and burn plantations, captured slaves and killed British soldiers who ventured out too far into the woods. The Maroons victories against the British were so numerous that in April, 1656, the British Governor D'Oyley reported "it hath pleased God to give us some success against the Negroes. A plantation of theirs beeinge (sic) found out, wee (sic) fell on them, slew some, and spoiled one of their chief quarters." In another skirmish the British soldiers killed "seven or eight “negroes" but the Maroons retaliated by ambushing and killing forty soldiers. In a letter to John Thurloe, Major Sedgwick said, "In two daies (sic) more than forty of our soldiers, were cut off by the negroes as they were carelessly going about their quarters."

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