Both these areas are so inhospitable and inaccessible that they are even today largely uninhabited. In the eastern end of the island, in the Blue Mountains and the intersecting John Crow Mountains, the Windward Maroons built their villages and planted their fields in the western interior, on the edges of a jagged limestone formation called the Cockpit Country, the Leeward Maroons made their settlements. Initially, a number of small bands formed, but these eventually coalesced into two major groups, each comprising several villages. Many must have died of wounds, starvation and exposure following their escape, but some did survive to forge new lives for themselves in the interior and to create new societies that were largely African derived. Slaves escaped singly, in groups, or by the hundreds in bloody rebellions. By the early lath century there were some thousand fugitives living in the interior. Their numbers were augmented by escapees from the new British plantations who either joined them or established their own settlements in the woods. The Jamaican Maroons started with a small group of Spanish slaves who were left behind when the Spaniards gave up the island to the British in 1660. Even after the treaty, both sides remained wary, and perhaps because of that they often made a point of stressing their friendly relations. It was only after his Maroon settlement was burned down that he agreed to come to terms.
Cudjoe was initially very suspicious of the government’s overtures of peace, for he did not believe the English would would keep their word.
Cudjoe and a white officer exchanging hats as a gesture of friendship. In Jamaica, descendants of the 17th and 18th century Maroons still live on the land their ancestors defended, ever conscious of their past as guerrilla fighters whom the British could not defeat. While most such communities were destroyed by the planter societies around them, in a number of cases the European powers could not overcome the Maroons and were forced to sign treaties with them in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Mexico, Jamaica and Surinam, colonial governments offered terms to Maroons, recognizing their freedom and the territorial integrity of their settlements, But it is only in two areas, Jamaica and the Guianas, that the descendants of Maroons have continued as separate and distinct communities into the present. On a smaller scale, the southern United States was dotted with settlements of fugitive slaves who sought shelter in the mountains and swamps where they sometimes mixed with Indians. The most famous of these Maroon societies, Palmares in Brazil, contained upwards of 10,000 people and withstood almost a century of Portuguese expeditions against it before it was finally destroyed in the 1690’s. And wherever geography permitted, the escaped slaves gathered together in the hush to form communities. They sprang up throughout the New World, not only in the Caribbean, but in Central and South America, and in the United States as well wherever there were slave plantations, there was resistance in the form of slave revolts and runaways. These Maroons, as they were called, were not unique to Jamaica. The rugged mountains made the interior of the island an ideal refuge for slaves who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, fled the plantations and created their own societies in the bush. Though this story, like many such anecdotes, has been told of other explorers and other places throughout the New World, it helps us to understand how, a few centuries later, a relatively small number of fugitive slaves could very nearly bring Jamaican planter society to its knees. The Caribbean island was Jamaica, with its magnificent and craggy mountains. There is a story that when Christopher Columbus, after his second voyage to the New World in 1494, was asked to describe the new island he had found in the west, he crumpled a sheet of paper and set it before the Spanish king and queen. This 18th century map of Jamaica show the inaccessible location of the Maroon villages-all in the interior mountains.