60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

180 Flight to Freedom
ravines and awesome Cockpits (deep hollows), with narrow passes and
countless caves (ibid., 10). She identifies the Blue Mountains and the John
Crow Mountains as the preferred hideouts of the Karmahaly and later the
Windward Maroons (ibid., 35, 50). 5 M.T.A. Ashcroft explored the John Crow
Mountains in 1965; both decay and new verdant life were no doubt greater
after two centuries of being uninhabited by Maroons. He wrote the following
description of the area: “The John Crow Mountains must be the most
deceptive in the world. Beneath a gentle and benign exterior they are harsh
and implacable, utterly useless to man and exceptionally difficult to penetrate.”
The members of his expedition tried to cross from west to east, taking
three days to do so and struggling “over crevasses in the jagged and unstable
rocks, smothered in a tangle of rotting vegetation” (Fincham 1997, 218). M.R.
Taylor, who explored the area in 1989, left an even more vivid description:
It was the toughest going imaginable. ...Frenzied vegetation spanned countless
crevasses: we walked in a perpetual twilight, on roots and crumbly rock pinnacles
well above the visible “ground”. We had to map our way over the surface as
we would have in a cave, in order to know where we had gone each day. When
plotted on the topo, the day’s map seldom agreed with our supposed route.
(ibid.)
Dallas (1803, 1:39–41) offered an equally graphic description of the famous
Cockpit 6 Country, the chief haunt of the Leeward Maroons:
From the first Cockpit there is a succession of them, running from east to west,
on a line in which they are passable from one to the other, though with more or
less difficulty. There are also parallel lines of Cockpits, but as their sides are often
perpendicular, from fifty to eighty feet, a passage from one line to another is
scarcely to be found practicable to any but a Maroon. The northern aspect is
commonly the steepest and often a solid perpendicular rock, so that if the opposite
ascent were practicable, to descend into the parallel line would be impossible.
This is the general character of these recesses, though they may in some
degree differ in their direction.
....At this mouth, which looks like a great fissure made through a rock by
some extraordinary convulsion of Nature, from two hundred yards to half a mile
in length, and through which men can pass only in a single file, the Maroons,
whenever they expected an attack, disposed of [sic] themselves on the ledges of
the rocks on both sides . . . and lay covered by the underwood, and behind rocks
and the roots of trees, waiting in silent ambush for their pursuers.