Qualla: Maroon Town, Jamaica

Maroon Town, Jamaica: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The name Maroon Town tells only the end of a story whose beginning was written in rebellion. Before the colonial authorities applied that label, this place was Cudjoe's Town, named for the warrior who led escaped enslaved people in a guerrilla campaign so effective that the British Empire sued for peace. Tucked into the conical limestone hills of Jamaica's Cockpit Country, roughly 29 kilometers southwest of Montego Bay, the settlement carries layer upon layer of defiance, displacement, and return.

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Maroon Town, Jamaica: The Cockpit Country Fortress

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The geography explains everything. The Cockpit Country is a landscape of conical limestone hills and deep sinkholes stretching across parts of Saint James, Saint Elizabeth, and Trelawny parishes. Dense tropical vegetation fills the hollows between the hills, and the terrain is so...

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Maroon Town, Jamaica: Cudjoe's War

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In the 1730s, a leader named Cudjoe organized the Maroons of western Jamaica into a fighting force that used the Cockpit Country's terrain to devastating effect against British soldiers. The First Maroon War ground on until Governor Edward Trelawny authorized the signing of a tre...

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Maroon Town, Jamaica: Exile Across Two Oceans

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Peace held for over fifty years before the Second Maroon War erupted in 1795. This time, the outcome was different. After the conflict ended in 1796, the colonial authorities deported the Trelawny Town Maroons, first to Nova Scotia's harsh winters and then to Sierra Leone in West...

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Maroon Town, Jamaica: The Return to Flagstaff

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The story did not end with deportation. When slavery was abolished in Jamaica in the 1830s, scores of Trelawny Maroons made the journey back across the Atlantic, drawn to the land their parents and grandparents had fought for. Many settled not in Maroon Town itself but in the nea...

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Image: Public domain