eft of the sixty thousand natives whom the Spaniards had
found there a century and a half before. Their pitiful tale is told only
by those caves, still known among the mountains, where thousands of
human skeletons strew the ground. In their place dwelt two foreign
races,--an effeminate, ignorant, indolent white community of fifteen
hundred, with a black slave population quite as large and infinitely
more hardy and energetic. The Spaniards were readily subdued by the
English,--the negroes remained unsubdued; the slaveholders were banished
from the island,--the slaves only banished themselves to the mountains:
thence the English could not dislodge them, nor the buccaneers, whom the
English employed. And when Jamaica subsided into a British colony, and
peace was made with Spain, and the children of Cromwell's Puritan
soldiers were beginning to grow rich by importing slaves for Roman
Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons still held their own wild empire in the
mountains, and, being sturdy heathens every one, practised Obeah rites
in approved pagan fashion.

The word Maroon is derived, according to one etymology, from the
Spanish word _Marrano_, a wild-boar,--these fugitives being all
boar-hunters,--according to another, from _Marony_, a river separating
French and Dutch Guiana, where a colony of them dwelt and still dwells;
and by another still, from _Cimarron_, a word meaning untamable, and
used alike for apes and runaway slaves. But whether these
rebel-marauders were regarded as monkeys or men, they made themselves
equally formidable. As early as 1663, the Governor and Council of
Jamaica offered to each Maroon, who should surrender, his freedom and
twenty acres of land; but not one accepted the terms. During forty
years, forty-four acts of Assembly were passed in respect to them, and
at least a quarter of a million pounds sterling were expended in the
warfare against them. In 1733, the force employed against them consisted
of two regiments of regular troops and the whole militia of the island,
and the Assembly said that "the Maroons had within a few years greatly
increased, notwithstanding all the measures that had been concerted for
their suppression," "to the great terror of his Majesty's subjects," and
"to the manifest weakening and preventing the further increase of the
strength and inhabitants of the island."

The special affair in progress, at the time of these statements, was
called Cudjoe's War. Cudjoe was a gentleman