No peace treaty was signed in Accompong Town – Part I
ON AUGUST 1, 1838, enslaved people in Jamaica and other parts of the British Caribbean were emancipated after over 300 years of enslavement by Spain and Britain. But 100 years before that, the Leeward Maroons of western Jamaica had already got their freedom through the signing of a treaty of peace and friendship.
This treaty was signed in Trelawny Town/Flagstaff, St James, and not in Accompomg Town, St Elizabeth. That the treaty was signed in a peace cave in ‘Old Town’, Accompong, is a historical inaccuracy.
This untruth has been told over and over again at the annual Accompong Town January 6 celebrations, which is a must-go event for many people from home and abroad. One of the highlights of the day is the cooking, roasting and eating of unsalted food under the ‘Kinda Tree’.
Some of the food is then taken by a procession of “Maroon only” to the ‘peace cave’ to appease ancestral spirits. Every year, non-Maroons are prevented from joining the procession for whatever reasons. But, how did Accompong Town come to be regarded as the place where the treaty was signed? That answer is lost in the haystack of time, it seems, and as such, might not be proffered. And the history books, not even one of them has any record of Accompong Town’s claim.
What the books are saying is that Accompong Town, named after Accompong, a brother of Cudjoe, the paramount Maroon leader, was established in St Elizabeth by Accompong on the instructions of Cudjoe himself, a military strategist. So, while Cudjoe reigned on one side of the vast Cockpit Country, in St James, Accomopong’s domain was in St Elizabeth.
R. C. Dallas, regarded as one of the foremost Maroon history writers, tells the story of how Cudjoe came to sign the treaty with the British in his book, The History of the Maroons – From Their Origin To The Establishment of Their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone Volume I, published in 1803.
The first major rebellion by enslaved Africans in Jamaica occurred in May 1690 in Clarendon at Sutton’s Plantation, not too far from present-day Chapelton. The enslaved burned the farms and the great house, which was poorly defended. Led by Cudjoe, many of them fled to the hills of north Clarendon from which they continued to launch more attacks on plantations, burning some of them.
Cudjoe was a military strategist who had people scattered all over the Cockpit Country to watch and gauge the movements of the British, who were always on the hunt, searching for “their runaways”. But, the Maroons used their knowledge of the geography of the land to outwit the hapless campaigners.
Cudjoe moved from his original base when he realised that their safety could be compromised and settled in a cockpit called Petty River Bottom to augment their defence, and sent Accompong to set up a station in St Elizabeth.
“Cudjoe, finding his haunts accessible to the rangers who were stationed at the barracks to the east of him, and the communication of his foraging parties with his old friends in the back parts of Clarendon and cut off, resolved to change his position, and to seek a situation of great security for his quarters, as well as a more extensive field for his operations,” Dallas writes.
“He accordingly removed to a place in Trelawney, near the entrance of the great cockpits to the northwest, the first of which, called Petty Bottom, now well known, was accessible by a very narrow defile (gap). The cockpit was considered a very large one, containing almost seven acres of land and a spring of water. Cudjoe displayed great judgment in choosing this position, as in case of alarm he could throw himself into the cockpit, whence no valour or force could drive him, and at the same time he placed the great range of cockpits between him and his former annoyers.”
About Accompong, Dallas says, “Cudjoe now augmented the body he had placed under the command of his brother Accompong, and established them on the northern borders of St Elizabeth, where the country afforded more cattle, but where also his men had to act against a greater number of inhabitants, prepared to defend their property. The situation was above the mountains of Nassau, a place where there is still a town called Accompong after his name.” A well-preserved map in R. C. Dallas’ book clearly situates the places mentioned above.
Accompong and the other Maroons of St Elizabeth were a part of the bigger picture, but the 1838 treaty of peace and friendship was not signed in the lofty heights of Accompong Town, where the air is rarefied. In Part II, R. C. Dallas recounts the moments leading up to the signing of the treaty and sacred blood oath at the hallowed cotton tree in the cockpit at Petty River Bottom, Trelawny Town, St James.