Travel Report

[Excerpt from travel report written by James Sidbury]

On the morning of the 9^th, we met Chief Michael Grizzle who served as our guide throughout our Jamaica trip. He loaded us into his mini-van, and we headed up to the cockpit country. The drive was fascinating in several ways. On the one hand, despite having read for decades about how lush Jamaica was in the eighteenth century, I was blown away by it. The narrow and poorly maintained road that curved back and forth up the hills and then mountains passed through beautiful green valleys (the drop offs were dramatic), endless stands of banana trees, breadfruit trees, akee trees and other food crops that seemed to grow almost spontaneously from the soil. It was clear that the maroon region is not favored by the government in that the road had an endless series of potholes that were deep and wide enough that Michael had to slow the car to a crawl to negotiate them. Each curve was also a little bit of an adventure since there was barely room for two cars to pass.

As we went up, Michael began telling us about Jamaica, the maroons, and little bits of his own story. As we climbed higher, we passed Maroon Town, which he explained was built after Trelawny Town was destroyed and taken over by the British in the wake of the Second Maroon War. The British had bombarded the Trelawny Town Maroons from Gun Hill, which we would later climb, and then had placed the British flag at the site of Trelawny Town, and that town has since been called Flagstaff. We did not go to Maroon Town which is in a valley—in what I think is one of the cockpits—and we could look down on it across the verdant hillside as we climbed to Flagstaff. There was what looked like a major house or perhaps a communal hall and then a group of brightly-colored individual houses or shops radiating out from it.

After a pretty long drive of what I would guess was two hours we arrived at Flagstaff/Trelawny Town. They have built a meeting hall with an open-air but roofed space on top that has permanent posters telling the history of the Maroons and of Flagstaff (we took pictures) and of the cockpit country’s ecology. We stopped there and went to the bathroom as Michael brought together the members of the community that he had arranged to accompany us up Gun Hill. There were five or six guys who grabbed machetes and were sharpening them as we walked toward Gun Hill. Michael told us the story of the British commander who put artillery on top of the hill and used it to force Maroon soldiers away from water sources and thus compel their surrender during the Second Maroon War. He warned us that the climb would be relatively rough and he did not exaggerate.

We went up the hill in single file with several young (and one older) Maroon men clearing the way with machetes and a couple following behind to make sure no one fell off the pace (or simply fell). We scrambled (and often nearly fell) over rocky outcroppings and slipped on muddy footholds, and we did that after two or three guys cleared the way and established the footholds. It was a bit scary at times, or at least anxiety-producing. It was also hard to miss how much more easily our guides moved through the space. We all had on hiking boots or other sturdy outdoor shoes. Most of them wore flip flops or rubber sandals.

Going down Gun Hill was at least as challenging as the climb and ended when we arrived at the remnants of Jamaica’s first swimming pool. Michael told us that it had been built by the British army to accompany a hospital that they built once they stationed troops at Flagstaff following the deportation of the Trelawny Maroons. One can still see the ruins of the stone walls that created the basin that is still fed by a spring. The swimming pool turned out to be just uphill from Flagstaff, something that I, anyway, would hot have realized at all, so we were then essentially at the end of the hike. Michael loaded us into his car after putting down some towels and cardboard to protect it from the mud that we were now caked in. He stopped by the town’s restaurant on the way home and we went to his house to eat lunch.

Throughout the day he told us stories of his past and of the maroon past. Piecing those stories together with other stories that he told over the course of our stay, his narrative of becoming and being the Chief of Flagstaff/Trelawny Town runs something like this. He is the son of a British man who worked construction (and continues to live) in Ocho Rios and a woman who traced her ancestry back to the Trelawny Maroons who were deported from Jamaica after losing the Second Maroon War, left Nova Scotia for Freetown in 1800, and, apparently, returned to the island in 1841. His parents took him up to the cockpit country fairly frequently when he was a child. He was the last son of his parents and was a favorite, accompanying his father to construction sites and his mother to the hotel(s) she worked at. He did well in school, finished high school at age 14 or 15 and attended a year of university. He left school to make money, moving to Cuba to work at Guantanamo Bay for seven years, where he was part of the staff that arranged recreation for U.S. sailors/marines who were stationed at Guantanamo. He left Cuba to return to Jamaica.

If I have the narrative straight, he began to work as a talent scout for a Dutch record company and to try to put into practice the plan for the cockpit country that he and his brother had developed. The talent scouting involved discovering Reggae bands for the Dutch label and traveling to Amsterdam for business. The second project involved establishing maroon control over the former site of Trelawny Town (now Flagstaff) and re-establishing its status as a Maroon community. My sense is that it had been largely abandoned by then, and thus could be reoccupied by squatters who identify as Maroons. It’s clear that this was slow going at first, but over time he made himself indispensable to other community members and got them on board for a vision of a reconstituted Trelawny Town. He and his brother had begun building a house that is getting reasonably near to completion and that will serve as a community guest house. He also got a community center built and has clearly built a loyal following among residents of the town. He hopes to turn Flagstaff/Trelawny Town into a fully recognized maroon community with communal claims to land, to the minerals beneath the land’s surface and to the artifacts that remain on the land. He has already succeeded to a remarkable degree, though there remains a long way to go to realize his vision.

Chief Michael believes that Africans are indigenous to Jamaica and that the Maroons are the descendants of the indigenous Africans. This does not seem to involve a rejection of Taino claims, but it does involve a van-Sertima-esque belief that Africans traveled west before Columbus, a claim bolstered by current work on the wealth and sophistication of Medieval Africa (e.g. Herman Bennett and Mike Gomez). Perhaps he envisions a pre-Columbian Jamaica in which Tainos and Africans shared the island but remained distinct? He combines this with assertions of the presence of Islam from very early on—perhaps before Columbus, but at least before the English, because of African “moors” who came over with the Spanish—and of its importance to Africans in Jamaica. The stakes of a claim to indigeneity, at least as I understand them, have less to do with absolute priority than to occupation prior to the arrival of colonizers and thus to a claim to control (or influence) over land use and a claim to the wealth produced by the land. It would be worth knowing how international law parses definitions of indigeneity and whether the legal case is materially affected by his claim that Africans were there before Columbus sailed.

To return to the narrative of our trip, after lunch at Michael’s house we began the long trip back to Montego Bay. We walked around Sam Sharpe Square and took pictures of some monuments. Michael noted that Montego Bay is geographically divided between the tourist district in the east, and the portion of the town where locals live and hang out, which is toward the west. Sam Sharpe Square is in the latter, so it was full of Jamaicans going about their Sunday business and leisure. Michael then drove us back to our hotel, where we enjoyed some drinks at the beach, took a brief swim, and headed out to Usain Bolt’s restaurant for dinner.

Michael picked us up the next morning to drive east to Port Antonio which would serve as our jumping off point to visit Moore Town. We planned to stop along the way at one or more plantation sites including Falmouth and Greenwood House. It was one of the only great houses spared by the enslaved during the Baptist War and was owned by the family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Because it was spared, it not only has the original structure but many of the original (almost all 19th c.) furnishings. It’s owned by a light-skinned African-descended man and a white woman and they seem to have run it on the model that was once used by English country estates. They lived in it until the wife’s Parkinson’s forced them to move into the carriage house, and they showed it to tourists. The docent was an African-descended woman who had been working there for decades. The tour was very focused on the famous whites who lived in the house and their connections to even more famous whites, and to the material culture of the planter class. There was very little acknowledgement of the enslaved people who had lived on the estate except in response to our questions which she answered happily.

It was a fascinating place. The house was pretty far up in the hills, where it would have received the sea breezes and from where the owners could have looked down and across the enormous sugar fields that must have filled what is now a region of coastal development. There was an enormous porch on the second floor which looks out now over the ocean, which of course it would also have looked out over in the 18th and 19th centuries but would in the past have given the planters a view down on grinding labor of the hundreds of bondspeople who would have worked for the planters. In the little entrance building where we paid for our tickets and where they sold drinks, they had a whip, some deeds, and a terrifying claw trap that they said masters of the estate had used to capture runaway slaves. It was a sobering thing to see even for one used to studying the brutality of slavery.

From the Greenwood House we continued our drive along the north coast highway, making attempts to stop at a couple of places that were run by the Jamaican National Historic Trust, but all were still closed for Covid. At one of them, a place in St. Ann’s Parish, we got out and explored ruins from the sugar mill, which were outside of the official park space. They included an enormous water wheel—it must have been twenty yards in diameter—which was intact along with the ruins of the sugar works that went with it. We also stopped at a roadside roasted yam seller and got lunch. It was a small ply-board shack by the side of the road that put roasted yams, roasted pork and other stuff together into a huge bowl of food. It was delicious. Then we proceeded on into Ocho Rios and to the outskirts of Port Maria, both of which were on the north coast highway, which is in good shape. Once we got past Port Maria, however, the road got very bad and our progress slowed to a crawl. We eventually arrived in Port Antonio a little before dinner time.

We woke up early the next morning to drive up to Moore Town. The road to Moore Town was considerably better maintained than that to Trelawny Town, or than the one from Port Antonio to the road that headed up the mountains, a fact that Michael seemed to attribute to Colonel Sterling’s leadership and political acumen. The road into and through Moore Town was brand new and probably the single best road we drove on during our time in Jamaica.

We arrived at Moore Town earlier than expected, in large part because the trip on good roads was so much smoother than Michael had feared it would be. Colonel Sterling wasn’t expecting us until mid-day, so when we arrived around 10am or so, the four of us just milled around a bit while Michael went off to locate the Colonel. We parked right at the grave and memorial to Nanny, which also holds the grave of the long-serving Colonel who preceded Sterling. We took pictures and marveled at how green and gorgeous the mountains were. Moore Town sits on a ridge looking down over a river, and the Blue Mountains rise sharply up the other side of that river. It’s located in a more accessible spot than Nanny Town had been—apparently it would have been a full day’s hike to go up to and return from Nanny Town (which was the original site of Maroon settlement there, but which was abandoned after the Treaty of 1739 when residents moved down to Moore Town). Across the street from the Nanny memorial grave and from the Moore Town cultural center, which was next door, was the elementary school, which had a series of portraits of historical heroes painted on the side (including Nanny, Paul Bogle, Sam Sharpe, Bustamante and Manley).

Colonel Sterling walked out of his back office to greet us, first hugging Michael, and then greeted us friendlily. He sat down with us in the cultural center to discuss Maroon history, the current challenges that Moore Town faces, and the plans that he is trying to implement to secure Moore Town going forward. During his conversation with us, he talked about the struggles to protect Moore Town’s land from encroachments by developers and corporate interests. He sought to use political pressure and court cases to protect his people’s claims, but he also noted that ambiguous legal rights could sometimes offer greater protection, since Maroons could lay customary claim to plots of land that weren’t officially platted.

Colonel Sterling’s plan for pushing Moore Town into the future was not entirely unlike Michael’s. Both reject any engagement with the cruise ship tourists, but both also feel their towns need to gain more reliable sources of income. Both think some form of eco-tourism combined with educational tourism is their best hope. Michael offers tours to bring people up to the cockpit country and is trying to complete a guest house that will allow him to house people in Flagstaff/Trelawny Town. He wants to show them the ways the Maroons live off the plants that grow in the mountains, the ways they used those plants in the struggles to gain freedom in the 18th century, and to discuss the medicinal properties that different plants have. He presumably will do that on long hikes of the sort that we did.

Moore Town is planning to construct a group of guest huts modeled on eighteenth century Maroon housing (made of wood and thatched roofs—there was a mock up of one in the cultural center) that will be available to guests. One of the newly-constructed ‘huts’ will be fully plumbed and have bathrooms, showers and a kitchen. The plan is to make them available to groups who want to come up the mountains to learn about the Maroons, to learn Maroon ways (knowledge of plants, traditional medicine, etc.), and to spend time in the beauty of the mountains. Colonel Sterling is planning to make a small concession to tourist-sensibility by installing a water slide on the river below the town, and Moore Town will offer hikes up to Nanny’s Falls and, presumably, up to Nanny Town for those who want to go. This does seem as if it might be a realistic thing for groups of Rice students to take advantage of, though it would require a course designed to prepare them for such a visit during, say, Spring Break.

Another topic that Colonel Sterling addressed, when discussing questions of borders and land, was the nature of land tenure in Moore Town. I’m pretty sure that the Maroons retain limited sovereignty over their land from the 1739 treaty until independence in 1962. It doesn’t seem as if the independent Jamaican government recognized the Treaty, but it has respected the towns’ autonomy. I asked Colonel Sterling whether the town’s land was individually or communally owned, and I understood him to say that it was communally owned, with the council enforcing respect for what amounts to the usufruct claims of those who live on and farm it. This leaves lots of questions—what happens to the land use claim when a long-term resident dies, either with a chosen or traditional heir or without one? Is there a market in land? Can outsiders acquire usufruct or other rights to land in the town? How do they settle disputes when, say, a town resident marries and outsider and then they split? Or the resident dies, leaving the outsider as the heir?