GX Network
On March 1, 1739, in the Cockpit Country of Jamaica, Captain Cudjoe of the Leeward Maroons made his mark on a document written in English by a colonial officer named Colonel John Guthrie. That document is called a treaty. That word is doing more work than it should.
Read what it actually says.
The 1739 agreement runs to fifteen articles. Article 1 grants the Maroons “a perfect state of freedom and liberty” — the phrase most often quoted from the document. Article 3 grants them fifteen hundred acres in the mountains of Trelawny Parish. Article 8 gives them the right to hunt “except within three miles of any settlement.” So far, so sovereign.
Then read Article 6.
Article 6 requires Cudjoe’s Maroons to hunt, capture, and return runaway enslaved Africans to their British owners — for a bounty payable per head. Article 9 requires them to defend the island against foreign invasion on the Crown’s behalf. Article 10 requires them to accept a resident British Superintendent chosen by the Governor. Article 12 requires Cudjoe himself, and his successors, to hold their authority “during his good behavior” — meaning: at the pleasure of a colonial governor who could revoke it.
This is not the language of a treaty between sovereigns. This is the language of a treaty between an empire and a militia the empire has decided to use.
The historian Werner Zips put it plainly: the 1739 agreement gave the Maroons legal recognition in exchange for turning their community into a colonial policing arm against the enslaved Africans still on the plantations. The freedom clause is real. The bounty clause is also real. They exist in the same document.
Look at what happened next.
By 1742, Maroon patrols were tracking and delivering runaways. In 1760, during Tacky’s Rebellion — the largest enslaved uprising in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean — the Trelawny Maroons fought on the side of the planters, per the terms of Article 6. The rebellion was broken. Tacky was killed. His head, per period accounts, was displayed on a pole on the road to Spanish Town.
The Windward Maroons at Nanny Town, Moore Town, and Scotts Hall — who signed their own separate treaty in 1740 under Quao — were bound by the same clause.
So when contemporary histories describe the 1739 treaty as “the moment the Maroons won their freedom,” they are quoting Article 1 without reading Article 6. When school textbooks call it a peace treaty, they are omitting that it converted a resistance movement into a subcontractor of the slave economy. When statues at Accompong describe Cudjoe as the man who beat the British, they are leaving off what the British got in return.
This is why words matter.
“Treaty” implies parity. “Freedom” implies unconditional. The 1739 agreement was neither. It was a negotiated survival — the Maroons kept their mountains, their language, their military autonomy, and their bodies. In exchange, they were required to help police everyone else’s bodies.
The uncomfortable truth is that both readings are correct at once. The Maroons of 1739 were sovereign. They were also, by the terms of their own signed document, deputized. To pretend it was pure freedom is to erase the enslaved Africans whose returns they were paid for. To pretend it was pure betrayal is to erase the ninety-four years of resistance that forced the empire to sit down and write anything at all.
Read the fifteen articles. All of them. Then decide what to call it.
— The Editors
(Part of the ongoing Sovereignty & Colonial Control series. Sources: Zips, W., “Black Rebels: African Caribbean Freedom Fighters in Jamaica” (1999); Campbell, M., “The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796” (1988); primary text of the 1739 Cudjoe Treaty via the National Library of Jamaica. Companion to Whose Independence? and The Ships That Never Sailed Home.)