The First Maroon War is one of the most significant military conflicts in the history of the Caribbean — and one of the least taught. It lasted, in its most intense phase, from approximately 1720 to 1739, though Maroon resistance to British colonial authority began earlier and continued long after the treaties were signed. During that period, a people who had been enslaved, who had escaped into the mountains of Jamaica, who had no standing army, no external allies, no access to conventional military supply chains, held the British colonial military machine at bay in the Blue Mountains and the Cockpit Country of western Jamaica with a consistency and a lethality that the British found impossible to overcome by conventional means.

The Maroon Wars are not ancient history. They are the legal foundation of contemporary Maroon rights claims in Jamaica. The treaties of 1739 and 1740 that ended the First Maroon War — the Treaty of Cudjoe with the Leeward Maroons and the Treaty of Nanny Town with the Windward Maroons — are the documents that the Jamaican courts have been asked to interpret in the twenty-first century. The 2018 Supreme Court ruling that the Accompong Treaty of 1739 constitutes a valid and currently binding treaty between the Jamaican government and the Accompong Maroon community rests on the same legal events that the British colonial administrators recorded in their dispatches from the mountains of Jamaica nearly three centuries ago.

The Military Genius of the First Maroon War

The British military forces that attempted to subdue the Maroons in the mountains of Jamaica were operating in terrain that negated every advantage of conventional European warfare. The linear tactics, the musket volleys, the cavalry charges that had made the British military formidable on the battlefields of Europe were useless in the dense forest and steep ravines of the Blue Mountains and the Cockpit Country. The Maroons exploited this with systematic brilliance.

The abeng — the cow horn communication instrument used by the Maroons — allowed rapid communication across the mountain terrain that the British could not monitor or intercept. The Maroon fighters moved through the forest in small, fast-moving groups that could concentrate for an ambush and then disperse before the British could mount an effective response. The trails through the mountains were known to the Maroons and unknown to the British, giving the Maroons the ability to attack and retreat through terrain that the British literally could not follow them through.

The Treaties of 1739 and 1740

The treaties that ended the First Maroon War were, from the British colonial perspective, a tactical concession designed to buy peace and divide the Maroon community from the larger enslaved population. From the Maroon perspective, they were a recognition of sovereignty — a formal acknowledgment by the most powerful empire on earth that the Maroon communities had rights, including the right to self-governance in their territories, the right to their land, and the right to their freedom.

The Leeward Maroon Treaty signed with Cudjoe in 1739 granted the Accompong community 1,500 acres of land, the right to self-governance, the freedom of all then-living Maroons, and the right to trade with Jamaica’s towns. In exchange, the Maroons agreed not to harbor new runaways and to assist in suppressing slave rebellions. This last provision is the wound that has not healed. The Maroons who had built their freedom on resistance to the same slave system were now legally bound to assist in its maintenance.

The Wounds That Have Not Healed

The treaty provision requiring Maroon communities to return new runaways and assist in suppressing slave rebellions is the source of the deepest wound in Jamaican Maroon history — a wound that shapes contemporary relationships between Maroon communities and the broader Jamaican population. In 1760, Maroon forces participated in the suppression of Tacky’s War — one of the largest slave rebellions in Jamaican history. In 1831, Maroon forces participated in the suppression of the Baptist War led by Samuel Sharpe, who is today a National Hero of Jamaica.

The contemporary Maroon communities of Jamaica are navigating this history while simultaneously asserting the sovereignty that the same treaties recognized. The Accompong Treaty of 1739, upheld by the Jamaican Supreme Court in 2018, is the legal foundation of contemporary Accompong land rights. The rights those communities are asserting today are the rights that the military genius of Cudjoe and Nanny made legally recognizable in 1739 and 1740. The wars were won. The sovereignty was recognized. The wounds remain. The claim is still active.