ABSTRACT
The Maroons were communities of ex-slaves who had escaped from the plantations and found refuge in the rugged interior parts of colonies. Here they lived by hunting wild game, growing food crops, and raiding plantations. Though small in number by comparison with the slaves, the Maroons were sufficiently numerous to harass and threaten the European slave-owning colonists. They raided plantations to acquire metal goods, cloth, salt, and other goods they were not able to produce themselves. Moreover, since they were predominantly male communities they raided plantations to acquire women, at the same time that they provided a refuge for runaway slaves. Colonial governments reacted to the Maroon menace by sending militia parties and European regiments into the backcountry on search and destroy missions. The Maroons, however, proved to be superb guerrilla fighters, laying ambushes and picking off the white troops as they marched through narrow passes in the mountains. The Maroons, on the other hand, were vulnerable to sustained campaigns which included the destruction of their provision grounds and the use of Amerindian guerrillas and bloodhounds. When long campaigns against the Maroons led to stalemate, the contending parties entered into treaties which accorded extraterritorial rights to the Maroons in return for their promise to return runaway slaves to their masters and join in defending the colony against foreign aggressors. I
It is the purpose of this article to trace by means of surviving census and other data the demographic and health experience of the Maroons of Jamaica. It will be instructive to see how this experience differed from that of plantation slaves. Both the Maroons and slaves were of African origin or descent and lived at least part of their lives in Jamaica. However, both
groups of blacks lived in parts of the island which were markedly different in their physiographic characteristics and disease environments. Moreover, while the dominant group of blacks lived at the margin of subsistence and produced surplus agricultural staples for their masters, their brothers and sisters in the backcountry were free to roam the woods and mountains in search of game and confine their sedentary agricultural labour to the growing offoodstuffs for local consumption. It will be our task to show how these and other differences affected the health and demographic performance of the Maroons and slaves.
