Caribbean (91 page)

“Government business,” Jason shouted back as he headed resolutely for the Blue Mountains. They might not have been impressive in comparison with the Himalayas or Andes, but they were much higher than anything in Great Britain, reaching up at times to more than six thousand feet, deeply ravined and tree-covered. When he had traveled halfway to the east coast he turned his horse sharply to the north, up a rugged path containing a few slave shacks perched at lonely spots. Again he was warned, this time by blacks: “Here no more, massa! Yonder big trouble—Maroons.”

“It’s them I seek,” he cried back, whereupon the blacks said: “Not go, massa, soon you hear horns,” and not long after he passed the last shack in the ravine he was following, he heard that deep-throated mournful sound which terrified Jamaicans: the pulsating moan of three or four great horns sounded in unison, the lonely cry of the Maroons, those runaway slaves who had persisted in the mountains of Jamaica, living their own untrammeled lives for the past two hundred years. Laws did not affect them. Police never dared enter their mountain, and even well-trained army troops preferred not to engage these formidable warriors. No white man could even guess how they lived. Coming down from their mountain now and then to work for wages, tilling their fields and engaging in small-scale raids, but retreating quickly to their hidden lairs, they made do.

Their horns were fashioned from various materials: treasured seashells passed from father to son, horns from cattle taken in raids, curious instruments made from wood. Whatever they used, sometimes simply manipulating the human voice, they achieved fearful effects, for the sound of the Maroon horns signified trouble, meant that the mountain blacks were once more on a rampage.

But in recent years it meant primarily trouble for other blacks, rarely for white men, because as happened repeatedly in other parts of the world, like Panamá and Brazil, in which renegade slaves fled to the jungle to gain their freedom, they saw other blacks as their major enemy, people never to be trusted. The Maroons had gained their greatest concessions from white men by serving as human bloodhounds—tracking, capturing and returning valuable runaway slaves—but they had also admitted slaves to their brotherhood, especially black women, to keep their own numbers strong.

They were redoubtable warriors who had been able to defend themselves for more than two centuries, keeping alive traditions inherited from Africa and posing a kind of mythic background to Jamaican life. They understood English but preferred their own indecipherable patois rich in African words, and they were extremely black in a way that made their visages terrifying to a white man. Not one white person in ten on the island had ever seen a Maroon, but everyone had been aware since childhood of their presence—“Be quiet or the Maroon will grab you”—and it was into the fastness of their hideaways that Pembroke now proposed to penetrate.

As he moved higher into the mountains he became aware that the Maroons had spotted him, for he heard first one mournful horn in the far distance, then another, but remembering his brave ancestor Sir Hugh, who had been the principal agent in pacifying the Maroons, he plunged ahead, hoping that he would be allowed at least one moment to identify himself to someone who would remember favorably the Pembroke name. It was risky and he knew it, so when the path grew steeper, as if in approach to where the Maroons had their remote dwellings, he dismounted and walked close to the right flank of his horse so as to protect himself from at least one side.

Then he began calling out: “Pembroke coming!” and repeating this at intervals while the sounding of the horns intensified.

As he approached the crest of a slight hill he was startled by two black men who suddenly leaped in front of his horse, each grabbing the reins with one hand while threatening him with a club held in the
other. “No! Stop!” he shouted as they brought the clubs close to his head.

These men were not savages from some jungle. They wore tattered trousers and torn shirts, and were clean-shaven. Pembroke, aware that what he did in these first moments might determine whether he lived or not, allowed them to take his horse, made no gesture that could be interpreted as unfriendly, and repeated over and over: “Pembroke your friend. Pembroke your friend.” The men, making nothing of this, looked at each other as if to ask: “What shall we do with this one? He seems brave.” They must have reached some unspoken decision, for one man led the horse forward while the other guarded Pembroke with his club as they started up the remaining portion of the climb.

Quickly they came to a village of sorts surrounded by small cleared fields, which their women tilled. The twenty-odd houses were little more than rude shacks, but a larger one in the center was sheathed in metal roofing and obviously housed the chief, an older black whose ancestors had fled to this mountain from the fields in 1657, two years after they had been landed as slaves by Sir William Penn, the British admiral who had captured the island from the Spanish. When the chief saw this white man coming toward him, his first inclination was to have him either slain for his impudence or thrown off the mountain, his horse being kept behind as a treasure, but Jason, hoping to prevent either of those misadventures, began talking swiftly, trusting that someone nearby would understand the force of what he was saying: “I am Pembroke. Same Pembroke who brought you peace, long ago.”

The words had a magical effect, for the Maroon leader caught his breath, came forward to inspect the visitor, and then embraced him: “We know Pembroke. Many years. Good man. Trusted man.” Extending his right hand, he said: “I am Colonel Seymour … in charge here.”

When Jason saluted as if the man were a real colonel, the latter called for a rough-hewn bench, placed it alongside his own, and invited Jason to join him. After some pleasantries, Jason broached the purpose of his visit: “Big trouble Morant Bay.”

“We know.”

“Former slaves killing and being killed.”

“He told us,” the colonel said, pointing to one of his men who had slipped into Morant Bay as soon as the rioting started to observe
what was happening and what effect it might have on the Maroon settlements in the mountains.

“Governor, big man, he send me to ask you not to join the rioting.”

“I know governor. Name Eyre. Pretty good man. What he promise us, we stay out?”

“Horses. Like that one. Maybe more bullets for your guns.”

After protracted dickering, the colonel astonished Jason by saying firmly: “We just about ready to march to Morant …”

“Oh no!” Paul pleaded, desperation almost checking his words. “If you join the rioters …”

“We not join them,” the colonel said. “We kill them.”

“No! No!” Jason pleaded. “Don’t kill them. Don’t kill the blacks. Don’t kill anybody.”

“Former slaves no good. They defeat you buckra, quick soon they go after us. We kill them first.” And no urgent plea that Jason could utter had any effect on the colonel, who had decided long before Jason’s arrival that the best interests of the Maroons would be served if they stormed into the troubled area and killed the black rioters.

With a speed that astonished Pembroke, Colonel Seymour signaled for the horns to resume blowing, and within minutes an expeditionary force consisting of some two hundred black men from various villages assembled, bringing with them a surprising number of good horses. Ordering the men who held Jason’s horse to return it to him, Colonel Seymour said: “You ride, too. Speak the officers what we do.” As Jason started for his horse, reluctant to participate in what might become a fearsome raid, he heard Seymour say: “Battle over, you can leave,” and he deemed it wise to go along.

Moving back down the mountain trail at a clip which made Jason gasp, the Maroon cavalry reached the main road, and there they turned east toward the settled areas where rioting had taken place. In the first half-hour of the charge Pembroke learned what character this expedition was going to take, for when they reached the black village of Conari, named for some ancient African settlement, Seymour divided his force into two groups, one to encircle the place, the other to dash in with flaming brands to set all huts afire. As the terrified occupants ran out to escape immolation, he shouted: “Kill! Kill!” and everyone was chased down through the smoke. Men, women and children alike were slain by clubs and long cane knives if
they were caught, by masterly gunfire in the middle of their backs if they tried to run. None survived.

“Seymour,” Jason cried as the murder continued in a second village the riders encountered, “no more killing!” But the colonel harshly ignored this plea: “Niggers no good. Kill all,” and he encouraged his Maroons to annihilate any blacks they came upon. Women and children were burned alive in their flaming shacks or shot as they tried to escape, and in this way the Maroons approached the principal town of Morant Bay.

There, fortunately, an army man, Colonel Hobbs, was in command, and he, anticipating the great confusion that would result if the Maroons were allowed into the town already beset by riots and hangings, had drawn his soldiers into a line to prevent the savage mountain men from entering. Undaunted, Colonel Seymour turned and led his marauders toward other rural areas where they could rampage at will. Pembroke, left behind and awed by the storm he had let loose and its fiery results in death and destruction, told Hobbs: “I came here on orders from the governor. To try to persuade the Maroons not to join the black rioters. I never dreamed they’d assassinate them.”

Hobbs waved his left hand as if dismissing the dead bodies: “Forget them. They’re rebellious niggers and there’ll be hundreds more dead before we get through.” Then he turned his horse northward and said: “Before you head back for Kingston you might like to see one of our courts-martial in operation,” and he led the way to an improvised grass-walled shack in which three very young army and navy officers were conducting that day’s trials.

A group of twenty-seven black men and two women stood shackled in one corner of the room guarded by armed sailors with dogs. The trial took exactly nine minutes, with the president of the court, an army man in his early twenties, asking: “What are the charges against these criminals?” Pembroke supposed that since Hobbs was senior officer present, he would object to this terribly pejorative implication that the accused were already criminals before the evidence was in. But then he discovered that there was to be no evidence. A white man told the court: “These were all involved in the rebellion.”

“Even the women?”

“Yes.”

“Verdict?” the judge asked his two fellow officials, and they said: “Guilty,” whereupon the judge handed down his sentence: “Hang the
men. Seventy-five lashes for the women,” and the twenty-seven men were led out to be hanged. There were, however, spaces on the suspended beam for only twenty ropes, so the sergeant in charge, without consulting the court, shot the others, moving from one pinioned man to the next and firing a pistol through the head, then kicking the body aside as the corpse fell.

In a sense those seven were lucky, for the improvised mode of hanging allowed for no sudden drop to break the neck. The men were hauled aloft, kicking and struggling and slowly strangling, until the sergeant shouted: “Pull those men’s legs!” and soldiers moved forward to lift the almost dead bodies slightly, then jerk them down with as much force as could be applied in that unsatisfactory way. Since this accomplished little, most of the men continued to strangle and gyrate on their ropes until the sergeant, in disgust, moved along the line shooting at them upward from the point of the chin through the head.

Pembroke was sickened by this brutality performed in the name of Governor Eyre and Queen Victoria, but it was what happened to the two women prisoners that made him realize the awful things a military court restrained by no law was capable of doing. The two women were stripped from the waist down, thrown on the ground with buttocks uncovered, and given twenty-five lashes each on the bare skin, not with an ordinary whip but with a cat-o’-nine-tails into which strong wires had been woven. The sailors given the task of whipping the women seemed to enjoy it, for they struck with such force that by the end of the fifth application of this almost deadly instrument, the flesh along the women’s backsides and legs was raw and bleeding. Young soldiers watching the beatings counted out the strokes in a chorus, and at the end of the first twenty-five lashes the beatings stopped, with the women almost unconscious from the pain.

But that was far from the end of their punishment, for after they were revived by water thrown in their faces, they were again thrown onto the ground and another twenty-five were applied with increasing vigor by the energetic sailors, who were applauded by the counting soldiers. Again Jason expected Hobbs to intervene, but the latter stood near the two women, a smile on his face, fists clenched, and counting as the blows fell.

When the fiftieth lash tore at the shredding skin, the beating stopped, and Jason felt impelled to protest: “Colonel Hobbs, stop this cruelty, please.”

“You heard the verdict. Guilty of rebellion. You heard the sentence,”
and he watched smiling as the women were thrown to the ground for the third time, with the dreadful metal-clothed cats cutting into their bloodied flesh. Only with supreme self-control did Pembroke refrain from leaping to their defense, and this was fortunate for him, for had he tried to make any move of compassion in this frenzied atmosphere of revenge, the young military men present, who saw nothing wrong with the punishment, might have turned on him and killed him.

When the hideous performance ended, with the flayed women unconscious beside the seven men who had been shot and below the dangling legs of the twenty who had been hanged, Pembroke wanted to flee, but as he prepared to ride back to Kingston, fifteen more accused were led into the shack where the same impartial court awaited them. At this moment, Hobbs said something which spurred Jason into precipitate action, regardless of the consequences: “Good news just in from Kingston. They’ve caught that bastard Gordon, and Governor Eyre is sending him over to us for trial.”