- Maroons fought two fierce wars to defend Jamaican highland territories.
- The 1739 Cudjoe Treaty granted Maroons land rights in perpetuity.
- Cockpit Country became the first legally protected Black land.
- Maroon sovereignty predates modern indigenous land rights frameworks globally.
- Moore Town remains a legally recognised Maroon settlement today.
- Bauxite mining now threatens centuries-old Maroon land sovereignty.
Before the ink dried on any modern land title, before the National Land Agency issued its first certificate of title, before the cadastral maps that govern today’s Jamaican real estate market were ever drawn, a group of formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants negotiated something extraordinary: a legally binding treaty with the British Crown that granted them sovereign rights over their mountain homeland in perpetuity. The year was 1739. The place was the rugged limestone highlands of western Jamaica. And the agreement—known to history as the Cudjoe Treaty—stands as one of the most remarkable land rights documents in the annals of the African diaspora.
It is a story of military genius, diplomatic cunning, and an enduring claim to territory that resonates, with troubling urgency, to this very day.
A People Born of Resistance
The Maroons of Jamaica did not begin as a political movement. They began as an act of survival. When English forces seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the Spanish freed their enslaved African workers and armed them against the British invaders. When the Spanish eventually withdrew, those Africans—and the enslaved people who had escaped from British plantations in the decades that followed—retreated into the densely forested interior of the island, particularly into the almost impenetrable terrain of the Cockpit Country in the west and the Blue Mountains in the east.
These communities, known as Maroons from the Spanish cimarrón (meaning wild or untamed), built autonomous settlements in the highlands. They cultivated food, maintained their own governance structures rooted in West African traditions, and organised themselves for defence with a sophistication that would eventually confound the most seasoned British military commanders. Scholars at the University of the West Indies (UWI) have long identified the Maroon communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as among the most organised examples of African-descended self-governance in the colonial world.
The First Maroon War: Mountains as Fortress
By the late seventeenth century, the Maroons of the Leeward (western) and Windward (eastern) communities had grown into a formidable force. The Leeward Maroons, led by the legendary Captain Cudjoe (also rendered as Kojo), operated out of the labyrinthine Cockpit Country—a karst landscape of conical limestone hills, sinkholes, and dense forest that gave defenders an almost insurmountable tactical advantage. The Windward Maroons, led at various points by the equally formidable Queen Nanny, fortified their stronghold at Nanny Town high in the Blue Mountains above Portland.
The First Maroon War, which historians broadly date from the 1720s to 1739, was less a single conflict than a sustained campaign of guerrilla resistance. British colonial forces sent expedition after expedition into the interior; expedition after expedition was routed, ambushed, or simply swallowed by the jungle. The Maroons employed a form of warfare adapted perfectly to their environment: they moved through the forest in small, silent units, communicated using the abeng (a cow horn instrument), and struck before colonial troops could form defensive positions. Records held in the British National Archives at Kew document the exasperation of successive British governors as their military campaigns depleted the colonial treasury and returned with little to show but casualties.
Governor Robert Hunter wrote to the Board of Trade in London as early as 1730 that the Maroon problem had become “a cancer growing in the bowels of this island” and that no conventional military solution appeared viable. His successors shared his frustration. The cost of maintaining a standing force against the Maroons, combined with the continual disruption to plantation productivity as enslaved workers were inspired by Maroon resistance and fled to join them, was threatening the economic viability of Britain’s most prized Caribbean colony.
The Cudjoe Treaty of 1739: Land as the Centrepiece
By 1738, British colonial authorities under Governor Edward Trelawny had concluded that military subjugation was not achievable at any acceptable cost. A negotiated settlement was the only viable path. In March 1739, after back-channel diplomacy conducted partly through Maroon intermediaries, Governor Trelawny dispatched Colonel John Guthrie and a small delegation to meet Captain Cudjoe in the Cockpit Country.
The meeting, by all contemporary accounts a carefully choreographed diplomatic ceremony, resulted in what historians and legal scholars now call the Cudjoe Treaty, formally signed on 1 March 1739. Its terms were nothing less than revolutionary within the context of British colonial law.
Under the treaty’s provisions, the British Crown recognised Cudjoe and his successors as the legitimate leaders of the Leeward Maroons. The Crown granted the Leeward Maroons 1,500 acres of land in the Cockpit Country “for ever.” The Maroons were guaranteed the right to hunt within a three-mile zone around their settlements and to trade freely in Jamaican towns. In exchange, the Maroons agreed to return any newly escaped enslaved people to the plantations, to render military assistance to the Crown in the event of foreign invasion or internal rebellion, and to maintain peace with the colonial government.
The land grant clause was, and remains, the treaty’s most historically significant provision. In granting territory “for ever,” the Crown was recognising, for the first time in British colonial Jamaica, that an African-descended community held a form of sovereign territorial right that pre-existed and existed independently of the colonial land tenure system. As legal scholars at UWI’s Faculty of Law have noted in contemporary scholarship, this was not a lease, not a licence, not a conditional grant subject to good behaviour. It was, on its face, a recognition of inherent territorial sovereignty—a concept that would not find broader expression in international law for another two and a half centuries.
The Quao Treaty and the Windward Maroons
The ink on the Cudjoe Treaty had barely dried when British authorities moved to conclude a parallel agreement with the Windward Maroons of eastern Jamaica. In June 1739, Colonel Robert Sadler negotiated a treaty with Captain Quao, the principal leader of the Windward Maroons following the earlier period when Nanny of the Maroons had led resistance at Nanny Town.
The Quao Treaty, sometimes called the Treaty with the Windward Maroons, extended similar territorial protections to the eastern communities. The area around what is now known as Moore Town (originally called New Nanny Town) in the Rio Grande Valley of Portland was formally recognised as Maroon territory. The settlement of Accompong, near the Cockpit Country in St. Elizabeth parish, was similarly confirmed as Leeward Maroon land under the Cudjoe Treaty framework.
Together, the two treaties of 1739 created a legally recognised patchwork of Maroon-controlled territory across Jamaica’s interior, governed by Maroon councils under their own customary law, distinct from the colonial legal and land tenure systems that governed the rest of the island. These communities functioned, in practice if not always in colonial theory, as semi-sovereign enclaves within the body of the Jamaican colony—a status unprecedented in the British Caribbean and, arguably, in the broader British Empire at that time.
Legal Recognition and Colonial Contradiction
The treaties of 1739 created an immediate and unresolved legal contradiction at the heart of Jamaican colonial governance. The colonial land system was built on the principle that all land ultimately belonged to the Crown, which granted it to colonists through patents, deeds, and eventually the system of registered titles that evolved into the modern framework administered by the National Land Agency (NLA) and its predecessor institutions. The Maroon treaties disrupted this logic entirely.
The Jamaica Archives and Records Department (JARD) holds copies of the original treaty instruments, as well as subsequent correspondence between Jamaican governors and the Colonial Office in London that reveals the persistent ambiguity over what, precisely, the Crown had committed to. Colonial officials in Jamaica periodically attempted to reassert sovereignty over Maroon lands, particularly as the plantation economy expanded into previously marginal territories. The Maroons, for their part, consistently invoked the treaty language as a constitutional guarantee of their territorial rights.
This tension came to a violent head in the Second Maroon War of 1795–96, triggered in part by disputes over the punishment of Maroons accused of theft in Trelawny Town (the principal Leeward Maroon settlement). The British response was overwhelming: Governor Alexander Balcarres deployed hundreds of troops and, controversially, imported Cuban bloodhounds to track Maroon fighters through the Cockpit Country. The Trelawny Town Maroons eventually surrendered after being promised that they would not be deported from Jamaica—a promise the colonial government promptly broke, shipping approximately 600 Trelawny Town Maroons to Nova Scotia in 1796 and eventually to Sierra Leone in 1800.
The deportation of the Trelawny Town Maroons did not, however, extinguish the treaty rights of the remaining Maroon communities. Accompong, Moore Town, Scott’s Hall, and Charles Town continued to function as treaty-protected Maroon settlements, their land rights anchored in the 1739 instruments. The Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT) today recognises these communities as sites of outstanding historical and cultural significance, and the Maroon communities themselves continue to assert the legal force of the original treaties.
A Forerunner of Indigenous Land Rights
The Maroon treaties of 1739 occupy a peculiar and underappreciated position in the global history of indigenous and minority land rights. More than two centuries before the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted in 2007, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights began developing its landmark jurisprudence on indigenous territorial rights, and before modern international law frameworks acknowledged the concept of prior and continuing sovereignty over ancestral lands, the Cudjoe Treaty enshrined in binding legal language the principle that an African-descended community held inherent rights to territory that the colonial state was obligated to respect.
This is not a minor historical footnote. Legal scholars, including those associated with UWI and international institutions, have increasingly pointed to the Maroon treaties as early precedents for the kind of community-based territorial sovereignty that indigenous peoples around the world are still fighting to have recognised. The Saramaka People v. Suriname case decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007—which recognised the territorial rights of Maroon descendants in Suriname—drew explicitly on the logic that communities with historical ties to territory hold rights that survive colonial dispossession. The Jamaican Maroon treaties of 1739 predate that logic by nearly 270 years.
The Jamaica Information Service (JIS) has in recent years published educational material acknowledging the Maroons’ role in shaping Jamaican national identity and their treaties as foundational documents of Jamaican legal history. The National Library of Jamaica (NLJ) holds extensive archival materials related to the Maroon communities, and UWI researchers have produced a growing body of scholarship examining the contemporary legal status of the 1739 instruments.
Cockpit Country, Bauxite, and the Unresolved Present
The story of the Maroon treaties does not end in 1739, or in 1796, or at Jamaican independence in 1962. It continues into the present with troubling urgency, centred on the ecological and cultural jewel at the heart of the original Cudjoe Treaty: the Cockpit Country.
The Cockpit Country is one of the Caribbean’s most significant biodiversity hotspots, home to hundreds of endemic species of flora and fauna, a critical watershed that supplies water to communities across five Jamaican parishes, and the heartland of Maroon cultural identity and territorial sovereignty. It is also, beneath its limestone surface, rich in bauxite—the ore from which aluminium is refined, and which has been a major Jamaican export commodity since large-scale mining began in the 1950s.
Since the 1980s and with increasing intensity in the twenty-first century, the question of whether bauxite mining should be permitted within or adjacent to the Cockpit Country has generated fierce controversy. Mining interests, supported at various points by Jamaican government ministries, have argued that the economic benefits of bauxite extraction justify extending mining licences into the Cockpit Country. Maroon communities, environmental organisations, and legal advocates have strenuously opposed this position, invoking both environmental law and, crucially, the 1739 treaties.
The Accompong Maroon Council in St. Elizabeth has repeatedly asserted that the Cockpit Country falls within the territory protected by the Cudjoe Treaty and that mining cannot lawfully proceed without Maroon consent—a form of the “free, prior, and informed consent” principle that international indigenous rights law now recognises as a fundamental requirement before development can occur on ancestral lands. The legal status of this claim remains contested and unresolved in Jamaican courts, highlighting the extent to which the 1739 treaties continue to generate live legal disputes nearly three centuries after they were signed.
In 2019, the Jamaican government announced a boundary for the Cockpit Country Protected Area that environmental groups and Maroon advocates criticised as too narrow, excluding areas they argued were covered by treaty protections and leaving them vulnerable to mining. The controversy illustrates with painful clarity how unfinished the legal and political settlement of 1739 remains.
The Long Arc of Land and Sovereignty
The modern Jamaican real estate market operates within a framework of registered titles, conveyancing law, and mortgage finance that would be recognisable, in its broad outlines, to any contemporary property lawyer. The National Land Agency issues titles. The courts enforce conveyances. Banks lend against registered security. It is a system built, ultimately, on the colonial land tenure apparatus that the British established in the seventeenth century and that Jamaica inherited at independence.
But running beneath this system, like an underground river through the limestone of the Cockpit Country itself, is a different claim to land—older, differently grounded, and not yet fully resolved. The Maroon treaties of 1739 remind us that the story of land in Jamaica is not simply the story of colonial grants and registered titles. It is also the story of communities who fought, bled, negotiated, and held on to their territory against one of the most powerful empires in human history, and who received, in return, a legal guarantee that their land was theirs forever.
Whether that guarantee will ultimately be honoured—by the courts, by the government, by the mining companies—is a question that Jamaican law, Jamaican politics, and Jamaican society have not yet fully answered. What is not in doubt is that when Captain Cudjoe and Colonel Guthrie met in the Cockpit Country in March 1739 and put their marks to the treaty that bears Cudjoe’s name, they created something that no subsequent colonial act, no post-independence statute, and no corporate licence has managed to fully erase: the first legally recognised independent Black land rights in the history of Jamaica, and one of the first in the history of the world.
Sources and further reading: British National Archives, CO 137 series (Jamaica Colonial Office correspondence); Jamaica Archives and Records Department (JARD), Maroon treaty instruments; National Library of Jamaica (NLJ) historical collections; Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT) heritage register; University of the West Indies (UWI) publications on Maroon history and law; Jamaica Information Service (JIS) historical resources; Carey, Bev, The Maroon Story (Agouti Press, 1997); Campbell, Mavis C., The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796 (Bergin and Garvey, 1988).
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