Cudjoe

Enslaved Africans in western Jamaica ran away into the Cockpit Country and established the first community of Leeward Maroons in the mountainous interior of the island.

[8] Milton McFarlane explains that his family's Accompong Town Maroon oral history states that Cudjoe was the freeborn son of Naquan, who was the leader of the self-liberated Africans who fled from Sutton's estate.

[11] White colonial physician R. C. Dallas, who wrote his account half a century after Cudjoe lived, claimed the Maroon leader was short and stout, with a "wildness in his manners".

He also described Cudjoe as having "a very large lump of flesh upon his back, which was partly covered by the tattered remains of an old blue coat, of which the skirts and the sleeves below the elbow were wanting.

[17] However, white Jamaican writers Edward Long and Thomas Thistlewood wrote of personal encounters with Cudjoe in the 1750s and 1760s.

In the last written reference, Long described how Cudjoe led his Leeward Maroons in a martial performance at Montego Bay for Governor Sir William Lyttleton in 1764.