[5] Juan de Serras' group of Jamaican Maroons established a distinct independent community, and they survived by subsistence farming and periodic raids of plantations.

However, de Serras used the lull in the fighting to relocate to a more secure environment, probably the Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica, from which they soon resumed attacks on the English colonial authorities.

[8] In the 1670s, the former buccaneer Henry Morgan, who later became lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, and owner of a slave plantation in Guanaboa Vale, led a campaign against de Serras and the Karmahaly Maroons.

[9] It is possible that de Serras and the Karmahaly Maroons withdrew further into the Blue Mountains, which were inaccessible to the English colonial authorities, where they lived off the land and avoided further contact with white planters.

The Williams family's status as free, property-owning black people set them apart from other Jamaican inhabitants, who were at the time mostly British colonists and enslaved Africans.

The remaining rebels then fell under the leadership of an escaped slave named Simon, which took refuge in the Cockpit Country at a place called High Windward, from which they mounted a number of attacks on nearby plantations in Saint Elizabeth Parish.

Contemporary historian Robert Charles Dallas wrote that in the 1770s, a community of runaway slaves formed the Congo Settlement in the Cockpit Country, and resisted efforts by the Accompong Maroons to break them up until the end of the century.

However, recent research has shown that free black people in Jamaica were able to escape from bondage and through marronage were able to self-liberate themselves and form their own villages, which thrived for years, and sometimes decades.

[41] The Second Maroon War began in 1795 against the background of the British-Jamaican planters panicked by the excesses of the French Revolution, and by the corresponding start of a slave revolt in neighbouring Saint-Domingue, which ended with the independence of Haiti in 1804.

[42] Governor Balcarres sent William Fitch to march on Trelawny Town with a military force to demand their immediate submission, ignoring the advice of local planters, who suggested giving the Maroons some more land in order to avoid conflict.

This new general suffered more setbacks, until he eventually opted to besiege the Cockpit Country on a massive scale, surrounding it with watchposts, firing in shells from a long distance, and intending to destroy or cut off all Maroon provision grounds.

In 1812, a community of runaways started when a dozen men and some women escaped from the sugar plantations of Trelawny into the Cockpit Country, and they created a village named Me-no-Sen-You-no-Come.

The unofficial maroon community grew from its start of less than 20 runaway slaves to a large village that supported 14 buildings with shingle roofs and wood floors, raised poultry, hogs and nearly two hundred acres of cultivated land, thickly planted with provisions.

[6] In the 18th century, Cubah Cornwallis, and other nurses in the West Indies during the period, treated patients with traditional home remedies, often mistaken for magic, religion or witchcraft.

[66] Other Jamaican doctresses of the 18th century included Mrs Grant, the mother of Mary Seacole, and Grace Donne, who nursed Jamaica's wealthiest planter, Simon Taylor.

Cubah Cornwallis, Mrs Grant, Grace Donne and Sarah Adams used hygienic practices long before it became one of the main planks in the reforms of Florence Nightingale, in her book Notes on Nursing in 1859.

The Jamaican colonial government deported the leaders of the free coloureds, Louis Celeste Lecesne and John Escoffery, in an attempt to destroy the movement.

In 1830, when Jordon and his colleagues presented another petition to the Jamaican Assembly, enough pressure was brought to bear to grant free people of colour the rights to vote and to run for public office.

Unlike other newspapers, which expressed the views of white planters, The Watchman presented issues of importance to the Jamaican free people of colour, and it forged ties with the humanitarian movement and the Anti-Slavery Society in England.

[82] The period after emancipation in the 1830s initially was marked by a conflict between the plantocracy and elements in the Colonial Office over the extent to which individual freedom should be coupled with political participation for blacks.

Most freedmen were prevented from voting by high poll taxes, and their living conditions had worsened following crop damage by floods, cholera and smallpox epidemics, and a long drought.

The governor had George William Gordon, a mixed-race representative of the parish in the House of Assembly, arrested in Kingston and brought back to Morant Bay, where he tried the politician under martial law.

The violent suppression and numerous executions generated a fierce debate in England, with some protesting about the unconstitutional actions of the governor John Eyre, and others praising him for his response to a crisis.

He is aggrieved because my forefathers rescued him from the bonds of thraldom and deprived him the privilege of being King of the Congo, enjoying the epicurean and conjugal orgies and the sacrificial pleasures of his ancestral home in Africa.”[90] The white establishment viewed Love with as much suspicion as they did the pan-African Native Baptist preacher, Alexander Bedward.

[90] In 1914, Marcus Garvey was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA), through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.

In 1919, he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to forge a link between North America and Africa and facilitate African-American migration to Liberia.

Deported to Jamaica in 1927, where he settled in Kingston with his wife Amy Jacques, Garvey continued his activism and established the People's Political Party in 1929, briefly serving as a city councillor.

Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay moved to New York City in 1914 and in 1919 wrote "If We Must Die", one of his best known works, a widely reprinted sonnet responding to the wave of white-on-black race riots and lynchings following the conclusion of the First World War.

[94] Besides these novels and four published collections of poetry, McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979); and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), consisting of eleven essays on the contemporary social and political history of Harlem and Manhattan, concerned especially with political, social and labour organizing.

A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays.