Some Jamaican Maroons eventually returned to Jamaica, but most became part of the larger Sierra Leone Creole people and culture made up of freemen and liberated slaves who joined them in the first half-century of the colony.
[1] The Jamaican governor, Alexander Lindsay, 6th Earl of Balcarres, used the contrived breach of treaty as a pretext to deport most of the Trelawny Town Maroons to Nova Scotia.
Walpole resigned his commission, and went back to England, where he became an MP and protested in the House of Commons how Balcarres had behaved in a duplicitous and dishonest way with the Maroons.
In 1796, just under 600 Jamaican Maroons from Trelawny Town were deported to Nova Scotia, where loyal colonial slaves who had sought refuge behind English lines had also been sent earlier in the decade.
[6] Prince Edward, the Commander-in-Chief, North America, impressed with the proud bearing and other characteristics of the maroons, employed the group to work on the new fortifications at the Citadel Hill in Halifax.
[citation needed] Following this the two commissioners responsible with credit of 25,000 Jamaican pounds from the government of Jamaica, expended £3,000 on 5,000 acres (20 km2) of land and built the community of Preston, Nova Scotia.
Governor Wentworth was granted an allowance of £240 annually from England to provide religious instruction and schooling for the community.
After the first winter, the maroons, raised in an independent culture and warmer climate, and not impressed with what they considered the servile aspects of subsistence agriculture, became less tolerant of the conditions in which they were living.
The colonel of the Trelawny Town Maroons, Montague James, wrote a number of petitions to England and Jamaica asking for them to be removed from Nova Scotia.
[16] The final tipping point occurred in 1839, when a Liberated African apprentice, an Ibo named Martin, murdered his elderly Maroon employer, Major John Jarrett.
The Ibo in the colony demanded vengeance, and attacked Maroons in Freetown, forcing a number of them to flee for safety in the interior.
Mary Brown and her family, which included her daughter Sarah McGale and a Spanish son-in-law, sold off their property in Sierra Leone, bought a schooner, and set sail for Jamaica.
[19] In 1841, some of the maroons returned to Jamaica to work for Jamaican sugar planters, who desperately needed workers following the abolition of slavery.
Many freedmen in Jamaica wanted to cultivate their own plots rather than work on plantations, leaving a vacuum for workers, and the Jamaican planters initially turned to Sierra Leone.