old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They
were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman
thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been
titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying
at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for rebels who
never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were full of the
same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less severely
tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the trees, but
they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a sentinel
declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the river in a
canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to arms--against
a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the most substantial
dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the chigres, locusts,
scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come half-way to meet
them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them the freedom of the
forests, and exhibited a hospitality almost excessive. Snakes twenty feet
long hung their seductive length from the trees; jaguars volunteered
their society through almost impenetrable marshes; vampire bats perched
by night with lulling endearments upon the toes of the soldiers. When
Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight mosquitoes at one
stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the spirit of martyrdom. But
when we add to these the other woes of his catalogue,--prickly-heat,
ringworm, putrid-fever, "the growling of Col. Fougeaud, dry sandy
savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot days, cold and damp nights,
heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can hardly wonder that three
captains died in a month, and that in two months his detachment of
forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.
Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of the
matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light heart and
a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good condition to his
keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes. Daily bathing in the
river had also something to do with it; and, indeed, hydropathy was first
learned of the West-India Maroons,--who did their "packing" in wet
clay,--and was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary
personal qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never
did a "meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he
calls himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy,
poetry, and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings
in his volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes
he coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's Homer and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion; and, to do
justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were his
men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without the camp, and
the cockroaches within; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he satisfies
himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the sand is
precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a scorpion, he
makes sure of a scientific description in case he should expire of the
bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some rational interest
in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes which pre-occupy it.
This is the highest triumph of man over his accidents, when he thus turns
his pains to gains, and becomes an entomologist in the tropics.
Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and
occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose
upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying. Stedman himself
made several campaigns, with long intervals of illness, before he came
any nearer to the enemy than to burn a deserted village or destroy a
rice-field. Sometimes they left the "Charon" and the "Cerberus" moored by
grape-vines to the pine-trees, and made expeditions into the woods,
single file. Our ensign, true to himself, gives the minutest schedule of
the order of march, and the oddest little diagram of manikins with cocked
hats, and blacker manikins bearing burdens. First, negroes with
bill-hooks to clear the way; then the van-guard; then the main body,
interspersed with negroes bearing boxes of ball-cartridges; then the
rear-guard, with many more negroes, bearing camp-equipage, provisions,
and new rum, surnamed "kill-devil," and appropriately followed by a sort
of palanquin for the disabled. Thus arrayed, they marched valorously
forth into the woods, to some given point; then they turned, marched back
to the boats, then rowed back to camp, and straightway went into the
hospital. Immediately upon this, the coast being clear, Baron and his
rebels marched out again, and proceeded to business.
In the course of years, these Maroons had acquired their own peculiar
tactics. They built stockaded fortresses on marshy islands, accessible by
fords which they alone could traverse. These they defended further by
sharp wooden pins, or crows'-feet, concealed beneath the surface of the
miry ground,--and, latterly, by the more substantial protection of
cannon, which they dragged into the woods, and learned to use. Their
bush-fighting was unique. Having always more men than weapons, they
arranged their warriors in threes,--one to use the musket, another to
take his place if wounded or slain, and a third to drag away the body.
They had Indian stealthiness and swiftness, with more than Indian
discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in
three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn.
They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by
scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave
wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on
their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black
rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of them,
finding himself close to the muzzle of a ranger's gun, threw up his hand
hastily. "What!" he exclaimed, "will you fire on one of your own party?"
"God forbid!" cried the ranger, dropping his piece, and was instantly
shot through the body by the Maroon, who the next instant had disappeared
in the woods.
These rebels were no saints: their worship was obi-worship; the women had
not far outgrown the plantation standard of chastity, and the men drank
"kill-devil" like their betters. Stedman was struck with the difference
between the meaning of the word "good" in rebellious circles and in
reputable. "It must, however, be observed, that what we Europeans call a
good character was by the Africans looked upon as detestable, especially
by those born in the woods, whose only crime consisted in avenging the
wrongs done to their forefathers." But if martial virtues be virtues,
such were theirs. Not a rebel ever turned traitor or informer, ever
flinched in battle or under torture, ever violated a treaty or even a
private promise. But it was their power of endurance which was especially
astounding; Stedman is never weary of paying tribute to this, or of
illustrating it in sickening detail; indeed, the records of the world
show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the agonizing wheel," proved
powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped, every bone broken, the
victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed, sang, and died triumphant.
Of course they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it would
have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates higher
virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery has not depraved him, it has done him little harm.
If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom,
let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is Cassy and Dred
who are the normal protest of human nature against systems which degrade
it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons, who had seen their
brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated, hanged on iron hooks,
broken on the wheel, and had been all the while solemnly assured that
this was paternal government, could only repay the paternalism in the
same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman saw a negro chained to a
red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient slaves, in repeated
instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and sent to boat-service
for the rest of their lives; and of course the rebels borrowed these
suggestions. They could bear to watch their captives expire under the
lash, for they had previously watched their parents. If the government
rangers received twenty-five florins for every rebel right-hand which
they brought in, of course they risked their own right hands in the
pursuit. The difference was, that the one brutality was that of a mighty
state, and the other was only the retaliation of the victims. And after
all, Stedman never ventures to assert that the imitation equalled the
original, or that the Maroons had inflicted nearly so much as they had
suffered.
The leaders of the rebels, especially, were men who had each his own
story of wrongs to tell. Baron, the most formidable, had been the slave
of a Swedish gentleman, who had taught him to read and write, taken him
to Europe, promised to manumit him on his return--and then, breaking his
word, sold him to a Jew. Baron refused to work for his new master, was
publicly flogged under the gallows, fled to the woods next day, and
became the terror of the colony. Joli Coeur, his first captain, was
avenging the cruel wrongs of his mother. Bonny, another leader, was born
in the woods, his mother having taken refuge there just previously, to
escape from his father, who was also his master. Cojo, another, had
defended his master against the insurgents until he was obliged by ill
usage to take refuge among them; and he still bore upon his wrist, when
Stedman saw him, a silver band, with the inscription,--"True to the
Europeans." In dealing with wrongs like these, Mr. Carlyle would have
found the despised negroes quite as ready as himself to take the
total-abstinence pledge against rose-water.
In his first two-months' campaign, Stedman never saw the trace of a
Maroon; in the second, he once came upon their trail; in the third, one
captive was brought in, two surrendered themselves voluntarily, and a
large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the camp,
ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion. Deep
swamps and scorching sands, toiling through briers all day, and sleeping
at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with weapons
supported on sticks crossed beneath,--all this was endured for two years
and a half, before Stedman personally came in sight of the enemy.
On Aug. 20, 1775, the troops found themselves at last in the midst of the
rebel settlements. These villages and forts bore a variety of expressive
names, such as "Hide me, O thou surrounding verdure," "I shall be taken,"
"The woods lament for me," "Disturb me, if you dare," "Take a tasting, if
you like it," "Come, try me, if you be men," "God knows me, and none
else," "I shall moulder before I shall be taken." Some were only
plantation-grounds with a few huts, and were easily laid waste; but all
were protected more or less by their mere situations. Quagmires
surrounded them, covered by a thin crust of verdure, sometimes broken
through by one man's weight, when the victim sank hopelessly into the
black and bottomless depths below. In other directions there was a solid
bottom, but inconveniently covered by three or four feet of water,
through which the troops waded breast-deep, holding their muskets high in
the air, unable to reload them when once discharged, and liable to be
picked off by rebel scouts, who ingeniously posted themselves in the tops
of palm-trees.
Through this delectable region Col. Fougeaud and his followers slowly
advanced, drawing near the fatal shore where Capt. Meyland's detachment
had just been defeated, and where their mangled remains still polluted
the beach. Passing this point of danger without attack, they suddenly met
a small party of rebels, each bearing on his back a beautifully woven
hamper of snow-white rice: these loads they threw down, and disappeared.
Next appeared an armed body from the same direction, who fired upon them
once, and swiftly retreated; and in a few moments the soldiers came upon
a large field of standing rice, beyond which lay, like an amphitheatre,
the rebel village. But between the village and the field had been piled
successive defences of logs and branches, behind which simple redoubts
the Maroons lay concealed. A fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during
which nearly every soldier and ranger was wounded; but, to their great
amazement, not one was killed. This was an enigma to them until after the
skirmish, when the surgeon found that most of them had been struck, not
by bullets, but by various substitutes, such as pebbles, coat-buttons,
and bits of silver coin, which had penetrated only skin deep. "We also
observed that several of the poor rebel negroes, who had been shot, had
only the shards of Spa-water cans instead of flints, which could seldom
do execution; and it was certainly owing to these circumstances that we
came off so well."
The rebels at length retreated, first setting fire to their village; a
hundred or more lightly built houses, some of them two stories high, were
soon in flames; and as this conflagration occupied the only neck of land
between two impassable morasses, the troops were unable to follow, and
the Maroons had left nothing but rice-fields to be pillaged. That night
the military force was encamped in the woods; their ammunition was almost
gone, so they were ordered to lie flat on the ground, even in case of
attack; they could not so much as build a fire. Before midnight an attack
was made on them, partly with bullets, and partly with words. The Maroons
were all around them in the forest, but their object was a puzzle; they
spent most of the night in bandying compliments with the black rangers,
whom they alternately denounced, ridiculed, and challenged to single
combat. At last Fougeaud and Stedman joined in the conversation, and
endeavored to make this midnight volley of talk the occasion for a
treaty. This was received with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed
through the woods like a concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_
of horns and hallooing. The colonel, persisting, offered them "life,
liberty, victuals, drink, and all they wanted;" in return, they ridiculed
him unmercifully. He was a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from
his own country, and would soon run away from theirs; they profoundly
pitied him and his soldiers; they would scorn to spend powder on such
scarecrows; they would rather feed and clothe them, as being poor white
slaves, hired to be shot at, and starved for fourpence a day. But as for
the planters, overseers, and rangers, they should die, every one of them,
and Bonny should be governor of the colony. "After this, they tinkled
their bill-hooks, fired a volley, and gave three cheers; which, being
answered by the rangers, the clamor ended, and the rebels dispersed with
the rising sun."
Very aimless nonsense it certainly appeared. But the next day put a new
aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise, the
Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and children, in
preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice, yams, and
cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for subsistence
during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the hungry
soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of generalship in a
savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would have done honor to
any European commander."
From this time the Maroons fulfilled their threats. Shooting down without
mercy every black ranger who came within their reach,--one of these
rangers being, in Stedman's estimate, worth six white soldiers,--they
left Col. Fougeaud and his regulars to die of starvation and fatigue. The
enraged colonel, "finding himself thus foiled by a naked negro, swore he
would pursue Bonny to the world's end." But he never got any nearer than
to Bonny's kitchen-gardens. He put the troops on half-allowance, sent
back for provisions and ammunition,--and within ten days changed his
mind, and retreated to the settlements in despair. Soon after, this very
body of rebels, under Bonny's leadership, plundered two plantations in
the vicinity, and nearly captured a powder-magazine, which was, however,
successfully defended by some armed slaves.
For a year longer these expeditions continued. The troops never gained a
victory, and they lost twenty men for every rebel killed; but they
gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and
planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the
deeper recesses of the woods, or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.
They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier guardhouses.
They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and bred in the
woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white man and of a
cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with torture, stretched
forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian eloquence, "These
hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he still went
barefooted, still quarrelled with his colonel, still sketched the scenery
and described the reptiles, still reared greegree worms for his private
kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote execrable, still pitied all
the sufferers around him, black, white, and red, until finally he and his
comrades were ordered back to Holland in 1776.
Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was
probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they
sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious
collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs of
old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had left
behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his eccentric
narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for his beautiful
quadroon wife and his only son.
Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign
first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate
friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then her
piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had just
gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not legally
emancipate his own children from slavery. Soon after, Stedman was
dangerously ill, was neglected and alone; fruits and cordials were
anonymously sent to him, which proved at last to have come from Joanna;
and she came herself, ere long, and nursed him, grateful for the visible
sympathy he had shown to her. This completed the conquest; the passionate
young Englishman, once recovered, loaded her with presents which she
refused; talked of purchasing her, and educating her in Europe, which she
also declined as burdening him too greatly; and finally, amid the
ridicule of all good society in Paramaribo, surmounted all legal
obstacles, and was united to the beautiful girl in honorable marriage. He
provided a cottage for her, where he spent his furloughs, in perfect
happiness, for four years.
The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or
disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for the
future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally a
slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her uncle,
was a captain among the rebels against whom her husband fought. And up to
the time when Stedman was ordered back to Holland, he was unable to
purchase her freedom; nor could he, until the very last moment, procure
the emancipation of his boy. His perfect delight at this last triumph,
when obtained, elicited some satire from his white friends. "While the
well-thinking few highly applauded my sensibility, many not only blamed
but publicly derided me for my paternal affection, which was called a
weakness, a whim." "Nearly forty beautiful boys and girls were left to
perpetual slavery by their parents of my acquaintance, and many of them
without being so much as once inquired after at all."
But Stedman was a true-hearted fellow, if his sentiment did sometimes run
to rodomontade; he left his Joanna only in the hope that a year or two in
Europe would repair his ruined fortunes, and he could return to treat
himself to the purchase of his own wedded wife. He describes, with
unaffected pathos, their parting scene,--though, indeed, there were
several successive partings,--and closes the description in a
characteristic manner: "My melancholy having surpassed all description, I
at last determined to weather one or two painful years in her absence;
and in the afternoon went to dissipate my mind at a Mr. Roux' cabinet of
Indian curiosities; where, as my eye chanced to fall on a rattlesnake, I
will, before I leave the colony, describe this dangerous reptile."
It was impossible to write the history of the Maroons of Surinam except
through the biography of our ensign (at last promoted captain), because
nearly all we know of them is through his quaint and picturesque
narrative, with its profuse illustrations by his own hand. It is not
fair, therefore, to end without chronicling his safe arrival in Holland,
on June 3, 1777. It is a remarkable fact, that, after his life in the
woods, even the Dutch looked slovenly to his eyes. "The inhabitants, who
crowded about us, appeared but a disgusting assemblage of ill-formed and
ill-dressed rabble,--so much had my prejudices been changed by living
among Indians and blacks: their eyes seemed to resemble those of a pig;
their complexions were like the color of foul linen; they seemed to have
no teeth, and to be covered over with rags and dirt. This prejudice,
however, was not against these people only, but against all Europeans in
general, when compared to the sparkling eyes, ivory teeth, shining skin,
and remarkable cleanliness of those I had left behind me." Yet, in spite
of these superior attractions, he never recrossed the Atlantic; for his
Joanna died soon after, and his promising son, being sent to the father,
was educated in England, became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at
sea. With his elegy, in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded
by a mourning parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect
they had on the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative
of a Five Years' Expedition" closes.