260 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA AND NOVA SCOTIA. 



BY J. C. Hamilton, LL B. 



Negro slavery disappeared from the Province of Nova Scotia dur- 

 ing the latter part of last century, without legislative enactment, by 

 what Judge Halibui'ton, in his" history of Nova Scotia, calls "latent 

 abandonment beneficial to the country." Thei^e remained a number 

 of emancipated provincial slaves and still more Africans who escaped 

 to Nova Scotia from the United States. These latter people were 

 called " Loyal Negroes." In 1821 a party of nearly one hundred of 

 them emigrated to Trinidad. But before this, on the founding of 

 Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa, about twelve hundred went 

 there, arriving in 1792. Four years after this, three ships entei'ed 

 the harbour of Halifax, laden with the most extraordinary cargoes 

 that ever entered that pox't. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, then in 

 command at Halifax, boarded the Dover, was met by Colonel W. D. 

 Quarrell, Commissary- General of Jamaica, with whom Mr. Alexander 

 Ouchterlony was associate.!, and a detachment of the 96th Regiment 

 drawn up on board to receive him. Black men of good proportions 

 with many women and children, all in neat uniform attire, wei'e 

 mustered in lines. Other transports, the Mary and Anne, were, his 

 Highness was informed, about to follow, and the main cargo was six 

 hundred Maroons exiled from Jamaica with soldiers to guard them 

 and meet any attacks from Frencli vessels on the voyage. 



The Prince was struck with the tine appearance of the black men, 

 but the citizens had heard of how Jamaica had been harried by its 

 black banditti, and were imwilling at first to have them added to 

 their population. When the Spaniards first settled in the Antilles in 

 1509, it is estimated by Las Casas, Robertson, and other historians 

 that the Indian inhabitants amounted to ten million souls, but by the 



