Space will not permit of more than a brief _résumé_ of the history of a people in Jamaica around whom much romance has sprang up. This romance is, however, apt to be a little modified by a closer acquaintance, for the modern representatives show little of that physical enterprise and endurance for which their ancestors were famous. [Illustration: BLOCK HOUSE, MAROON TOWN ] The term Maroon—said to be a corruption of the Spanish _Cimarron_, wild, untamed, and applied to those negroes, originally fugitive slaves, who lived and still live in the mountains and forests of Guiana and the West Indies—first occurs in the English language in 1628, in “Sir Francis Drake Revived”: “The Symerons (a blacke people, which about eightie yeeres past, fled from the Spaniards their Masters).” So, too, in 1655, when Penn and Venables arrived, the negroes left their masters and betook themselves to the mountainous parts of the island, with a natural desire to escape from serving alien owners; and when the Spaniards vacated the island, assumed to themselves, as they had every right to do, not the _rôle_ of rebels, but of a people resisting to the utmost of their power the invasion of the island by the English. And thenceforward, their forces swelled from time to time by runaway slaves of the newcomers, they were for many a long year a source of anxiety to the planters living in their neighbourhood, and, indeed, to the colony in general. It may be mentioned that Bridges, in his History, gives a different origin to the Maroons, but he quotes no authority in support of either of the following statements, and the first is certainly untrue. He says: It has been supposed that the present race of Maroons derive their origin from the Spanish slaves who remained in the fastnesses of the island after its conquest; but these were all disposed of and accounted for to a man in less than eight years after that event. The Maroons of Jamaica owe their peculiarity of feature to the mixture of the Malay caste, which they derived from the crews of a Madagascar slave-ship wrecked upon these shores. That the Maroons of Jamaica were a real menace in the early days is evident from the fact that General Robert Sedgwick, in writing home to Thurloe, more than once referred to them with apprehension.