He had seen more deaths than we of the twentieth century can contemplate with equanimity, and many runaways trying to better their lot. It was probably easier for the first slaves to run away than at the time we come across them in the slave books of Worthy Park and Rose Hall. The lonelier parts of the island were abandoned because of these runaway negroes, who banded themselves together and were a constant danger to the isolated settler. And a place in fertile Jamaica abandoned soon becomes densest jungle, affording a still more useful shelter to people accustomed to such surroundings. Even though the life of a savage in the woods was a hard one, it was better than the almost certain fate that awaited them if they came in and gave themselves up. I conclude it was only when a slave found himself alone that he returned of his own free will. If he found companions he stayed. This of course it was that made of the Maroons such an ever present danger, free as they were among a black population that outnumbered the white ten to one. The settler had always an enemy within the gates. “This bad success,” mourns the historian when the whites have failed to overcome the Maroons, “encouraged Gentlemen's slaves to rebel.” The trouble was that to keep the slaves under, a great quantity of arms and ammunition had to be stored on the plantations, and when they rose this was likely to be turned against their owners. Did one of those overseers at Worthy Park ever toss restlessly on his feather bed and wonder what would be his fate if some of those slaves, the “ill-disposed” or “skulkers,” rushed his hot room and possessed themselves of that store of powder? It is only natural that history should mention the rebellions that made their mark, and never those that were nipped in the bud. But those that had a measure of success were numerous enough. There were no less than four between 1678 and 1691, in the three last of which many white people were murdered. One of these was at Sutton's, a plantation near the centre of the island. I have been to Sutton's. A long low house it is, not the first house, the slaves burned that, behind it are the green hills and in front red lilies grow beneath the bananas after the rain. The women who were born there say it is the loveliest plantation in an island of lovely plantations. And here at the end of the seventeenth century, 400 slaves, stark naked savages with hoes and machetes in their hands, stormed the house, and by sheer weight of numbers bore all before them. They murdered their master and every white man there, and seized all the arms kept to be used against them. Fifty muskets and blunderbusses and other arms they took, great quantities of shot and four small field pieces--(in such fear they had been held)--and then they marched on, raiding other plantations and killing every white person they could lay their hands upon.