Things were getting desperate, something must be done. They had not nearly enough soldiers.... But in a country like Jamaica, where slave risings were to be feared, whose coasts were harried by picaroons and corsairs, which might even expect descents by the French and Spaniards, there were the militia, and they raised easily enough independent companies and rangers to cope with the difficulties that faced the country. They even raised a body of negroes called Blackshot, favoured, of course, above the rest of their race, a body of Mulattoes who might perhaps reasonably be supposed to side with the whites, and also they brought over from Central America a body of Mosquito Indians. Both the Blackshot and the Mosquito Indians, wild or half wild men themselves, proved of great assistance. They found out the provisions grounds of Cudjoe and the Maroons, and many were the skirmishes as they drove the freebooters back, back into the recesses of the mountains I went up that sunny December morning; but it is on record that even when the Maroons were defeated it was always the assailants who lost the more heavily. But indeed, seeing the country now that is partly opened up, so that you may stand on a well-made road and look down into the most desperate cockpit, I know that it must have taken an amazing valour to have penetrated at all in the old days. “There are,” says Dallas, “parallel lines of cockpits, but as their sides are often perpendicular from fifty to eighty feet” (looking down with the jungle clear from the top I should have said they were deeper), “a passage from one line to the other is scarcely found practicable to any but a Maroon.... There are trees in the glens and the entrance of the defiles is woody. In some water is found.” They were almost impregnable those fastnesses. But out of these defiles the Maroons had to come in search of provisions and the sharp-sighted guides, Mosquito Indians and other black men on the white men's side, easily detected the paths all converging on the same place. It might be a defile so narrow that for half a mile men could only pass through in single file. The Maroons knew as well as their assailants that these paths that led into their impregnable defiles were tell-tale, and they made use of them. Always they were informed of the approach of a body of militia and soldiers. It was a fact hardly to be concealed, and in the dense vegetation surrounding the entrance to the particular cockpit to be attacked they established a line of marksmen, two sometimes if the width of the ground admitted of it. They were well hidden by the roots of trees, by the thick screen of greenery, by the rocks and stones. As soon as the assailants, panting, breathless, fatigued from the terrible climb that lay behind them, approached from their concealment they let fly a volley, and if the forces, who did not lack courage, turned to fire at the spot where they saw the smoke they received a volley in another