Hey, so remember that video about the real life Captain Morgan? How a pirate blew up
one of the largest trading hubs in the Americas and the king responded by making him a governor?
You may recall I mentioned he was later fired and “by then Morgan was around 50,
so rather than return to the sea and embark on more raids to force
nuns to do his dirty work at the point of a gun, he embraced the life of an English gentleman
and raided the hills of Jamaica to capture the descendants of escaped slaves and force
them to do his dirty work at the point of a gun”. Well I looked into those people living in
the hills of Jamaica, and what I found was one of the first independence movements in the New World,
a mostly successful revolt by a whole society of people that freed themselves from slavery,
that had built up over the course of a century, and was led by a Fearsome Commander called Nanny.
[intro]
“Hello, Henry Morgan here to tell you about today’s sponsor, Keeps. Nanny couldn’t make it
today because taking a national hero who fought to preserve her people’s freedom from British
slavery and putting words in her mouth to sell you hair loss medication was met with some skepticism
in the proverbial office. But a refined English gentleman such as myself will be happy to tell you
that Keeps is the best way to fight male-pattern baldness. If your body’s running on testosterone
chances are you’re one of the two thirds of men who’ll lose some or all of their hair by the
time you’re thirty-five. Keeps is your affordable alternative that delivers generic-brand medication
to your door, and trust me, your all-natural locks are a much better look than a powdered wig.
I mean seriously that has got to be one of the weirdest fashion trends in all of history, most
of these guys had hair but I guess they all wanted to look like old men, now of course I think like
anything else your hair is part of how you express yourself and wigs are just an extension of that…
[over Morgan’s rambling:] Keeps.com/JackRackam. Get 50% off your first order today!
So these people called the Maroons have lived in Jamaica since…
pretty much the first person to be kidnapped and dragged across the ocean into what was effectively
a forced labor camp decided to break free. See the thing about Jamaica is you can’t run away
very far on an island, but there are a bunch of hills and mountains that the
Europeans can’t be bothered with settling. Over the years, escapes keep happening,
slowly you’ve got a couple small towns getting started up there, and
subsequent generations probably grew up looking at the mountains and hearing stories about… well,
how life was probably still pretty difficult but y’know you got treated like a human being.
Spanish lost control of the island in 1655, and in between their hurry to get off the
island and the weeks before the English could really set up a whole new society even more
people started flocking to the Maroons. Then in 1673-1690 there were a bunch of
slave revolts owing to the fact that a bunch of the slaves being brought to the colony were
prisoners of war brought over from the Ashanti Empire, or in other words, trained soldiers.
Now although the Maroons weren’t necessarily a rebel group per se, they probably weren’t bothered
either raiding or trading just to get a hold of whatever they couldn’t get from the mountains,
the English, including one Henry Morgan, made a point of capturing them, but that turned out
easier said than done. Picture it, you’re a 50-year-old ex-pirate spending all day
hiking through the mountains with a bunch of redcoats, half the time you never even see the
people you’re looking for because one of them spotted you from across the ridge and blew the
horn to tell everyone in a ten-mile radius exactly where you are in a code you don’t understand,
if you do manage to sneak up on their camp now you’ve got to get your men to scale a waterfall
while trying not to get crushed by a boulder or stabbed to death, and then if you finally get up
there everybody in town has already boogied out the back door to one of their other dozen bases,
and if you don’t keep this place occupied then you’ll end up chasing them right back here,
but that means you’ve got to keep a supply train going all the way up the mountain,
over the stupid waterfall, I mean it’s a disaster! And for the Maroons this is brilliant,
you don’t run an autonomous community in direct conflict with one of the largest empires in the
world on a small island for over a hundred years without a few tricks up your sleeve.
So the British bring in a new governor in 1728 named Major-General Robert Hunter. He
used to be the governor of New York, actually, and his method of conflict resolution there
had been to write a play about thinly veiled allegories for his political opponents and
how they were all basement-dwelling losers who tried to kidnap the charming and heroic governor
by crossdressing and seducing him, but they all failed because they’re a bunch of ninnies.
As for his military knowledge though he’s plucky and adventure-y, it had only been brought down
to the beginning of the century. Nonetheless, he set it upon himself to bring war to Jamaica.
And in the left corner, facing up against one of the largest empires in world history,
a master tactician, an accomplished expert in psychological warfare, a guerilla freedom fighter,
a middle-aged woman, it’s Nnnnnanny! Where the mighty Queen Nanny came from is something of
a mystery. It’s believed that like many Jamaican Maroons she was originally from modern-day Ghana,
but her history was primarily recorded orally and where there’s oral history there’s bound to be
improbable origin stories! Some say that she was never enslaved,
either deciding that an English colony half way around the world was a marvelous place
to set up shop and coming into town with her own slaves, or surviving the
Atlantic crossing on a slave ship, jumping overboard and swimming to shore on her own.
The war was an absolute disaster for the British. Again,
a lot of the details have gotten fuzzy over the years, I’m kind of pulling a Herodotus here and
telling you about what kind of things I saw on somebody’s blog post, if you want to sink your
teeth into some real research there’s a helpful thesis by Michael Sivapragasam in the description,
but then you won’t get to hear about how she was supposedly such a master of camouflage
and understanding terrain and maneuvering her troops that it was as if she’d charmed
the trees themselves to cut off soldiers’ heads. But she’d always leave at least one man standing,
presumably the one guy in the back who’s been quaking in his boots the entire fight and
forgot how to use his rifle, and send him back to town to spread fear far and wide.
Soon the Maroons were launching counter-attacks on British forts across the island, and Jamaica was
placed under martial law. Now there weren’t actually a lot of white people in Jamacia,
only around 2,000 and most of them were not the best at doing war,
so at one point the British had the bright idea of forming an enslaved militia. You can
imagine their surprise when some of those brigades found themselves face to face
with freedom fighters and decided they’d rather be on the other side of this war.
Eventually Jamaica got a new governor, and then another new governor,
and this new governor realized this was a war he couldn’t afford to win.
The British had actually seized the Maroons headquarters, called Nannytown by the way, but
it was just too expensive to keep it occupied so they had to just give it back without a fight. But
he did have the clever idea to offer a separate peace to half of the maroons, who were actually
totally separate and under command of someone else entirely, and then offer worse terms to Nanny.
The Maroons kind of did it, they pretty much got officially recognized independence from
the British! Kind… of… what drew me to this topic was the idea that there was this tiny
community of a few hundred people landlocked inside of Jamaica who were secretly the first
in the Americas to declare independence half a century before the United States!
And, well, winning the war was certainly a big deal, to the best of my knowledge
both major Maroon groups still celebrate the anniversary of the end of this war,
and the British basically left them alone and even would often side in favor of the Maroons when a
plantation owner started encroaching on their territory, and the guy that
freed all the slaves in Haiti pointed to the Maroons as inspiration, but there was a cost.
The British effectively decided that if they couldn’t win a military victory,
they would go for a diplomatic victory. They said “Yeah, you guys are totally free and independent,
but just to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up, we’re gonna give you a supervisor,
just pretend like he’s not even there”. And as Nanny’s generation passed on, the already loosely
united Maroons split apart into independent towns the superintendents said “Come, let us pay you to
build roads leading up to your towns which will definitely not be used to wage war against you
later” and then they became community organizers, and then they started appointing Maroon deputies
and it just kind of became this weird system where they were kind of independent but kind
of under the thumb of the British, like part of the deal was that the Maroons were going to be
their own people now, if any more escaped slaves come running up the mountain looking for freedom,
they had to re-kidnap them and drag them back into town and that they did.
Anyway, I’m getting way beyond the scope of this video, but suffice to say the Maroons won the war,
the British governors were crafty little buggers, but the Maroons are still around today!
As for Nanny herself, a man named William Covfefe claimed to kill her in 1733,
but according to tradition she was impervious to bullets and/or could tap into the Matrix to catch
them mid-air and shoot them back with her bare hands, and there was an official document probably
referring to her in 1740, it’s a little tough to tell because Nanny was actually a title shared by
a few women, but there’s a decent chance she lived into old age and now she’s on Jamaican money!