“WE HAVE SEEN ALL PASSIONS IN A TEMPEST”: FIRST EDITION OF DALLAS’ HISTORY OF THE MAROONS, 1803, WITH ENGRAVED FRONTISPIECES AND TWO FOLDING MAPS OF JAMAICA

(SLAVERY) DALLAS, R[obert]. C[harles]. The History of the Maroons. London: T.N. Longman and O. Rees, 1803. Two volumes. Octavo, modern blue cloth.

First edition of Dallas’ important two-volume History of English slave-holding Jamaica and wars “against the body of black people called Maroons [fugitive slaves]… including in it the whole history of the maroons, the expedition to Cuba… and the account of the state of Jamaica since the French Revolution,” with steel-engraved frontispieces and two folding maps of Jamaica.

History of the Maroons is one of the first accounts of slave-holding English Jamaica and the lives of fugitive slaves known as Maroons. Jamaica-born British author Dallas writes of wars “carried on by the government in Jamaica, against the body of black people called Maroons… including in it the whole history of the Maroons, the expedition to Cuba… and account of the state of Jamaica since the French Revolution” (iii), with detailed sections on the Maroon Wars of the 1730s and 1790s. From its beginnings “early English Jamaica was actually two societies, one white and ‘maritime’ (coastal), the other Maroon and ’mountain.’ Shortly after the conquest of Spanish Jamaica in 1655, Maroons set up in the mountains” (Mullin, Africa in America, 54). With plantations often on the edges of wilderness, the harsh mountain terrain provided refuge for runaway slaves, who established maroon communities and “defended them from possible attack against those who would seek to reenslave the self-emancipated fugitives” (Rodriguez, Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance I:xxv). While qualified in its opposition to slavery and the slave trade, in many respects Dallas’ History nevertheless counters those accounts that “would portray Maroons as godless savages in order to rationalize any measure that would erase them from Jamaica” (Mullin, 56). With two folding maps of Jamaica, and steel-engraved frontispiece in each volume. Volume I with preface and “A Succinct History of Jamaica”; Volume II with rear leaf containing errata and a page of advertisements. Each volume with an extensive appendix. Sabin 18322. Blockson 3037. Allibone 467-8. Lowndes, 580.

Text, plates and maps generally fresh with light scattered foxing. A scarce near-fine copy.