However, Captain Quao, like Captain Cudjoe,
made a treaty at last, and hats were interchanged instead of hostages.
Independence being thus won and acknowledged, there was a suspension of
hostilities for some years. Among the wild mountains of Jamaica, the
Maroons dwelt in a savage freedom. So healthful and beautiful was the
situation of their chief town, that the English government has erected
barracks there of late years, as being the most salubrious situation on
the island. They breathed an air ten degrees cooler than that inhaled by
the white population below, and they lived on a daintier diet, so that
the English epicures used to go up among them for good living. The
mountaineers caught the strange land-crabs, plodding in companies of
millions their sidelong path from mountain to ocean, and from ocean to
mountain again. They hunted the wild-boars, and prepared the flesh by
salting and smoking it in layers of aromatic leaves, the delicious
"jerked hog" of Buccaneer annals. They reared cattle and poultry,
cultivated corn and yams, plantains and cocoas, guavas and papaws and
mameys and avocados and all luxurious West Indian fruits; the very weeds
of their orchards had tropical luxuriance in their fragrance and in
their names; and from the doors of their little thatched huts they
looked across these gardens of delight to the magnificent lowland
forests, and over those again to the faint line of far-off beach, the
fainter ocean-horizon, and the illimitable sky.
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