Talk:Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone

Maroons in Sierra Leone

When I took on the role as CEO of xrefer (which became Credo Reference), I took more than 40 trips to London over my first 3 years. Credo, like Wikipedia, is an online encyclopedia. It's important to know the differences between scholarly communication (such as peer-reviewed journals and monographs) and encyclopedias. One very big difference is the role of citations or references. An encyclopedia is meant to facilitate the spread of knowledge. It needs to be reliable so that people can trust and rely on the information required. So when an encyclopedia provides a "reference", it is doing so to basically say, "We didn't make this up--it's backed up by these reliable sources". This means that encyclopedia authors have their choice of possible references. [I hope Wikipedian editors will take the effort to find OA sources whenever possible. That will improve the general user experience of Wikipedia since it will avoid cases which marginalize those who don't have access to pay-walled content.]

That said, encyclopedias are really important to academic work. So I decided that I needed to experience the type of work that academic users of Credo Reference might be doing. I needed to experience what it might be like to do academic research. I'd never done such research myself. So I decided to take on a little project about something I was really curious about.

My son, Michael Dove, and I took a trip to Jamaica in January of 2002. Complete serendipity had us both decide we wanted to spend part of our week there seeking out Accompong Town, in the mountains. [Though the Maroon towns had been an autonomous region in Jamaica since the end of the First Maroon War [~1738], there had not been a road into Accompong Town until 1960's.] We were there during their celebration of the signing of the Peace Treaty. We ended up staying in a spare room of the one of the officials of the community. We got to be a fly on the wall as various people from the diaspora of Maroons came by to show their respect for this official and to talk politics. One thing I learned about Cudjoe, the leader that signed that first Peace Treaty, is that he was 3 foot 6 inches tall. Accompong, his brother, was of ordinary height.

So I decided that I'd take on a research project to learn as much as I would about this 3 foot 6 inch military and political figure who signed a Peace Treaty with representatives of King George, the Second. I was hoping I'd find someone who told the King, "Yes, we signed a Peace Treaty with this guy; by the way, did you know that he is 3 feet 6 inches tall?".

I first wrote a letter on xrefer stationary to the British Library to apply for "Readers' Card" giving me research privileges at BPL. With my card I then went to ask where I'd find material about Jamaican history. "Oh, that's in the 'Oriental Room'". [This was in 2004. Did they still think Jamaica was in the Orient?]

Cutting out a long story--I eventually ended up at the Archives at Kew Garden outside of London. What an amazing place! Strict rules, for sure, but everyone of the staff no matter what their role seemed to be on the look-out for people who might be new to research or confused about where to begin. It turned out that material from the 1700's had not yet been digitized. So I was directed to a librarian who pointed out to me the many shelves of indexes that people had prepared to guide others in their research. Within 45 minutes of arriving at the Archive I was examining original documents. I spent several long weekends in that archive. I've often asked historians I've met, "Have you ever found a document on-line that brought you to tears? How about a physical document?" Yes, there is something about the physicality of holding a document that you know was written by the participants in the history that you are interested in.

One of those documents I found brought me to such tears that when I want to the copy/service to get my own copy, I could hardly compose myself to make a clear request for which pages I wanted to copy. All this is to say that I have 47 pages, the full account, from a court case in Sierra Leone, in the 1790s [after the Second Maroon War when so many Maroons were tricked into giving up their arms and then put on ships and sent to Nova Scotia]. This document gives a very detailed description of both Maroon Wars, but especially the second. I don't remember the specifics of how the case before this Sierra Leone British Judge was resolved, but I remember well some of the summary: Something like "This was the worst crime that our government has ever perpetrated against a free people."

  So I write all of this here thinking that someone who reads these pages about the Maroons in Sierra Leone might want to see this document.  [Perhaps the National Archives has now digitized these and other files].  I'd be glad to help anyone who wants to know more.  Or, if someone could tell me the right way to reference this document in Wikipedia, I'd be glad to pull out a sentence or two that would strengthen this article about the Maroons in Sierra Leone.

john.dove@alzora.org. JGDove99 (talk) 18:20, 28 December 2022 (UTC)