In the Forests of Freedom
In the Forests of Freedom
The Fighting Maroons of Dominica
In this detailed, brilliantly researched book, historian Lennox Honychurch tells the enthralling and previously untold story of how the Maroons of Dominica challenged the colonial powers in a heroic struggle to create a free and self-sufficient society.
The Maroons, runaways who escaped slavery, formed their own community on the Caribbean island. Much has been written about the Maroons of Jamaica, little about the Maroons of Dominica. This book redresses this gap.
Honychurch takes the reader deep into the forested hinterland of Dominica to explore the political, social, and economic impact of the Maroons and details their struggles and victories.
In his lively history of Dominica Marronage, Honychurch chronicles the island’s Maroon Wars of 1785 to 1814. Runaway slave chiefs such as Jacko, Balla, Elephant, and the Nanny-esque Angelique and Calypso significantly menaced the British plantation system. . . . In the Forests of Freedom opens a window onto a little-known West Indian history.
This book will long stand as the definitive account of these Maroons whom the British considered, after those in Jamaica, the major menace to their plantation system. Dominica’s Maroons have finally found their chronicler.
The brave people who held out in Dominica’s mountain wilderness for generations against the military forces of two colonial empires have had their story well told at last. Their spirits can now be at rest.
Born and raised in Dominica, Lennox Honychurch is one of the island’s most noted historians. A graduate of University of Oxford, he has published numerous books and academic papers on the history of Dominica and the wider Caribbean. He is well known for writing The Dominica Story: A History of the Island, the first published history of the island. He also published the textbook series The Caribbean People and the travel book Dominica: Isle of Adventure.
