Sheridan, and mourned by Wilberforce; while the employment of bloodhounds
against them was vindicated by Dundas, and the whole conduct of the
Colonial Government defended, through thick and thin, by Bryan Edwards.
This thorough partisan even had the assurance to tell Mr. Wilberforce, in
Parliament, that he knew the Maroons, from personal knowledge, to be
cannibals, and that, if a missionary were sent among them in Nova Scotia,
they would immediately eat him; a charge so absurd that he did not
venture to repeat it in his History of the West Indies, though his
injustice to the Maroons is even there so glaring as to provoke the
indignation of the more moderate Dallas. But, in spite of Mr. Edwards,
the public indignation ran quite high in England, against the bloodhounds
and their employers, so that the home ministry found it necessary to send
a severe reproof to the Colonial Government. For a few years the tales of
the Maroons thus emerged from mere colonial annals, and found their way
into annual registers and parliamentary debates; but they have long since
vanished from popular memory. Their record still retains its interest,
however, as that of one of the heroic races of the world; and all the
more, because it is with their kindred that the American nation has to
deal, in solving one of the most momentous problems of its future career.




THE MAROONS OF SURINAM.

When that eccentric individual, Capt. John Gabriel Stedman, resigned his
commission in the English Navy, took the oath of abjuration, and was
appointed ensign in the Scots brigade employed for two centuries by
Holland, he little knew that "their High Mightinesses the States of the
United Provinces" would send him out, within a year, to the forests of