ABSTRACT
The account of ‘three-fingered Jack’ was first published in 1799 in Benjamin Moseley’s A Treatise on Sugar (pp. 197–205). John Dalling, the Governor of Jamaica, and the colonial legislature had issued proclamations in 1780 and 1781 offering a bounty of £100, and then an additional £200 for the capture of a Maroon leader who was alleged to have ‘committed many robberies, and carried off many Negro and other Slaves on the Windward roads into the woods.’ The Maroons had ‘terrified the inhabitants, and set the civil power, and the neighbouring militia of that island at defiance for nearly two years.’ Bounty-hunters were also offered £5 for apprehending each of Jack’s accomplices, and ‘the further reward of FREEDOM’ was promised for any slave that killed him. A ‘free PARDON, and his FREEDOM as above’ was on offer to any member of Jack’s gang who turned him in dead or alive. Also known as Mansong, Jack was described as possessing gigantic proportions and legendary stature: ‘he ascended above SPARTACUS.’ Credited with superhuman strength and stealth ostensibly acquired by practising obeah, Jack was tracked down and killed by three bounty-hunters who claimed to be immune to his magical powers because they were protected by ‘white Obi’ or Christianity. Moseley boasts that he has seen the contents of Jack’s ‘Obi’, which he deems an anti-climax:
His OBI consisted of the end of a goat’s horn, filled with a compound of grave dirt, ashes, the blood of a black cat, and human fat; all mixed into a kind of paste. A cat’s foot, a dried toad, a pig’s tail, a slip of virginal parchment of kid’s skin, with characters marked in blood on it, were also in his Obian bag. These, with a keen sabre, and two guns, like Robinson Crusoe, were all his OBI. (Moseley, p. 197)
