Overview of the Cordon of Defence

Titel Leupe: Kaarten van het Cordon van Defentie. Verzamelingskaart van de plans van het Cordon.

After 1750 the Marrons, former enslaved people who had fled from the plantations and formed new communities in the Surinamese interior, became increasingly formidable opponents against the plantation owners and the colonial government. Following their unification under the leadership of the famous Boni, whose name they later adopted for themselves as a group, in 1771 a full-scale war broke out, which is now known as the (first) Boni War. This ended in 1776 with the expulsion of the Boni to French Guyana. To contain and defeat the Marrons, the colonial government built the almost 100-kilometre-long Cordon of Defence or Cordon Path. The first designs and surveys for this through patrol road with military posts at regular intervals had been prepared in 1772, but preliminary work on a large scale, in which the military engineers Johan Christoph Heneman and Johann Friedrich Ferdinand Wollant, played a leading role, began only a year later. Both of them produced detail maps of the separate sections of the Cordon path.

This overview was almost certainly made by Wollant. The final section to the coast has a third variant, according to which the westward turn from Oranje Creek does not follow the Cottica but first goes northwards to the post De Unie and from there to Vredenburg over a sand ridge a bit north of the river. Numerous section maps (VEL2097-2103) were attached to this overview.

North is below.

Scale-bars of 1200 chains of 66 Rhineland feet: / 6 hours: / 3 miles: = [approximately 1 : 140,000].