Map of part of the colony of Suriname

Titel Leupe: Kaart van een gedeelte der Colonie van Suriname.

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 anonymous map, probably by Johan Christoph Heneman, notes the numbers of soldiers needed to garrison the posts along the planned line. According to the compiler, this would altogether require around 2,000 men. (In reality, the military would later have to make do with usually less than half that number.) The Cordon is not marked in along the Perica and Upper Commewijne; for the major part it would later be built here through the plantations along the eastern banks.

North is below.

Scale-bars of 1200 chains / 6 hours / 3 miles = [approximately 1 : 255,000].