Map of the Cordon of Defence between the Casawinika Creek and the Suriname River

Titel Leupe: Plan van de dispositie van 't Cordon, tusschen 't rivier Suriname en de Cassewinica Creeq.

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. Here the section between the Suriname River and Casewinica creek is shown. All posts are designated and the soil types are given. As is described in the annotation at the upper left, in total 265 men were to operate in the depicted posts.

North is lower right.

Scale-bar of 300 chains of 66 Rhineland feet = 143 ‘strepen’.