Map of the Cordon of Defence, Plan VIII, design for a post

Titel Leupe: Kaarten van het Cordon van Defentie. Plan VIII. Teekening van een post op 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.

In his original concept, Wollant had planned the final post, De Uitkijk, on the sea shore. This design was numbered as Plan VIII and is the last sheet of his Cordon series. As far as is known, this fortification was never constructed and after c. 1790 the line ended at the post De Unie, with a simple picket post on the sea shore.

Scale-bars of maps 5 chains = [approximately 1 : 815] / [2] 25 feet = [approximately 1 : 120] / [profiles] 10 Rhineland feet = [approximately 1 : 57].

Part of VEL2105A-C.