Map of the Cordon of Defence

Titel Leupe: Generaale dispositie van 't Cordon van defentie, getrokken om de Colonie van Surinaame.

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 map is an edited and possibly combined version of the work of both surveyors. It shows the villages, trails, forests and creeks at the cordon between the Wanika Trail and the Caswinika Creek. Based on information provided by 'the slaves of adjacent plantations', the suggestion is made to construct a road between the Crawassibo and Quapibo plantations as this would be more easily traversable.

Scale-bar of 500 chains of 66 Rhineland feet = 162 “strepen”