Map of the Cordon of Defence, Plan III, Van Imotapi tot De Hoop

Titel Leupe: Kaarten van het Cordon van Defentie. Plan III. Van Imotapie tot de Hoop.

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.

Very probably Wollant’s series was made in 1774, once the final decision to go ahead with the construction had been taken and before Wollant was appointed adjunct head of the post at Antoe-plantage, in the southeast of the colony, later that year. The sequence of the separate sheets runs from southwest to northeast, that is from Jodensavanne and Post Gelderland on the Surinam River to the planned post Uitkijk (Lookout) on the coast. Although the section maps join up to each other, it should be noted that beween them different scales were used. This particular sheet shows the settlements, creeks and forests which appear on the cordon between the Imotapi and the post De Hoop. In addition, a profile depicts the trail and the surrounding forest.

North is below.

Scale-bars of 150 chains = [approximately 1 : 33,500] / [profile] 20 feet = [approximately 1 : 70].