Three-Fingered Jack rises from notoriety to fame

SOME PEOPLE’S bad reputation is so rich that it propels them to fame. Jack Mansong was one of such people. Years after he died, he was still the ‘talk of the town’, a folk hero whose story has become the inspiration for many creative endeavours.

It started about 10 years after the 1760 Easter Rebellion when another enslaved person, Tacky, led a rebellion in St Mary. Tacky himself had become famous for his infamy, even having a school named in his honour.

Jack Mansong was called ‘Three-finger Jack’ because he lost two fingers from one hand in a duel with another enslaved person who wanted to capture him to turn his head to the authorities, so the story goes. He was tall and powerfully built, and had a big head, and two massive arms.

And in that head lurked a desire for vengeance and the longing to be free from slavery. His enslaved father was killed by a tyrannical plantation owner, Henry Hassop. He promised his mother to avenge his father’s death. The resentment for Hassop marinated, and when the right time came he manifested his freedom by running away.

But, he did not go alone. He kidnapped and brought Hassop with him to a cave, near Cane River, in the Hope Mountain area of St Andrew. He tied up Hassop and left him in the cave while he went out to rampage.

Yet, Oliver Senior says in Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage, “One account suggests Jack took to the wilds after he led his fellow slaves in St Mary parish in a failed attempt at revolt. He was sentenced to be executed, but tore apart the bars of the prison with his bare hands and escaped into the mountains, and became an outlaw … .”

All over the central and eastern parish Mansong roamed, driving fear into people’s hearts, especially the men’s, as it is said he did not harm women and children.

Part of the romance of the story is that while he was feared by the British soldiers, their women and sweethearts adored him, and loved to hear stories of his exploits. He once accompanied a soldier’s wife along the road to Newcastle, the site of the soldiers’ camp in the rugged terrains of St Andrew.

To her amazement, after describing her escort upon arrival, it was Jack Mansong, Jamaica’s most wanted man at the time. He had eventually left Cane River, and had gone further up into the Blue Mountains, at a place called Queensbury Ridge, where he and other run-aways lived in a cave.

They would come down from the mountains to carry out acts of killing and robbery. He was known as a highway bandit, an outlaw who was able “to absorb bullets without harm”. He frequented the highway in the vicinity of Eleven Miles. Travellers on the road to and from Kingston were at his mercy.

It was rumoured that Mansong was also adept in the use of obeah/obi (supernatural practices), thus his elusiveness. Whatever he was doing was working, but the British and militia on one hand, and enslaved pursuers and Maroons on the other, were determined to catch him. One side wanted to stave off the fear and embarrassment that he was causing them, the other wanted the reward of £300 and their own freedom, as was promised.

The research has not revealed how he was tracked and cornered, but once source says that he was brought down by three powerful enslaved men, who removed his head and brought it to Kingston to prove that Three-finger Jack was dead. Another source says he met his demise at the hands of a Maroons named Quashie, and two others, in January 1781.

“The rebel’s head was stuck on a pole and the proud captors marched with it all the way to Spanish Town to collect the reward offered, again followed by a crowd of people, beating drums and singing a chorus that might well have been play,” Oliver Senior writes in Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage.

The chorus goes: “Beat big drum, wave fine flag/ Bring good news to Kingston Town, O!/ No fear Jack’s obeah-bag/ Quashie knock him down, O!”

It was perhaps the first song that Three-Finger Jack inspired. And his story can be traced in the Jamaican Royal Gazette. It was introduced to the British public through a section of a book, A Treatise on Sugar, published in 1799 by Dr Benjamin Moseley. It describes Mansong’s use of obi to maintain his power.

Moseley’s account of Three-Finger Jack was the inspiration for a very successful stage pantomime, Obi, or Three Finger’d Jack, which first played at the London Haymarket Theatre in 1800. Two novels based on the story were published that same year, and the story was then told and retold through further pantomimes, theatrical productions, booklets, juvenile literature, novels and other cultural productions. In 1980 Three-Finger Jack’s story was staged as the Jamaica National Pantomime production, Mansong, which tells the story of Jack the freedom-fighter.

In 1978, the Jamaica National Trust Commission (now Jamaica National Heritage Trust) placed a monument at the side of the road near to Bull Bay, in St Thomas, in honour of Jack Mansong. Parts of the inscriptions say: “North of this road in the hills and valleys behind this marker was the territory of the famous Jack Mansong or Three-Finger Jack … He became a legend. Books and plays were written about him and performed in London theatres. He was ambushed and killed near here in 1781.”