DONOVAN EDWARDS, caretaker at Stony Gut, names Dr Clinton Hutton as his most consistent visitor. Hutton, a lecturer in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, takes students to Stony Gut regularly.

Hutton says that on October 19, 1865, British troops from the Sixth Royal Regiment walked from Newcastle, St Andrew, to Stony Gut, the operation carried out with Marines. "Apparently, they carried with them a few artillery pieces," Hutton said. The day was rainy, the terrain was muddy - and Stony Gut was deserted save for an elderly woman named Polly Livingstone.

"People in the community decided to run away. They knew they would be coming. For whatever reason, she stayed," Hutton said.

Livingstone related her ordeal at the hands of the British troops to the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the Morant Bay Rebellion, describing how she was interrogated in the chapel about Paul Bogle's whereabouts. "They encouraged her to speak by putting a rope around her neck, throwing it around one of the high beams and pulling her up. Her eyes were popping out of her head, she could not breathe," Hutton said.

The soldiers would let Livingstone down, ask her questions, then pull her up again when they did not get the answers they wanted.

As for the village of Stony Gut, Hutton says, "They burnt it off the face of the Earth. Everything was destroyed there".

In January or February of 1866, two men visited Stony Gut and, in an article, described the burnt soil where the houses used to be, as well as scorched trees and the four walls of the chapel still standing, scorched and blackened by fire.

"Stony Gut was pretty much the headquarters of the progressive movement in that part of the island. Its leader was Paul Bogle. He lived there with his wife and children," Hutton said.

suppressing progressive persons

Hutton said that a number of persons were executed and arrested in the aftermath of the Morant Bay Rebellion, the opportunity being taken to suppress progressive persons right across the island and close down newspapers. Those who bore the brunt of the repression were mostly, but not exclusively, black, and Hutton points out that prominent Jamaican families formed militias.

Samuel Clarke, the brother of Bogle's son-in-law, who lived in the then neighbouring parish of St Davids, was executed for statements he made before the rebellion. John Willis Maynard, a black American and clerk on Capitol Hill who became Clarke's friend, was arrested, the US Sate Department eventually intervening.

Spring Garden, a short way up the hill from Stony Gut, was also burnt and Hutton says over 70 communities in St Thomas in the east were completely or partially destroyed by the British and the Maroons. One-fifth of the population was displaced as 100,000 homes and chapels were destroyed. Bogle was eventually hanged from the rail of the Morant Bay Courthouse and buried behind it. Arthur Wellington, a sawyer and obeah man with a large reputation, was tied up and shot from 500 yards with an Enfield rifle in a field test of the weapon. His head was then cut off and displayed on a pole to prove that his obeah was no protection.

Hutton describes Stony Gut as "a black community, founded by blacks, apparently after slavery". It was well fruited and "really a community for the emerging middle class, non-estate people, people working on their own account".

ambush

And he says that on the day of the rebellion, on the way to Morant Bay, the marchers met two persons who said that people were waiting for them with rifles. Bogle wanted to turn back, but Edward K. Bailey, a leader in his own right, said no.

Hutton attributes the abandonment of Stony Gut to "the absolute horror of the repression. They did not want to be associated with it". There were even those who said not one seed of Paul Bogle was to be left alive.

"In the 1870s, there were women walking the streets of Morant Bay, mentally ill. People developed psychoses after the rebellion," Hutton said, in illustrating the long-term effect of the repression.