THE name Cockpit Country has its origins in the Maroon Wars, when a population of Maroons was able to force the British into signing a peace treaty in 1738.

At that time, the term cockpit was in nautical use, denoting an area in the lower deck of a man-of-war where the wounded were taken. Like all lower-deck spaces, it was confined, humid, and badly lit. During a battle, it was also noisy, stinky and bloody, which reminded people of a real cockpit, hence the name.

If you visit Cockpit Country today, what will strike you as you hike through the hills, is the 100 per cent humidity and the sweat which quickly soaks your clothing. What will not strike you is the shape of the cockpits: that’s hidden by the trees.

Now, imagine the British soldiers in their nice, woollen uniforms during the Maroon Wars. Remember that they had been transported to Jamaica by the Royal Navy, so they were well-familiar with the wooden battleships and indeed, the cockpit.

As history records, the Maroon style of guerilla warfare completely outclassed the British soldiers in this terrain and, for them, the dark, confined, humid sinks were places of blood and death, so that they used the term cockpits, and the derivation thereof is pretty obvious.

It was later picked up by James G Sawkins (1869), who provided a detailed account of the geology and hydrology of the island and used the name Cockpit Country in print for the first recorded time.

Use in yachts and aircraft came later.

Sweeting (1958) misled generations of geologists by suggesting that ‘cockpits’ were “so called for their resemblance to the arenas for cockfighting”. That this is wrong is clearly demonstrated by Lyew-Ayee’s definition (2006) as “irregular, star-shaped hollows”.

Sweeting’s assertion was also queried at the time (ref: Lewis & Sweeting 1959): “Judge the surprise of those of us not unfamiliar with limestone country, but ignorant of Jamaica, when the air photographs of the Cockpit Country included in the paper portray almost exclusively round-topped hills with hardly a semblance of enclosed rounded hollows — or cockpits in the normally understood sense.”

The formation of Cockpit Country started about 15 million years ago when Jamaica emerged from the sea. Limestone is formed under the sea by the accumulated skeletons of sea-dwelling creatures such as molluscs and coral.

The faulted white limestone plateau, laid down on top of older, yellow limestone, itself laid down on the underlying igneous rock, rose to about 600m (2,000ft) above sea level. Erosion of this plateau formed the regular array of round-topped, conical hills and sinks separated by star-shaped valleys, something similar to an upturned egg carton.

The transition from true cockpits to the degraded cockpit karst of Dry Harbour Mountains define a geological boundary of Cockpit Country.

— Windsor Research Centre