The Cockpit Country is a rugged, forested area of western Jamaica, rich in biodiversity and cultural heritage. The area encompasses the largest remaining intact wet limestone forest in Jamaica, which is of outstanding ecological importance to the island. Its landscape of steep-sided hills and deep, round valleys eroded from the limestone bedrock is the world’s most outstanding example of karst topography.
This reservoir of globally significant natural and cultural resources has been earmarked for bauxite mining by the local subsidiary of the multi-national minerals company, ALCOA.
Due to its remoteness and inaccessibility, most of the Cockpit Country has been insufficiently studied. Each scientific expedition reveals more of the natural wonders of this ‘biodiversity hotspot’ and the secrets of its human history.
Biodiversity
 The wildlife of the Cockpit Country is specially adapted to this unique
environment, and numerous species of plants and animals occur here that
are found nowhere else in the world: they are endemic not only to
Jamaica, but to the Cockpit Country itself. Indeed, the concentrated
biodiversity of this an island-within-an-island is considered to be of
global significance.
The area is home to perhaps the only viable population of the
endangered, endemic Giant Swallowtail butterfly; with a wingspan of up
to 8 inches (20 cm) it is the largest butterfly in the Americas.
Many of Jamaica’s threatened birds are found here, including the
critically endangered Jamaican Blackbird and both species of Jamaica’s
endemic parrots. Almost the entire population of the Black-billed
parrot (95 percent) is found in the Cockpit Country. The illegal
capture of Jamaican parrots for the pet trade threatens their survival
in the wild.
Four of Jamaica’s 14 endemic frogs occur only in the forests and caves
of the Cockpit Country, by far the most important area of habitat for
Jamaica’s amphibians and reptiles.
Unique in the world is a species of crab that inhabits the water at the
base of bromeliad leaves in limestone forests such as those of the
Cockpit Country.
 Cultural resources
Although much of the Cockpit Country remains unexplored, there are a
number of known sites of Taino occupation. The zoomorphic art of the
Taino reflects their reverence for the natural world, on which they
depended. For example, the frog was a Taino fertility symbol. The
drawing at right is inspired by a Taino pictograph.
The Cockpit Country is renowned in Jamaican history as the refuge of
the fiercely independent Maroons, descendants of the earliest slaves
who were freed by the Spanish settlers around the time of the British
conquest in 1655. After almost a century of resistance to British rule
in the ‘Land of Look Behind’, the Maroons forced the British into
signing a peace treaty in 1738.
Geology and Hydrology
Cockpit Country is recognized internationally as the ‘type locality’
for cockpit karst – a term given to limestone bedrock that has been
dissolved and eroded by rain over millions of years. It has taken over
15 million years for Jamaica’s Cockpit Country to be created in this
way. Cockpits, the bowl-shaped valleys, average in depth from 100 to
120 metres, with walls generally sloping from 30 to 40 degrees.
Drainage of the cockpit bottoms occurs via percolation or by sinkhole.
The municipal and agricultural water supply for much of western and
northern Jamaica is dependent on the input of groundwater from Cockpit
Country sources. The headwaters of a number of the island’s major
rivers are found within the Cockpit Country, including the Martha Brae
to the north, the Hector’s River and Black River systems to the south,
and the Rio Bueno to the east. The Quashie’s River sink at Freeman’s
Hall (within the prospecting licence area) is one of the sources of the
Dornoch Head Rising near Stewart Town, which flows to the sea as the
Rio Bueno.
The hydrology of the area is not yet thoroughly understood and further
research is needed to trace the vast subterranean network connecting
the caves, sinks and risings of the Cockpit Country.
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