Jamaica with the maroons as commissioners. During the course of his administration, Ochterlony took half a dozen maroon women as mistresses. Quarrell tried in vain to break up the maroons as a community. On 26 June 1796, the ships Dover, Mary, and Anne sailed from Port Royal, to Halifax. One arrived in Halifax on 21 July, the other two followed two days later, carrying, according to one historian, a total of 568 men, women, and children. According to another historian, about 581 Maroons from Trelawny Town left Jamaica, and 17 died on the voyage. Prince Edward, the Commander-in-Chief, North America, impressed with the proud bearing and other characteristics of the maroons, employed the group to work on the new fortifications at the Citadel Hill in Halifax. Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Wentworth believed that the maroons would be good settlers. He received orders from the Duke of Portland to settle them in Nova Scotia. Following this the two commissioners responsible with credit of 25,000 Jamaican pounds from the government of Jamaica, expended £3,000 on of land and built the community of Preston, Nova Scotia. Governor Wentworth was granted an allowance of £240 annually from England to provide religious instruction and schooling for the community. After the first winter, the maroons, raised in an independent culture and warmer climate, and not impressed with what they considered the servile aspects of subsistence agriculture, became less tolerant of the conditions in which they were living. The colonel of the Trelawny Town Maroons, Montague James, wrote a number of petitions to England and Jamaica asking for them to be removed from Nova Scotia. The maroon colonel sent one of his junior officers, Charles Samuels (maroon), to London to present information to Whig MP George Walpole about the terrible conditions they had to endure in Nova Scotia. Arrival in Sierra Leone The Sierra Leone Company decided to send the maroons to its new colony of Freetown in present-day Sierra Leone (West Africa), which had been established for the Nova Scotian Settlers. The Maroon survivors from Nova Scotia were transported to Freetown in 1800, in the early years of the colony. The final leg of their journey was aboard . She arrived at Halifax on 31 May 1800, presumably still under her captain from 1796, Robert Murray, to pick up the maroons, sailed again with them on 8 August, and arrived in Sierra Leone on 30 September that