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104 Flight to Freedom
sion; and preventing the rental or sale of such vessels except in designated
harbours (Donoghue 2002, 156–57; Oldendorp 1987, 36; Hall 1992, 127–29).
Although the laws were periodically renewed and refined, and the sanctions
against delinquents were increased, these measures had little or no effect on
the incidence of maritime marronage.
The situation in Bermuda was somewhat different. Its small size – only
twenty-one square miles – and its high concentration on seafaring activities
that employed many enslaved persons theoretically gave many of them the
opportunity of absconding. Like the Danish West Indies, Bermuda had a
comparatively less rigorous system of slavery than the plantation colonies,
and also stringent laws and measures to prevent fugitives seizing boats in the
harbours to make good their escape. However, the relative geographical isolation
of the Bermuda islands seems to have been the main factor that prevented
large-scale desertion from that colony (Packwood 1975, 21–38).
It is perhaps appropriate to interject here that the plantations and small
farms also offered the runaways shelter among the Blacks, free Coloureds
and Whites who lived there. Here, too, farmers found their labour useful for
a variety of purposes, including cultivating their fields, tending their cattle
and engaging in domestic chores. Moreover, they did not have to invest highrisk
funds in purchasing labour hands, especially in volatile situations of
extensive marronage; they did not have to pay head taxes; and they hired this
kind of labour dirt cheap, precisely because they held a sort of Damocles
sword over the fugitives. 9 All this, of course, had to be done surreptitiously,
but to many employers it was worth the risk because the potential financial
savings were huge.
It was not only in the small island communities that rural-to-urban (and
sometimes urban-to-urban) flight was common. Jamaica, Cuba, the United
States, Haiti, Mexico, Peru and Brazil, among others, were greatly affected by
what the authorities perceived as an urban menace. Indeed, urban Maroons
were prevalent in all slavery jurisdictions in the Americas and drew the attention
of lawmakers, who passed stringent laws against harbouring such people.
In Mexico, Mestizos, Indians and Blacks increasingly jostled for space in the
small and large towns, and by the early eighteenth century the free Black and
mixed populations had become so large, due to manumissions and natural
reproduction among free persons, that the urban Maroons could live among
them with little chance of detection (Pereira 1994, 96). The situation was not
so different in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Karasch 1987, 304,