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Establishment of Maroon Communities
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constantly against British and Spanish attempts to ensnare them and return
them to slavery (Gordon 1998, 37–38).
Periodically, military expeditions accidentally came across or were told
about Maroon settlements, containing upwards of fifty people, that they
never knew existed. Two of these groups in the Dominican Republic in the
early seventeenth century contained around seventy people each (Esteban
Deive 1989, 70–72). In Cuba, it was fairly common for regularly dispatched
Maroon-hunting expeditions to locate such settlements (La Rosa Corzo
2003, 124, 180 passim). The Todos Tenemos palenque, which an expeditionary
force stumbled upon, contained between one hundred and two hundred souls
(La Rosa Corzo 2003, 200–201). But there were other groups that adopted a
more militant stance, ravaging plantations, outlying settlements and urban
areas, and leaving destruction behind them. These were the Maroons who
were most feared, the ones against whom the authoritarian states sent out
frequent search parties – which cost considerable sums of money – and with
whom the authorities had sometimes to seek a peaceful accommodation.
This is not to suggest that the enslavers were usually prepared to let live
any Maroons – in small or large, new or old settlements – who were willing
to engage in peaceful dialogue with them. Far from it: the fact that enslaved
persons could and did drift from their assigned place in the hierarchy of
human society was anathema to the authorities. This is why the authorities
often searched out and attacked small, obscure, out-of-the-way settlements,
such as those in the rugged, densely forested river valleys of Grão-Pará and
Maranhão in Brazil (Conrad 1983, 386), which were usually more interested
in peaceful coexistence than confrontation.
Examples of Maroon Communities
As noted in the introduction, this study will not provide a detailed or chronological
history of the vast number of Maroon communities. Instead, it will
discuss a few of the main communities in the context of their emergence and
the problems they posed to the slaveholders. Succeeding chapters will elaborate
several of the themes that will arise in this chapter.
The Spanish had the earliest and longest experience of marronage. They
were the first European inhabitants of the hemisphere, they instituted the
earliest regimes of enslavement of Indians and Africans, and they were virtu-