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Establishment of Maroon Communities
129
settlement even if the lower figure is accepted. The Matawais are said to have
had around 300 in 1767 (Thoden van Velzen 1995, 113), while Le Maniel, on
the Haiti–Dominican Republic border, comprised about 130 inhabitants in
the last quarter of the eighteenth century (Moreau de Saint-Méry 1979, 140).
There are also more debatable figures, such as a group estimated at 200
that was located in the marshlands near Huara in Peru in 1545 (Bowser 1974,
188). In 1736 the main Leeward Maroon town in the parish of St James,
Jamaica, was thought to contain about 1,000 inhabitants; there were also several
outlying Maroon towns and villages in the parishes of St George and
St Elizabeth, and more than 300 people in other outlying areas (Patterson
1979, 270). However, at the time of the treaty with the British in 1739, the
number who submitted (which seemed to be the vast majority) amounted to
only about 470 (Campbell 1990, 119).
The most impressive figures, which few writers dispute, are the 15,000 to
20,000 estimated for Palmares at the height of its power in the early 1670s
(Kent 1979, 185; Carneiro 1946, 85). Mattoso (1979, 139), a recent writer, actually
states that its population had reached 30,000 at the time of its destruction
in 1694–95. In 1643 Cerca do Macaco, its capital, was said to contain
fifteen hundred houses, and in 1675 an expedition encountered a well-garrisoned
large city with more than two thousand houses (Mattoso 1979, 139;
Conrad 1983, 370). This “republic of warriors” was really a confederacy of
many settlements owing allegiance to a king. The Ndjukas and Saramakas
follow, with much more modest figures of 2,500 and 3,000 respectively at the
time of their treaties with the Dutch colonial government in 1760 and 1762
(Thoden van Velzen 1995, 113); then comes the 1,000 attributed to the
Quilombo Grande in Brazil around 1759 (Pinto Vallejos 1998, 195).
Depredations Crises
Robert Conrad (1983, 359) alludes to the fact that in 1818 an adviser to King
João IV of Portugal declared that the relationship between Brazilian overlords
and their servile charges was one of domestic warfare. 20 While Gilberto
Freyre (1956) may dispute this assertion, one can hardly read the record of
Maroon assaults in that country and elsewhere without becoming aware that
periodically, and sometimes frequently, the White communities experienced
depredations crises reminiscent of warfare (McFarlane 1986, 132, 134). On