60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

130 Flight to Freedom
many occasions Maroon assaults on White urban and rural areas became so
deadly and rapid that the enslavers despaired of ever bringing the perpetrators
to heel. A contemporary writer declared that
[t]he inhabitants of Alagôas, Porto Calvo, and Penedo were constantly under
attack, and their houses and plantations robbed by the Blacks of Palmares. The
Blacks killed their cattle and carried away their slaves to enlarge their quilombos
and increase the number of their defenders, forcing the inhabitants and natives
of those towns to engage in fighting at a distance of forty leagues or more, at
great cost to their plantations and risk to their own lives, without which the
Blacks would have become masters of the captaincy because of their huge and
ever-increasing numbers. (Conrad 1983, 370)
Maroon settlements were located in all the main plantation and mining
areas of Brazil – Pernambuco, Alagôas, Sergipe, São Paulo, Minas Gerais,
Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grosso, Goias, Pará, Maranhão and Rio Grande do
Norte – and created major problems for the slaveholders through their ability
to attract new runaways and the depredations that they often carried out
against their former overlords. By the last quarter of the seventeenth century
the inhabitants of Alagôas, Porto Calvo, Derinhaem and Rio de San
Francisco (Penedo) are said to have become greatly impoverished by wars
first against the Dutch and then the Palmarinos. Expenditure on these wars
was estimated at well over a million cruzados (Carneiro 1946, 60). It took
between sixteen and thirty-five Dutch and Portuguese expeditions (based
upon the estimates of different authors) between 1644 and 1695, led by some
of their bravest and most experienced warriors, to destroy Palmares. 21 The
invading forces suffered heavy defeat on several occasions. They also won
several partial successes, destroying many outlying settlements. In 1678 they
managed to sack the main cities, forcing the king and some of his leading
men to accept the offer of a peace treaty (Conrad 1983, 370–72), but it was a
treaty that did not last long (see chapter 10).
In some jurisdictions, such as the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and
Suriname, the colonial authorities believed that Maroon activities would lead
to the total ruin of the colony. José Franco (1979, 47) declares that the Cuban
government was concerned mainly with persecuting the Maroons and
destroying the palenques. The island had an Office for the Capture of
Maroons from the late eighteenth century, and special Maroon prisons.
Campbell (1990, 79) cites a member of the Jamaican legislature to the