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

132 Flight to Freedom
grounds or sugarcane fields or the theft of a few cattle created fear of nocturnal
attacks and of entire towns being burnt. However, strangely, he also
asserts that it was only rarely that a colonist really believed that the Maroons
posed a threat to his personal safety. The records are full of references to the
widespread paranoia of the Whites and create the impression of slaveholding
societies that were tension-ridden, most of all by the Maroon presence and
depredations.
Around the mid-sixteenth century the Bahoruco and Vega regions had
acquired reputations as such fearsome Maroon haunts that individual
colonists ventured into those areas at their peril. One of the Maroon groups,
led by a Black leader named Diego de Guzmán, had recently raided a nearby
town, burnt part of a sugar mill, and locked swords with the Spanish. The
colonists were thereafter afraid to venture forth except in groups of at least
fifteen people. Though the danger temporarily passed shortly afterward,
when Guzmán and some of his followers were killed by a military expedition
sent against them, further dangers lay ahead in the rapid recruitment of new
Maroons for the settlements in the area (Franco 1979, 39–40).
The enslavers and other citizens in outlying areas relatively close to the
Maroon settlements, and also in urban areas within whose vicinity roving
Maroon bands operated, developed a siege mentality. They became jittery at
any news about Maroon assaults, often exaggerated the numbers of the
Maroons in the bush or the hills, saw Maroons where they were not, and at
times attributed to Maroons acts committed by others. Burdened by fear,
many planters sold out and ran for their lives; others migrated to those urban
centres where vulnerability was lower due to the relatively higher density of
the White population and the existence of more organized military and
police forces. Several rich landlords decided to remove themselves altogether
from the arena of conflict, taking ship to Europe where they could bask, not
in the sunshine of the luxuriant tropical climate, but in the riches that their
attorneys sent home to them. All writers agree that insurgency on the part of
enslaved persons and Maroons played a major role in determining both the
numbers of White residents and the quality of life they enjoyed in the slave
societies.
In 1693 an official in Pernambuco rued the fact that the colonists had
established no new ranches but instead had retired from some of the livestock
farms that they had erected in areas close to the mocambos, because of
the great damage that they had experienced at the hands of the Maroons