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

Establishment of Maroon Communities
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(Carneiro 1946, 54). This affirmation of despair was echoed around the same
time by another writer, who waxed emotional at the thought that many
inhabitants stood in jeopardy of losing their lives, honour and property to the
Maroons who repeatedly seized their goods, carried away the women and
virgin daughters and killed the parents and husbands (Carneiro 1946, 55). But
let us consider this bit of whining by enslavers whose tyranny had resulted in
a servile revolt in Bahia in 1814:
They burned more than a hundred houses, even killing innocent children, and
the evil now continues in other places. In Iguape, Cachoeira, and Itaparica, the
blacks of Gonçalo, Marinho Falcão, Rodrigo Brandão, and Francisco Vincente
Viana have run away and revolted, and all these owners of sugar plantations have
fled to this city, where they now are. Every day blacks run away from this city.
(Conrad 1983, 404)
While the larger Maroon groups had the potential to inflict much more
damage than the smaller ones, the latter also did substantial damage, especially
in the urban and suburban areas. The extant records attest to numerous
raids on towns and plantations by relatively small groups, though they are
sometimes identified as belonging to large settlements. Conrad (1983, 361),
for instance, informs us that in the 1820s some of Brazil’s major cities were
virtually encompassed by clusters of Maroon settlements whose inhabitants
preyed on unwary travellers. In Peru, the colonial authorities around the midsixteenth
century reported that small groups of fifteen to twenty Maroons
went about robbing travellers and Indians, and were impudent enough to
enter the city day or night; they also attacked farms and other properties. In
1549 a group of about twenty-three Maroons was reported to be committing
robberies and murders against Indians and other people (Bowser 1974, 188).
James Lockhart (1968, 189–90) mentions a group of about fifteen Maroons in
the Piura region of Peru in the 1540s who attacked Indian villagers and travellers,
killing the men and abducting the women. For a while they brought
commerce between the highlands and the coastal Indians to a complete stop.
Indeed, the Maroons created so much bother for the Peruvian authorities
that putting them down, or “under”, occupied a considerable amount of time
and expenditure by successive governors and colonial councils (Bowser 1974,
187–221).
In Mexico in 1560 a small Maroon band of some fifteen to twenty people
carried out a series of deadly raids on Spaniards in Guanajuato, Pénjamo and