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Establishment of Maroon Communities
135
San Miguel. So perturbed was the viceroy that he ordered the local magistrate
to have them wiped out by any means (Palmer 1976, 123–24). In 1606 the
viceroy reported that there was a large number of Maroons in Vieja and
Nueva Veracruz, Río Blanco and Punta de Antón Lizardo, and that they were
bolder than before. They had begun to visit the town of Tlalixcoyán, robbing
homes, carrying off Black domestics and setting fire to the Spaniards’ houses
(Davidson 1979, 93). 22 Gaspar Yanga, an African, originally from Gabon, who
led a revolt in 1570 and shortly after established the Cofre de Perote palenque,
justified assaults on White persons and property as a means of compensation
for what the enslavers had taken from them over the years (Palmer 1976, 129).
Maroons in Cuba travelled up to twenty and even forty miles, over hills
and through forests, to attack plantations to obtain clothing, firearms and
other goods (Pérez de la Riva 1979, 57). It was this strike range that unsettled
a number of White settlers, since the remoteness of a Maroon settlement did
not guarantee their protection from assault. Guillermo Rivas’s community in
Ocoyta, Venezuela, in the 1770s provided an outstanding display of this kind
of aggressive warfare. It was said that he frequently raided the towns and
plantations far and wide, seizing arms, which he cached. Acosta Saignes
(1979, 66) refers to his palenque as a core area of resistance and attack. He also
states that Guillermo was accustomed to travel from Ocoyta to Chuspa and
from Ocumare to Barcelona, in order to maintain close contact with the various
communities and organize raids on the plantations and towns. He stole
great quantities of cocoa, which he sold to White merchants (Acosta Saignes
1979, 64, 66–69). 23
In Colombia, in the early sixteenth century, a group of Maroons set fire to
the city of Santa María. In the early seventeenth century Domingo Bioho,
Maroon leader of the San Basilio palenque in that country, created havoc
among the White settlements. According to Escalante (1979, 77), he was a
fiery and daring person, who once plunged with thirty male and female followers
into the forests and marshes of Matuna and easily defeated a group of
nearly twenty enslavers who had been tracking them. Such reckless bravery
was replicated often in the history of Maroon warfare. In the next few years
Cartagena, Tolú, Mompós, Tenerife and other areas felt the might of the
growing community of warriors. They sacked and ransacked plantations, cattle
ranches and other holdings. Even after its founder’s death in battle in 1621,
the palenque remained a scourge of the outlying White settlements until it
signed a peace treaty early in the next century (Escalante 1979, 77–79). In the