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Military Expeditions and Judicial Terror
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ing out Maroons. Such groups, for instance, existed in Mexico, Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Peru, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and Suriname. 6 In Brazil,
capitães do mato (capitães do campo, capitães dos assalto: “bush captains”), who
were often free Coloureds, led mixed groups of bounty hunters – Indians,
Mulattos, Mestizos and Blacks. They roamed the rural areas in search of prey.
According to the police chief of Rio de Janeiro in 1824, they were able to penetrate
the forest in Minas Gerais (and perhaps elsewhere) because they wore
leather clothing that protected them from thorns and briars (Conrad 1983,
383). In the gold-bearing province of Minas Gerais, they were paid in gold
for each Maroon that they captured (Boxer 1962, 170).
La Rosa Corzo (2003, 4) states that in Cuba, small private bands were permitted
to hunt down “vagabond runaway slaves”, while large slave-hunting
expeditions consisting of militia and military personnel were assigned the
task of scouting the haunts of Maroon settlements for up to three months at
a time (ibid., 28 passim), and the same was basically true in Brazil (Lara 1988,
295–322). Usually, large expeditions could take place only with the specific
permission of the colonial authorities. In 1794 the Royal Consulate or Board
of Development was established in Havana to formulate policy and coordinate
major activities against the Maroons throughout the island, but much
was still left to the regional governments (La Rosa Corzo 2003, 4, 7).
Indians became indispensable in Suriname, Guyana and Brazil, and they
were used frequently in Mexico, Venezuela and elsewhere. Though on the
whole the Jamaican authorities placed less reliance on them, on a few occasions
in the 1720s and 1730s they imported Miskito Indians specifically to
seek out and destroy Maroon settlements. However, these hired hands were
not very effective because – according to Governor Hunter in 1731 – they were
accustomed to fighting in swampy rather than mountainous terrain. But
Bryan Edwards felt that they had rendered important service to the colony
(Campbell 1990, 55). One important thing that the White expeditionary
forces learned from the Indians was the imperative of silence on their expeditions,
which included refraining from shooting game on the way (Campbell
1990, 54–55).
Whites were always concerned that Blacks on expeditions would join the
Maroon ranks, taking whatever military equipment they could seize, as happened
frequently in Jamaica in the 1730s. On one occasion as many as one
hundred Black Shots and baggage carriers, both drawn from the enslaved
population, deserted. 7 In fact, Campbell (1990, 81) boldly asserts that no state