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

Military Expeditions and Judicial Terror
151
Spanish used them from the early days of colonization to hunt Indians in
Hispaniola (Dominican Republic). In the hinterland of Cuba, the
Dominican Republic and the United States the dogs of war instilled terror in
many Maroons. Some Maroons actually died from dog bites (Villaverde 1982,
107).
In 1815 Alfonzo Martínez, leader of an expedition against El Frijol
Maroons, calculated that in order to overpower the settlement, estimated as
having over two hundred warriors (a gross overestimate, according to La
Rosa Corzo), he required two hundred men and thirty bulldogs (La Rosa
Corzo 2003, 107–8). From the 1680s the Jamaican government began to
import dogs periodically to hunt down Maroons. One early government act
made provision for a large gang of dogs to be paid for out of funds from the
respective parish churches (Campbell 1990, 37). The government also
imported a number of them from Cuba in 1795, along with their chasseurs
(handlers), to assist in putting down Maroon unrest in that year. The French
employed two hundred dogs in the last phase of fighting against the Black
revolutionaries in Haiti. 10 It is said that these hounds were able to sniff out
the most sheltered palenques in Cuba (Franco 1979, 41). In the nineteenth
century, as the sugar plantation economy expanded in that island and the
number of Maroon communities grew, so did the organized bands of hunters
equipped with trained dogs (Pérez de la Riva 1979, 57). Ortiz (1975, 366–67)
cites Merlin, who stated that the canine species of Cuba was unique for its
strength, its intelligence and its incredible aversion to Black runaways. He
might also have said that this was not a natural aversion but one sedulously
cultivated through training by Maroon hunters. In the mid-sixteenth century
the Spanish loosed dogs on a group of captured Maroons belonging to the
Palenque de Bayano in Panama, who refused to give up their religion and
accept conversion to Catholicism, in spite of repeated exhortations by their
captors to do so before being executed. The Spanish turned the mastiffs on
them, huge dogs that had been trained to tear at the flesh of Blacks. The latter
had only thin rods with which to defend themselves, which were quite
harmless to the dogs but enraged them further, driving them to sink their
teeth into their victims and tear away great pieces of flesh. Despite their
extreme agony, the dying Maroons refused to recant (La Guardia 1977,
88–89). 11
Marcus Rainsford (1805, 426–27) explained how dogs were trained to disembowel
Blacks in Haiti: