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

176 Flight to Freedom
munities came to be relatively pluralistic or multicultural, especially from the
late eighteenth century.
Whether in small or large communities, Maroons often learned to survive
in the most exiguous circumstances. The physical organization of Maroon
settlements was usually carefully planned. Some settlements were large or
significant enough to be described by leaders of military expeditions and contemporary
writers as towns or capitals (see, for instance, Stedman 1988, 404;
Bolland 2002, 57), but they were clearly not nearly as large as the White urban
settlements. They were often regarded as the headquarters of a number of
smaller settlements organized in a centripetal pattern (Franco 1979, 46). The
Maroon states led by Miguel and Guillermo Rivas, both of Venezuela,
Françisque Fabulé of Guadeloupe, Grandy Nanny of Jamaica and Boni of
Suriname are examples. The same was true of Palmares in Brazil, the
Bahoruco settlements in the Dominican Republic, and the small but no less
complex settlements built around Bumba in Cuba. 2
The landscapes of some of these towns were impressive, some because of
the natural beauty of the rocky cliffs and others because of the Maroons’ ability
to shape the environment into elegance. Stedman (1988, 404) gave one
such example. He described the Aluku (Boni) town at a distance as presenting
the appearance of “an amphitheatre sheltered by the foliage of a few ranks
of lofty trees, which they had left standing, the whole presenting a truly
romantick [sic] and enchanting coup doeuil ”. La Rosa Corzo (2003, 155) tells
us that El Cedro settlement in Cuba was “in a ‘picturesque, leafy’ valley that
had a stream running through it and was surrounded by hills”. Todos
Tenemos was perhaps even more impressive by the standards of the time.
Located in El Frijol Mountains, in the 1840s, according to La Rosa Corzo, it
was carefully laid out in public squares and blocks. It contained fifty-nine
“houses” and thirty-four “huts”, simple buildings used as storehouses. 3
Palmares was, by almost all accounts, an impressive state or confederation
of states. Its physical contours spread over a wide area, estimated by Mattoso
(1979, 371) at sixty square leagues, and contained settlements of various sizes
and levels of sophistication. An anonymous seventeenth-century writer who
took part in an expedition against Palmares in 1675–76 (and whose work was
published by Pedro Paulino da Fonseca in 1876) has left us the following
description concerning the largest settlements: