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184 Flight to Freedom
(ibid., 15, 225) notes three characteristics of Maroon settlements: isolation
from populated areas, obscurity that made them difficult to locate, and difficulty
of access for anyone seeking to enter them. He also remarks that the
huts or houses were usually scattered in the settlements to make it difficult
for expeditionary forces to surprise all the inhabitants at once and to permit
unimpeded flight.
While water was abundant in or around many Maroon settlements, good
drinking water was not always easy to find. In the Guianas and Brazil, with
the many streams that chequered the landscape, Maroons often built their
settlements close to those that offered a good supply of relatively wholesome
drinking water. The best example is Palmares, by or through which many
rivers flowed, including the Ipojuca, Serinhaem, Una, Paraiba, Mundau,
Panema, Camaragibe, Porto Calvo and Jacuipe, with their numerous springs
and tributaries (Carneiro 1946, 26). In Jamaica the Windward settlements
were also well provided with water through the Rio Grande, Negro and Dry
Rivers and the Jackmandoore Spring (Agorsah 1994, 168). For their greater
convenience, or where water was less abundant, the Maroons employed their
knowledge and technological skills to resolve the problem. For instance, an
expedition sent against the Windward Maroons in 1730 reported finding a
large cave with two troughs for holding water (Agorsah 1994, 169). In Haiti
in 1717, a French officer on a military expedition discovered a settlement with
a well forty feet deep (Moreau de Saint-Méry 1979, 135). The fields of
Palmares were apparently well irrigated with canals (Conrad 1983, 369). 9
Of course, apart from drinking, water was needed to grow crops and for
other daily activities. Personal hygiene must have been an important feature
of at least some of the communities. This is relevant, because part of the
mythology of slavery is that Africans were naturally unclean. Historians have
repeatedly noted the contradiction between that assumption and the fact that
Black women were the main domestic hands in most White households,
cooking, washing, cleaning the homes, looking after the children and occasionally
breast-feeding them. The unclean conditions in which many plantation
and other Blacks lived had a lot to do with their limited access to the
tools of cleanliness and the state of knowledge about the spread of disease
pathogens. In the late eighteenth century Stedman (1988, 409–10) recorded
that the Maroons in Suriname used the dwarf aloes to make soap, evidence
that they were concerned about personal cleanliness even in the trying circumstances
of life in the bush and often on the run. In the 1570s Francis