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

188 Flight to Freedom
(Carneiro 1946, 76). During the next half-century, the threat to the integrity
of the Maroon state had led to the evolution of a more sophisticated defence
system. When the Portuguese made their final assault in 1694, they encountered
a fence or stockade of 2,470 fathoms (4,940 yards), protected by
trenches and sharpened stakes. Embrasures at intervals in the rampart
accommodated guns, while flanks, redoubts and sentry posts also protected
the site. The invading forces had to employ artillery to breach the defences
(Carneiro 1946, 17, 45), and they still suffered heavy reverses at the hands of
the Maroons.
The erection of double or multiple palisades was a common West African
practice, exemplified by the following description:
The town of Tamisso is a fortified place with a double fence of pointed posts.
The space between the two fences, being some seven feet apart, is planted with
thick forest and small sticks pointed and hardened by the fire, which render
them as durable and as hard as iron. This is done in case the enemy should climb
the first fence; they would meet an army of wooden bayonets, difficult to surmount
as they are pointed not only upwards, but diagonally and horizontally.
(Conneau 1976, 128)
In Guyana, George Pinckard (1806, 2:246–47) wrote, the typical Maroon
settlement consisted of a circular area, cleared of trees, in the centre of which
a few huts were built. A deep, wide ditch filled with water surrounded the
area, and pointed stakes were placed into its sides and bottom. A bridge
spanned the ditch but was located about three feet below the surface of the
opaque water, so that the untrained eye would be unlikely to detect it. Leaves
strewn all around the ditch further camouflaged its width. Openings that
gave access to the bridge were created at several points around the ditch, so
that the unwary intruder might be trapped – and perhaps impaled – once he
ventured into the ditch. Other settlements were fortified by palisades or by
fallen trees encircling the living area. These, in turn, were protected by sharpened
bamboo stakes stuck into the ground. People wounded by these stakes
often sustained grievous sores. In 1816 one writer noted that a settlement that
existed in Belize, close to the Sibun River, was very difficult to find, and the
area had many poisonous snakes (Bolland 2002, 56–57). Vaissière states that
some Maroons in Haiti lived in settlements sealed off by palisades of liana
and surrounded by ditches twelve to fifteen feet deep, eight to ten feet wide
and studded at the bottom with pointed stakes (cited in Fouchard 1972, 425).