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240 Flight to Freedom
Santos Gomes (2002, 485) describes the economy of the mocambos in the
Grão-Pará captaincy of Brazil as consisting of “salting meat, dying [sic]
clothes, planting crops, herding cattle, and making bricks to build French
forts”. Carneiro (1946, 28) tells us that the people of Palmares found in the
forests all the elements necessary for their livelihood. He writes of the diversified
economy of that state that those from the rural areas cultivated sugarcane,
maize and plantains; those from the urban areas were usually artisans
and produced iron objects; and others devoted themselves to hunting, fishing,
raising chickens, and manufacturing baskets, hats, bellows, pots and
other vessels (ibid., 7–8). Runaways, of course, often fled with a number of
tools and household utensils, such as machetes, hoes, axes and cooking pots
(Mullin 1992, 39; Fouchard 1972, 284–87).
A few examples must serve here to illustrate what is frequently found in
contemporary records of the contents of Maroon communities. In the late
eighteenth century, when an expeditionary force overcame the community
led by Balla in Dominica, they found that it was well furnished with provisions,
quite a lot of clothing, expensive pieces of furniture and several other
objects (Atwood 1791, 249). In 1662 Archbishop Francisco de la Cueva
Maldonado wrote to the king of Spain that there were four large Maroon
communities in the Bahoruco Mountains of the Dominican Republic that
cultivated the land, possessed meat and agrarian products in abundance, and
collected large quantities of gold from the river with which they bought
clothes, beverages and other necessities (Larrazábal Blanco 1998, 147).
According to Estévez, a palenque in Santa Cruz de los Pinos in eastern Cuba
contained much beef, pork, and smoked rodents, twenty large baskets of
bananas, a lot of male and female clothing, part of a woollen bedspread,
numerous earthen pots and iron kettles, and two horns with powder
(Villaverde 1982, 46–47). In the early seventeenth century, Padre Laurencio,
who lived for a while with the Cofre de Perote apalencados of Mexico, had
this to say: “The plunder that was found in the town and cabins of these
blacks was considerable. A variety of clothing that they had accumulated,
daggers, swords, axes, some arquebuses and money, salt, butter, maize and
other similar things” (Marcano Jiménez 2001, 29). 1
Padre Laurencio was wrong to assume that the possessions of the Cofre
de Perote Maroons were purely the result of plunder. The Maroons usually
obtained these goods from various sources, including trade, plunder and production
by the members of their own communities. Moreover, Maroon raids