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

252 Flight to Freedom
Figure 27. Akan gold weight. From Akan
Weights and Gold Trade, by Timothy F.
Garrard (London: Longman, 1980).
precious stones) was an important
activity in Colombia and Brazil,
and to a lesser extent in Venezuela,
Mexico, Cuba and the Dominican
Republic. In the Dominican
Republic, and perhaps elsewhere,
both women and men were
involved in mining gold from the
streams (Landers 2000b, 4). In the
late seventeenth century, about
three hundred Maroons in the
province of Cartagena took possession
of some three hundred
royal gold mines in the region
between El Firme and San Lucas,
chasing the Whites out of the area
and naming their own mayors and lieutenants from within the palenques
(Borrego Plá 1973, 109). In Brazil, Maroons exploited the mines in the
province of Maranhão and other places. They were well established in the
Maracassume mines in that province in 1853 (Conrad 1983, 387). Maroons in
Cuba and the Dominican Republic also produced small quantities of gold
(Pérez de la Riva 1979, 53; Albert Batista 1990, 39). The Maroons traded much
of this gold for various commodities (see below), but it is likely that they
fashioned some of it into jewellery and figurines, just as Africans had been
doing in West Africa for centuries. The Akan of the Gold Coast, for instance,
produced artistic gold weights and measures (Leyten 1979). 17
The extent of iron-working remains unclear, though a number of Maroon
communities manufactured a variety of iron weapons, and archaeological
finds suggest more varied metallurgical activities. There is no evidence that
the Maroons mined metals apart from gold, and so we have to assume that
they acquired copper, iron and other metals largely through trade and plunder.
In 1662 Archbishop Francisco de la Cueva Maldonado noted that the
Bahoruco Maroons depended upon trade to obtain iron and that their ironsmiths
were excellent workmen (Landers 2000b, 4). Elsa Goveia (1965, 163)
notes that enslaved persons in Antigua carried on a “growing trade in stolen
iron, copper, lead, and brass”, which the colonial government attempted to
arrest by imposing stiff penalties on delinquents. According to Terry Weik