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

Maroon Economy
259
of the mines for its basic support. According to the president of Maranhão
province, where the mocambo was located, its inhabitants carried on trade in
Santa Helena and other places for food, ammunition and other goods. They
maintained amicable relations with peddlers and persons who lived close to
their community (Conrad 1983, 387). 25 In Cartagena province, Maroons
exchanged the gold that they had mined from the rivers for firearms in the
city (Borrego Plá 1973, 27). According to Father Zapata of Cartagena, the
palenques in that province that were inhabited largely by African-born fugitives
were pretty well equipped with firearms, whereas one palenque that
allegedly contained exclusively Creole Maroons was thought to have only
bows and arrows (Borrego Plá 1973, 77). The contrast in the kinds of weapons
possessed by the occupants of the different communities is overdrawn, for we
know from captured Maroons from the Matudere (African) settlement that
they had a number of archers (Borrego Plá 1973, 83). Nevertheless, Zapata’s
information emphasizes the more aggressive role of the African-born
Maroons in obtaining firearms through trade.
The underground trade in Mexico was noted from the very early days of
marronage in that country. The colonial authorities complained frequently of
the connivance of Africans, Indians and even Spaniards in that trade, despite
frequent prohibitions and threats of harsh punishments against offenders.
Not only petty merchants but also rich ones, some of whom were high government
officials, fed the trade. As noted above, Don Andrés Fernández de
Otañes, senior magistrate of Teutila in the eighteenth century, is said to have
employed Maroons in his vanilla trade and to have supplied them with
weapons (Naveda Chávez-Hita 2001, 143).
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Maroons in
the northern area of the Dominican Republic (comprising Blacks, Mulattos
and Mestizos) carried on a lucrative trade in hides with foreigners (Esteban
Deive 1989, 61, 71–72). By the late seventeenth century this Spanish colony
had become integrated into a wide contraband network of trade, “one which
provided ample space for former slaves to find upward mobility through a
combination of smuggling and swidden agriculture and hunting, along with
marooned shipmen and deserters, adventurers and runaway bondsmen who
would try their fortune” (Derby 2003, 17). In Venezuela, the Ocoyta and
Varacuy Maroons raided the cocoa and other plantations, seized a lot of the
crops and sold them to Dutch and British traders, who supplied them with
firearms, powder, lead and other goods (García 1989, 68–69; Brito Figueroa