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

Maroon Economy
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commercial interests. In Brazil, the Quilombo Grande and the Quilombo do
Gabriel, which an official government report in 1876 described as being very
old, for a long time carried on a lucrative maritime trade in firewood with
plantation owners and others in and around Rio de Janeiro. Various people
usually went to the Maroon settlements to purchase this wood, which was
said to be the best that the urban dwellers could purchase. So important was
this trade to the consumers that, like the inhabitants of Neybes, they would
warn the Maroons of impending danger from expeditionary forces. The elimination
of these quilombos in 1876 must have been a significant loss to the
neighbouring White settlements (Conrad 1983, 385–86).
The trade conducted with the Miskito Maroons and their descendants in
Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua, was a much more open and elaborate
affair. Its network extended far and wide, embracing through agents –
especially from Providencia (Old Providence), San Andrés and Corn Island –
other settlements in Jamaica and the United States, and Spanish colonies on
the Central American mainland. Orlando Roberts, a trader in the 1820s,
described the trade as involving different groups of Indians and Miskito men
from all parts of the coast who brought tortoiseshell, gum copal, rubber,
skins, paddles, canoes and various other goods to barter for duck, check cloth,
cutlass blades and other articles (Gordon 1998, 38).
The transactions were usually conducted with extreme honesty, out of fear
of Maroon reprisals for betrayal (Pérez de la Riva 1979, 54). However, on at
least one occasion the European trading allies betrayed the Maroon cause,
though in this instance they were threatened with judicial sanctions by the
Guatemalan state if they did not guide the expedition to their usual meeting
place (Lokken 2004b, 50–52). The trade was important in providing the
increasingly wide range of products that the larger and more well-established
Maroon societies required, not simply to survive but to enhance their comfort,
and for ritual and aesthetic purposes. Some White people made a lot of
money from the transactions. This, for instance, was the case with the
Scotsman Arbuthnot, who sold Seminole Maroons and Indians gunpowder,
lead, knives, paints, beads, blankets, rum and other goods, and who, according
to Porter (1951, 266), realized that such trade was “a paying proposition”.
Apart from the financial returns, some merchants might have engaged in the
trade because they were ideologically opposed to slavery or because they did
not have any special connections with enslavers. In some instances they
might also have been seeking to preserve their farms or other businesses from