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

Negotiations and Treaties
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tions by several officials and other slaveholders that it was a nest of robbers
and lowlifes, and suggestions that the government should destroy it. In 1740
its population was estimated at two hundred people (Larrazábal Blanco 1998,
152–64). 9
Fouchard (1972, 427–28), whose work generally displays analytic depth,
deals rather superficially with why the Haitian Maroons preferred to flee into
the Spanish zone. He notes rightly that the contours and expanse of sparsely
inhabited territory and the difficulties of the mountain terrain were pull factors,
and also that the underdeveloped plantation regime offered comparatively
easy work for many enslaved persons who were occupied in cattle
ranching, certainly a less strenuous pursuit than plantation work. However,
his suggestion, even if tongue-in-cheek, that enslaved persons usually ate the
same food as their overlords is frivolous. His comments about cattle herding
allowing for long siestas, the indolent life to which the Spaniards were accustomed,
and the fluid social and class relations between enslaved and free persons
are more imaginary than real. He caps his analysis by saying, “In brief,
the Spanish part of Saint-Domingue [Hispaniola] represented in the eyes of
the slave the closest image of the liberty to which he aspired.” This is not to
deny that a system of enslavement based on cattle herding had a much more
relaxed atmosphere than one based on sugar and offered somewhat greater
opportunities for Black social mobility. However, Spanish policy in the
Dominican Republic and elsewhere was hypocritical in the context of the
official brutalities meted out to runaways from Spanish overlords, and the
cédulas explicitly excluding them from royal benefaction, regardless of their
religious profession (Veracoechea 1987, 222).
Derby (2003, 12–20) implies that part of the problem related to “competing
regimes of value” between the poor Spaniards in the Dominican Republic
and the rich Frenchmen just across the (ill-defined) border between the two
countries: the one lived largely through the growing of tobacco and cacao
and the rearing of cattle; the other through the cultivation of sugar. The
Spanish expressed their envy by encouraging desertion from the French zone,
sometimes going so far as instigating desertion, and even abducting enslaved
persons to sell in the Dominican Republic. Debbasch (1979, 144) goes a step
further by asserting that Spanish francophobia in the Dominican Republic
was the main reason for their strong support for Le Maniel Maroons – that
they would have done anything to harm the French colonists. As noted
above, the situation between the two colonies was exacerbated by boundary