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276 Flight to Freedom
disputes, especially in the south, and prevented any serious effort to colonize
that area (Debbasch 1979, 145).
The conflict between Haiti and the Dominican Republic was one of several
episodes in Spanish relations with other colonial powers, and involved
some of the most intractable problems in hemispheric and imperial relations.
The Spanish havens usually offered all fugitives from neighbouring (especially
Protestant) countries protection and freedom if they declared that they
had sought asylum in order to be baptized into the Catholic faith. The
Spanish government made this clear in dispatches to Venezuelan officials in
1680 and 1757, and to Florida officials in 1693 and 1733 (Veracoechea 1987, 222;
García 1989, 20; Landers 1998, 362, 365). Rarely did the officials return runaways
to their owners in foreign jurisdictions. In 1778, a resident of Petén,
Guatemala, wrote the captain-general of the country, explaining that he had
taken into his care four runaways from Belize and Jamaica who had sought
refuge and baptism. The official advised him that the governor of the
province could grant the refugees their freedom because of their quest to be
baptized, in accordance with a royal cédula of 1739 ( Jones 1994, 112).
The situation regarding the Dutch territories of Essequibo and Demerara
in the late eighteenth century illustrates the kinds of problems that other territories
faced with respect to desertion to the Spanish colonies. In 1772
Laurens Storm van’s Gravesande, governor general of Essequibo and
Demerara, informed the directors of the Dutch West India Company that
the problem of runaways to Venezuela had become urgent and required official
mediation to arrest it; without it, the plantations would be ruined. In 1775
the militia officers of Essequibo sent a letter to their colonial government,
declaring that unless immediate action was taken, the constant desertion of
their servile charges would lead to the total ruin of the colony. In 1784 their
counterparts in Demerara voiced a similar concern, adding that not a week
passed without significant numbers of their workers deserting to the Spanish
colony. For several years the colonial authorities in Demerara and Essequibo
and the imperial authorities in the Netherlands pressed the Spanish in vain
to sign a mutual extradition treaty.
The officials in Venezuela and elsewhere maintained that it was a longstanding
policy of their imperial government not to return runaways who
sought asylum among them because they desired to become Catholics, unless
it could be verified under oath that the fugitive had committed murder. The
dispossessed planters, perhaps rightly, viewed Spanish action as emanating