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

278 Flight to Freedom
tion to fugitives from Essequibo and Demerara into Venezuela in 1791. 10 The
almost immediate result of the Franco-Spanish treaty was the movement of
French farmers into the border areas, an act that completely upset the equilibrium
of life among Le Maniel and other border Maroons and led to conflict
between the two sides. Le Maniel Maroons began attacking the farms
and carrying away implements and enslaved persons. The more timid settlers
withdrew, but others remained in an area that became a hotbed of strife.
According to Debbasch (1979, 146), those who stayed on carried out their
tasks with firearms in hand. The settlers, however, realized that they could
never develop flourishing plantations in the teeth of such resistance, and so
they pushed for a treaty with the Maroons.
Generally, the treaties with the Spanish led to a temporary drop in marronage
to the jurisdictions listed above, but this kind of desertion gained new
life with the abolition of slavery first in Haiti, then in the British colonies,
and so on. There was desertion, for instance, from Jamaica to Haiti,
the Danish West Indies to the British Virgin Islands, Dutch St Maarten
to French St Martin (the two colonies sharing the same small island),
and Suriname to Guyana. In 1825, in a move that presaged a more forwardthinking
policy on the issue of slavery, the British imperial government
ordered its governors to end the policy of returning fugitives from foreign
jurisdictions to their overlords (Ragatz 1977, 437).
Negotiations with Maroons
Negotiations between the enslavers and the Maroons were carried out at the
individual, sectional (that is, involving particular members within a settlement)
and community (involving all the members of a given polity) levels. At
the individual and sectional levels, the main intention was to produce internal
dissension within the Maroon polities, thus causing them to implode.
The methods by which the slaveholding fraternity tried to do so included
offering amnesty (sometimes with, and at other times without, freedom) to
any fugitives who turned themselves in to the military or police authorities
within a specified time; offering Creoles freedom provided they turned in
their African-born brethren; offering freedom to people who had been in the
settlement for a number of years but requiring them to hand over those who
had joined it recently – that is, within a year or two; promising the leader and