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286 Flight to Freedom
cussion of the leaders for the section dealing with the treaties that they signed
(page 289). The authoritarian state usually offered generous terms to people
who betrayed Maroon communities (or slave revolts). In 1574 the Mexican
government passed a law that any runaway who handed over one of his comrades
would obtain his freedom, and would be paid twenty pesos for each
additional person whom he delivered. However, the law specified that any
free Mulatto or free Black who protected a runaway and then turned him in
to receive the reward would suffer the death penalty (Pereira 1994, 97; Palmer
1976, 125; León 1924, 10). 19 In 1665 the Jamaican government promised that
any enslaved person who killed or captured any of the Karmahaly Maroons
would be freed, and also offered both pardon and freedom to any Maroon
who would bring in a fellow Maroon, dead or alive (Campbell 1990, 27).
The colonial authorities often subjected captured Maroons to extensive
“debriefing”, using torture to elicit information that would allow for more
easy and complete subversion of the polities. There is sufficient evidence to
suggest that torture with this end in view was widespread. 20 In this connection,
Porter (1943, 396) writes, “One may be pardoned for wondering what
methods of persuasion may have laid [sic] behind some of the communications
so freely – nay, so eagerly – offered by Negro slaves and prisoners under
examination by overseers and army officers.”
In 1693 an expeditionary force tortured people found in the Matudere
palenque in Cartagena to obtain information from them concerning the
organization and demographic profile of the settlement (Borrego Plá 1973,
79–80). In 1749 the authorities in Caracas employed torture to elicit valuable
information about an intended servile revolt (Brito Figueroa 1985, 212–13).
Brito Figueroa (ibid., 217) also accuses the slaveholding authorities of subjecting
four very small children to torture on one occasion in 1774, in order to
obtain information about Guillermo Rivas’s forces. In 1855 state officials in
the Amazon Valley, who had found it impossible to locate some of the
mocambos in that district, were finally able to find and destroy the Mucajuba
mocambo, one of the largest, after coercing a captured Maroon to show them
the best way through the lake on whose bank the settlement was located
(Conrad 1983, 390). In 1795 Demerara government officials tortured several of
the prisoners apprehended in a recent expedition, to get them to reveal details
about a settlement that the expedition had failed to discover. In spite of it,
the captives went to their deaths without supplying the information
(Pinckard 1806, 2:248–51).