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

Negotiations and Treaties
287
We therefore have to be suspicious of many of the instances in which prisoners
were alleged to have supplied information voluntarily about Maroon
communities. When Maroon women captured in Dominica in 1786, or
Moses, a North Carolina Maroon captured in 1830, divulged strategic secrets
of the communities to which they had belonged (Honychurch 1975, 74;
Aptheker 1979, 160), did they do so under torture or voluntarily Of course,
at times Maroons fled their haunts for personal reasons, including conflicts
with other Maroons, and became informants against their brethren. It was
unwritten but standard policy in all jurisdictions that a Maroon who claimed
that he held information that would serve the interests of the authoritarian
state should be treated with the greatest civility and brought to the colonial
authorities post-haste.
In 1737, after two years of deadly assault by Maroons under the leadership
of José Pérez and José Tadeo, the colonial authorities in Córdoba, Mexico,
finally managed to convince a Maroon called Fermín to betray the palenque.
This resulted in the capture of the leaders and several of their followers. The
leaders were subsequently executed, while those who remained at large
sought refuge in neighbouring palenques (Naveda Chávez-Hita 1987, 133–35).
In 1786, Petite Jacques, a confidant of the Maroon leader Cicero of Dominica,
betrayed his friend, who was later executed (Honychurch 1975, 74).
In 1739 the defence network of the Leeward and Windward Maroons of
Jamaica was compromised by former members of their communities, who led
White military expeditions to their hideouts and showed them how to breach
the defence systems. Among the defectors from the Leeward Maroons were
Venus and Assiba, whose reasons for defecting are unknown; and Cuffee,
Sambo and Zuashey, who declared that the Maroons had abducted them and
that they had later made good their escape. Venus provided crucial information
about the daily activities in which the Maroons would be engaged at
that time of the year, while all five of them led expeditions to the Maroon
towns. However, as usual, the expeditions captured very few Maroons. The
belligerent parties finally agreed to peace terms, and the colonial authorities
compensated Maroon defectors and other guides with freedom for giving
meritorious service that led to the signing of the treaties (Campbell 1990,
107–15, 121–24). 21
In 1815 the San Andrés and La Cueva palenques in Cuba (the latter
unknown to colonial officials up to that time) were assailed as a result of
information given to the authorities by Batista Bayona and his wife, former