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316 Flight to Freedom
could not) forge the kind of relationship with their Black brethren that
allowed for revolutionary action on a national scale. Richard and Sally Price
(1988, xxii) inform us that “the Maroons against whom Stedman and his
comrades fought consisted of a number of very small bands – at the height of
their strength no more than a total of several hundred men, women, and children.
Organized primarily according to the plantations on which they had
served as slaves, these Maroon groups periodically banded together,
split apart, and rejoined, depending on the immediate military situation and
the shifting alignments of their leaders.” Maroon communities generally
lacked the weapons and organizational skills to wage all-out war on the slaveholding
states. Even if several of the large communities had combined to
do so, which would have been a feat in itself, they would have been largely
ineffective.
While a particular slaveholding state might have been weak at a specific
point in time, it could usually call upon the resources of its “mother” country
or on similar slaveholding polities to assist it. This was demonstrated as early
as 1548, when enslaved persons in San Pedro, Honduras, revolted against their
Spanish overlords. The Spanish dispatched reinforcements from the neighbouring
colonies to put down the revolt (Franco 1979, 35). In the 1560s and
1570s the combined assaults of Indians and African Maroons on the White
settlements in Mexico had become so lethal that Davidson (1979, 91)
describes the situation as one of anarchy. While this description is no doubt
an exaggeration, the important point is that the oppressors were not driven
out because of assistance from Spain. During the Berbice slave revolt of 1763,
the colonial government received assistance not only from the neighbouring
colony of Suriname and from the Netherlands (its imperial overlord), but
also from Barbados and elsewhere (Thompson 1987, 163, 166, 172). Several
such examples might be cited. 14
It might be argued that some Maroon communities had a wider vision of
freedom and made efforts to translate it into reality through a process of
depredations and attrition rather than all-out warfare. We cannot be sure of
this, because we usually perceive Maroon thoughts obliquely, through the
prism of their adversaries, whose records are virtually the only extant ones.
Until much more work is done on Maroon societies, it will be difficult, if not
impossible, to trace the development of Maroon revolutionary consciousness
in the Americas generally, or in any particular jurisdiction, over a long period
of time. However, it seems that as time passed many Maroons developed a