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

Conclusion
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scholars seem to believe that the vast majority of Maroon settlements were
destroyed at some point in their existence by military expeditions and, in fact,
that they had a rather ephemeral existence. More careful work needs to be
done in this area. A review of current writings on the subject leads to the
conclusion that relatively few Maroons were caught in the numerous raids
that the slaveholding fraternity carried out against the settlements, and that
the displaced persons either found refuge in other settlements, repaired the
ravaged ones or built new ones. La Rosa Corzo’s study, while claiming that
the colonial state in Cuba was largely successful in wiping out the Maroon
communities in Cuba by the mid-nineteenth century, also makes it clear that
there were a large number of small communities (with twenty or fewer inhabitants)
that the expeditionary forces came across only by chance or through
informants. We will never know how many eluded detection, and further
archaeological work and the collection and analysis of oral traditions are necessary
before it will be possible to ascertain the location of some that survived
until the end of slavery. This is particularly true in Brazil (especially
Amazonia), Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and the United States.
Of course, for those Maroon communities that were wiped out or substantially
disfigured by expeditions, life for their survivors had to start all over
again. Many of them were re-enslaved, sometimes after being wounded in
battle or being severely whipped or losing body parts though judicial sentence.
Invariably, Maroon families were broken up during such encounters,
through deaths, escape of only some family members, sale to various plantations
or abroad and so on. Many Africans must have gone through at least
three experiences of seeing their families separated – at the time of capture in
Africa or sale in the Americas, during escape to Maroon settlements and at
the time of recapture and re-enslavement. Slaveholders sometimes experienced
an increase in their servile population as a result of capture, since the
colonial laws regarded children born in Maroon communities as the property
of the enslaver who “owned” their mother. At other times, when the maternity
of the child could not be established, or when the authoritarian state
made special arrangements with Maroon-hunting expeditions, the children
(or any Maroons whose overlords could not be ascertained) were treated as
booty belonging to their captors. The choice between re-enslavement and
death with some measure of dignity explains why Maroons fought so hard to
elude capture, and why many of them committed suicide, sometimes in large
groups.