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Notes to pages 38–62
331
before emancipation, before he achieved a legal equality, made the transition from
slavery to freedom easy, and his incorporation into the free community natural”.
5. In this instance, of course, it was all classes of the Coloured population (rich,
middling and poor) who joined the fight for social equality.
6. According to Porter (1932, 319), Douglass was “the son of an unknown father and
Harriet Bailey, a slave who had also some Indian blood”.
7. Some writers see this as a “prophetic” statement concerning Toussaint Louverture,
who became the chief leader of the Blacks during the Haitian revolt in the 1790s that
eventually brought about an end to slavery and colonialism in the country.
8. Mathurin (1975, 24) also states that in 1791 the workhouse in Morant Bay, Jamaica,
held a person described as “a little hump-backed old woman”.
9. Freyre (1963, 131) goes on to explain that the others would have died or run away.
10. They were generally regarded as Africans, though some people thought that they
were Indians (Larrazábal Blanco 1998, 164–67).
11. The term was first applied in Spanish America to cattle that had escaped into the
wilds, and then to Indians who had absconded. The Spanish drew a distinction
between “domesticated Indians” (indios mansos) and “wild or maroon Indians” (indios
bravos o cimarrónes) (Knight 1999, vii; Peréz de la Riva 1979, 50). For further discussion
of the origin of the term, see Arrom and García Arévalo (1986, 15–30); Esteban
Deive (1989, 11–12); Fouchard (1972, 381–82).
12. Zips (1999, 37), in an overall interesting study of the Jamaican Maroons, highlights
the physical, psychological and emotional factors that impelled enslaved persons to
become Maroons, and places too little stress on the sheer love of freedom that caused
them to do so.
13. Fouchard (1972, 33–129) outlines the “classic causes” of marronage.
14. On the matter of a small elite dominating a large group of people for a long time, see
Philip Mason’s Patterns of Dominance (1970).
15. House of Commons, “Mr. Gannon’s Report on the Condition of Apprenticed
Africans”, British Parliamentary Papers, 1826–27, 22 (355): 39.
Chapter 2
1. This is reminiscent of Fouchard’s (1972, 151) statement about “an imperious desire for
freedom” that many enslaved persons felt and that transformed them into Maroons.
2. It was first published under the Spanish title Biografia de un Cimarrón.
3. William Wells Brown (1999, 684) describes the whip with which his mother was
punished in this way: “The handle was about three feet long, with the butt-end filled
with lead, and the lash six or seven feet in length, made of cowhide, with platted wire
on the end of it.”