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

24 Flight to Freedom
Figure 3. Whipping an enslaved person. From Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil,by
Jean-Baptiste Debret (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39).
indecencies and atrocities against the servile population, one begins to understand
why some of them wrought similar vengeance on the White community.
We cite here only a few of Fouchard’s listed atrocities: throwing people
alive into ovens and suspending them over spits like barbecuing meat; burning
or mutilating men’s genitalia and women’s genitalia and breasts; priming
their anuses with gunpowder which was then set alight; burying them up to
the neck alive and pouring sugar over them, to be consumed by flies or ants;
making them eat their own faeces and drink their own urine; sewing their
lips together with wire; raping women in front of their husbands and children;
and cutting up children in front of their parents.
In Berbice around the mid-eighteenth century, manager Gerlach brutalized
a seven-year-old girl for what the governor considered trifling offences:
he gave her 250 lashes, had her placed in the stocks without food (except what
friends and relatives smuggled to her) and kept her there for three weeks.