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

Totalitarianism and Slavery
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Maroon societies. Cudjoe, a “humpback”, was leader of the Leeward
Maroons of Jamaica when the group signed a treaty with the British in 1739
(Mullin 1992, 54). 8
Many runaways individually were “elusive shadows”, as Fouchard (1972,
390) calls them, in the sense that we might hardly hear about them; but collectively
they were a clearly identifiable people. They responded to the inner
call to freedom despite the many risks to life or limb, including not only harsh
punishments if they were apprehended but also natural obstacles and insalubrious
environments. Many of them succumbed to hunger, fevers and wildanimal
attacks, and sometimes they turned back (Santos Gomes 2002, 481).
One such example comes from Paraguay, where a young Frenchman named
Escoffier sought to lead five deserters to a safe haven, but tragedy struck: a
tiger devoured one of them, another was bitten by a viper, and a third fell victim
to fever. The survivors fell once again into the hands of the enslavers (Plá
1972, 156). In the United States, topography and climate often weighed heavily
against successful flight, though many persons made the effort to escape.
According to Mullin (1992, 39–40), it was not uncommon for runaways to be
recaptured exhausted, cold, badly clothed or naked, and sometimes frostbitten.
Whether or not deserters weighed their options carefully, they must
have felt that the new environment was likely to be friendlier than the one
from which they were fleeing. Given the generally accepted view among
modern scholars that field labourers on sugar plantations in the Americas
lived between seven and ten years after beginning their labour, the deserters’
probable assumption that they were likely to live longer as Maroons than as
plantation slaves seems highly reasonable.
Friar Jerome de Merolla, an Italian Capuchin missionary on a visit to Bahia
in 1682, was told, concerning enslaved persons in the mines of Minas Gerais,
that their work was so hard and their food so inadequate that they were considered
to have lived long if they survived for seven years (Boxer 1962, 174). In
1734, Martinho de Mendonça, after extensive enquiry into the matter, opined
that the mining overlords did not usually expect their servile charges to provide
them with more than twelve years’ labour (ibid.). Sebastião Ferreira
Soares wrote in 1860 that he had been informed that the planter calculated
that of every one hundred enslaved persons introduced into plantation culture,
only about twenty-five were likely to be alive at the end of three years
(Freyre 1963, 131). 9 The situation was not unique to Minas Gerais or to Brazil
as a whole. Cornelis Goslinga (1985, 463) estimates that the average lifespan of