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

48 Flight to Freedom
its historical origin is given (wrongly) as “negro – (Hist) runaway slave, fugitive
slave”. Likewise, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (third edition)
defines Maroon as “wild, untamed run-away slave”. 11
Some overlords viewed marronage as resulting mainly from shortage of
food and surfeit of physical brutalities inflicted by insentient overlords and
managers. For instance, López de Cerrato, a Spanish official in the Dominican
Republic around the mid-sixteenth century, expressed the view that out
of every hundred runaways, ninety-nine had deserted because of such ill treatment
(Esteban Deive 1989, 45). In 1820 a government official in Belize
declared that the first Blacks who had absconded and had excited others to
join them had been treated very mildly, and definitely did not have just cause
to complain (Bolland 2002, 55). More sentient overlords could understand
why ill-fed and generally badly treated enslaved persons would abscond, but
the vast majority could not understand – or behaved as though they could not
understand – the writhing of the Black soul for freedom as reason enough for
deserting. 12 A few lonely voices here and there among the enslavers articulated
why their so-called faithful Blacks deserted them even in their hour of
travail. In the 1730s the Jamaican government reflected the sentiment of these
few when it observed ruefully that the hope of freedom had undermined the
fidelity of the most trustworthy Blacks (Campbell 1990, 80). Governor
Trelawny saw unrest in the island among the servile population as the manifestation
of a dangerous spirit of liberty (Campbell 1990, 105). A few years
earlier, in 1719, Count Pedro de Almeida, captain-general of Minas Gerais in
Brazil, was even more candid about the “problem” of servile unrest:
[S]ince we cannot prevent the . . . Blacks from thinking, and cannot deprive
them of their natural desire for freedom; and since we cannot, merely because of
this desire, eliminate all of them, they being necessary for our existence here, it
must be concluded that this country will always be subjected to this problem.
(Conrad 1983, 396)
We should note carefully the reason that, in his view, it was impolitic to
“eliminate all of them”.
Fouchard (1972, 33) asserts that in Haiti no witness of the period had
attributed to the Maroons an ideal of or even a need for freedom. Thus César
de Rochefort wrote in 1681 that enslaved persons who had the good fortune
to be under a kind overlord preferred their present servitude to their former
liberty (Fouchard 1972, 34). Another colonist in the same country was non-