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Forms of Marronage
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their settlements when necessary. Strategically and operationally, it would
have been much more difficult to wipe out twenty or more small groups than
a few large ones, because the former were more amorphous and lacked a central
authority or headquarters that the expeditionary forces could target. Still,
we cannot make any definitive statement about the survival capacity of small
as against large groups, mainly because small groups did not enter the historical
record as often as large ones, and some of them entered simply as a footnote
in the diaries of military leaders who encountered them. More often
than not, while the places of encounter might be mentioned, the groups are
not identified by name either collectively or in relation to their leaders. Still,
in some countries – for example, Peru – small groups played a significant role
in harassing the slaveholders (Bowser 1974, 187–221).
It was the large collectives that the Whites feared most and that received
the greatest attention from the colonial state and the plantocracy.
Contemporary records speak often of Maroon “camps” or “encampments”,
suggesting that these were temporary phenomena rather than well-established
communities, and that their denizens lived largely by brigandage.
Doubtless, some settlements were of this character, but there were others that
were more stable, catering to fairly large populations. Though modern scholars
believe that the Whites considerably exaggerated the size of the largest
communities, many of them were substantial enough to be regarded by contemporary
writers as states and their operational centres as towns. This was
grudging, and no doubt unintended, tribute to their survival capacity and the
organizational abilities of their leaders. Palmares is writ large in the annals of
Maroon history because these features were more prominently displayed in it
than elsewhere; it has often been dubbed in both scholarly and popular literature
as a republic of warriors.
Gender and Marronage
The gender imbalance in most Maroon communities has led some writers to
conclude that women were not as interested as men in absconding. The common
view is that the female adult population in Maroon communities comprised
largely women who were abducted, mainly to satisfy the biological and
social needs of male Maroons. Debien (1979, 109) strongly implies that this
was the case, stating that the most common “crime” was the abduction of