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

Forms of Marronage
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that pregnancy and motherhood did constrain other women in respect of
marronage.
Stedman (1988, 80) gives the impression that fleeing women were a common
sight in Suriname in the 1770s. According to him, enslaved persons –
men, women and children – often rose up against their overlords, killed the
White inhabitants, ravaged the plantations and fled as a group to the woods.
Gautier (1985, 237) declares that some women deserted while pregnant, which
to her is a clear indication of their refusal to bring up their children under
slavery. Among the examples that Fouchard cites is Marie, who took off with
her children, aged seventeen, four and two years: “The procession continues
with babies of all ages. There were those born on slave ships, whose mothers
attempted to snatch them from slavery, spiriting them away into marronage
as soon as they arrived in port” (1972, 285).
It is possible that Maroon abduction of Indian rather than African women
occurred on a proportionately larger scale in societies where the number of
Indian women was large, such as Mexico, Peru and Colombia. We cannot,
however, assume that all, or almost all, Indian women found in Black
Maroon settlements were abducted. In Mexico, for instance, the colonial
authorities complained to the imperial government that the legal prohibition
against amorous relations between Africans and Indians ran afoul of the
stubborn reality that Indian women preferred to marry Black rather than
Indian men, and that Black men married Indian women so as to have free
children (Martin 1957, 99). While there may have been a certain element of
pragmatism in these unions, mutual attraction certainly played a role.
Colonial laws sought in vain to prohibit such marriages, as happened in
Mexico in 1568 (Dusenberry 1948, 291).
Reliable figures for the sexual composition of Maroon communities are
extremely difficult to find, but the following is a sample of what is available.
In 1693 a captured Maroon from the Matudere (Matadure, Matubere,
Matubre, Tabacal) settlement 5 in Cartagena reported that it consisted of
ninety-nine people – fifty-four Black males, forty-two Black females and
three Mulattos (Borrego Plá 1973, 86). In the Bahoruco (Le Maniel) settlement
6 on the Haiti–Dominican Republic border in 1785, the population comprised
seventy-five males (forty-two Maroon-born) and fifty-eight females
(thirty-eight Maroon-born). 7 In the late eighteenth century the male-tofemale
Maroon ratio in Guadeloupe was estimated at two to one (Gautier
1985, 231, 234). Fouchard (1972, 289) estimates the number of women in Haiti