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

70 Flight to Freedom
who deserted at about 15 to 20 per cent, but it is unclear whether he is referring
to the number of women imported or those advertised as runaways.
Figures for the United States during the eighteenth century are somewhat
lower than those for the French colonies. In one sample of runaways in
Virginia, 12 per cent were females, and in another sample of 134 runaways
(apparently from South Carolina), 11 per cent were females (Blassingame
1979, 202). In Suriname, Hoogbergen (1993, 167) reports, the deserters were
mainly “men, in proportion often reaching 90 percent”. In 1843 in the
province of Santa Marta, Colombia, 89.16 per cent of the runaways were
males and 10.84 per cent females (Romero Jaramillo 1997, 185). Aguirre (1993,
248–49) indicates that of 121 Maroons in Lima between 1840 and 1846 for
whom data are available, 71.9 per cent were males and 29.1 per cent females.
Mullin (1992, 289–90) states that in Jamaica between the 1730s and 1805,
women constituted 24 per cent of the total number of deserters (631, as compared
with 1,981 men). In Cuba, in the Todos Tenemos (Bota) settlement
around the mid-nineteenth century, there were at least as many women as
men, and in El Frijol settlement in 1815 the number of women might have
slightly exceeded that of men (La Rosa Corzo 2003, 107–8, 180). According
to the testimonies of two captured Maroons, in 1733 and 1734–35 respectively,
in the Windward settlement in Jamaica the women and children combined
greatly outnumbered the men (Tuelon 1973, 22).
Often, sex ratios of those who absconded are based on the records of those
recaptured. Though these records frequently indicate a higher percentage of
women than men being recaptured, such was not always the case, especially in
urban communities. Karasch (1987, 305–6), for instance, notes that between 1826
and 1837 in Rio de Janeiro one set of newspaper advertisements showed that
25.9 per cent of the runaways were females, but females constituted only 15 per
cent of those recaptured. She surmises that women found it easier than their
male counterparts to hide in the homes of protectors, a view that Donoghue
(2002, 154–55) seems to corroborate in the case of the Danish West Indies.
The extent to which the gender imbalance in the wider enslaved population
influenced the gender ratio of persons who absconded remains uncertain,
but it must have played some role. Among the plantation societies, only
in the southern United States and Barbados did females outnumber males.
In the southern United States, the relatively large number of females did not
affect the general trend of a higher incidence of male than female marronage.
In Barbados the ratio is said to have evened out by the mid-eighteenth cen-