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

72 Flight to Freedom
Brazilian Maroons carried off White women only rarely and usually ransomed
them without sexually molesting them. The celebrated author Edison
Carneiro (1946, 108) found only one occasion on which the Palmarino
(Palmarista) warriors were alleged to have raped some White women, as
reported by Antonio Garro da Câmara, a Pernambucan soldier, in 1682.
Patterson (1979, 286) could not find a single recorded case of rape throughout
the history of revolts and marronage in Jamaica, though several White women
were killed. This is not to suggest that no instances of rape occurred in that
country, but such cases were rare. In other jurisdictions we sometimes
encounter charges of Maroons raping both White and Black women. For
instance, William L. Hill, head of a militia unit in Onslow County, North
Carolina, complained in 1821 that the runaways had “ravished a number of
females” (Schweninger 2002, 6).
Gautier (1985, 229, 235–38), while recognizing that enslaved women of
almost all ages, colours, and maternal circumstances absconded, insists that
the fact that there were fewer female than male Maroons had nothing to do
with a less acute desire for freedom but rather with the special circumstances
of their lives. Among these were the need to take care of their very young
children, who might not have survived the rigours of the flight from slavery
to freedom; the fact that men enjoyed much greater mobility than women,
since they were assigned to work as messengers, fishermen, traders, dockworkers,
artisans, military cohorts, scouts, baggage carriers and so on; the
suspicion that would have attended a woman being seen alone in the bush or
with very young children; the risk of being raped by men of all colours; and
the difficulties of negotiating through certain kinds of terrain. All these
impediments provide a sound, if not a comprehensive, explanation for the
relatively smaller female than male Maroon population. 8 Gautier also
believes that the practice in Africa of men ranging much farther than women
from their home base to hunt and fish gave men greater confidence to venture
into the unknown forests in the Americas. She suggests that women
were more disposed to flee with all their family members when the destination
was another country where they would be declared free (ibid., 230).
The received wisdom is that women were disposed to flee to urban rather
than rural communities because they offered more opportunities of earning a
living and the deserters could avoid the rigours of forest or mountain terrain.
Higman (1984a, 389) implies this for Kingston, Jamaica, and states it explicitly
for Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1817. Heuman (1986, 99–101), however,