responsible for tripling the volume of the French slave trade over the previous decade, and official figures showed annual African imports to rival consistently the size of the colony’s entire white population year after year, reaching a dizzying total of 30,000 at least as early as 1785. By 1789, Saint-Domingue was the world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee; its plantations produced twice as much as all other French colonies combined; and French ships entering and leaving its ports accounted for more than a third of the metropole’s foreign trade.7
While the decisive economic expansion after 1700 sounded the death knell, both in image and reality, of the masterless Caribbean of an earlier time, it also produced new strata of disaffected individuals who continued to strive to place themselves outside the plantation orbit and survive. In addition, forms of resistance already endemic to the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long standing at the turn of the eighteenth century. As sugar production expanded and regional demography tilted dramatically in favor of Africans, the problem of controlling runaway slaves became one of the paramount concerns of Caribbean planters, colonial officials, and other whites. Workers fleeing plantations and attempting to set up communities of their own provided both concrete alternatives to the plantation regime and a powerful metaphor informing other forms of mobility and resistance in the region.
Africans in Jamaica achieved notable success in their efforts to become independent. The rugged “cockpit country” in the northwest of the island and the Blue Mountains in the east harbored refugees from slavery from the earliest years of Spanish control; these groups of outlying runaway slaves constituted the region’s first “maroons.” As slave imports soared after 1700, Africans followed the well-worn paths of their forebears, leaving plantations for expanding maroon communities in the parishes of Trelawny, St. James, St. Elizabeth, and St. George. As these communities grew, so did their contacts with the plantations, for maroons and slaves carried on a clandestine trade in ammunition and provisions, and maroons staged periodic raids. During the 1730s, a period of slave unrest throughout the Caribbean, the related problems of slave desertion and the hostile activities of communities of runaways became particularly acute, driving the planter class into open warfare with the maroons. A decade of conflict finally forced the government to recognize by treaty the semi-independent status of several maroon towns in 1739. By these treaties, the British government agreed to allow these maroon towns to exist under limited self-government, but at the same time enlisted their aid in policing the island. In return for official recognition, the maroons promised to discourage, apprehend, and return future runaways. Designed to drive a wedge between the maroon towns and nearby plantations, laws passed in the aftermath of the rebellion threatened maroons guilty of “inveigling slaves” from plantations or “harbouring runaways” with banishment from the island.8
Not surprisingly, conflict and ambiguity complicated the history of this arrangement between the planter class and the maroons in the half century after 1740. On occasion, residents of the maroon towns faithfully outfitted parties to track down runaways in their areas, and the accounts brought back to the estates by recaptured runaways produced a marked animosity in the slave huts.9 Such examples of loyalty led Governor Adam Williamson to assert hopefully in 1793 that “the Maroons are well affected, and would exert themselves either in the defence of the Island or quelling internal Insurrections.”10 The planters themselves, however, apprehended danger in the carefree mobility of ostensible black allies, and their concerns surfaced time and again. They observed that the laws restricting the movements of the maroons were indifferently enforced, and they watched as the maroons wandered about with ease in the towns and through the countryside, where they had extensive contact with plantation slaves. The men of Trelawny Town, the largest of the maroon settlements, fathered “numerous Children by Female Slaves, residing on the Low Plantations” of the surrounding parishes, and, concluded a 1795 report, “the Nature of their Connections was alarming.” When the Trelawny maroons took up arms against the government that same year, officials moved quickly to isolate the rebels by cutting off such communication, fully expecting their “Search for concealed Arms in all the Negroe Huts over the Island” to uncover and foil their networks.11
Finally, critics of the government’s treaties pointed out, the agreement with the maroons hardly deterred groups of new runaways from seeking even greater independence and taking to the woods and mountains to establish towns of their own. Well known from estate to estate, the daring exploits of leaders of runaway groups sparked excited conversation among Jamaican slaves and constantly reminded them of both the hazards and the promise of such activity. Market days, dances, horse races, and other public occasions attracting large gatherings of slaves allowed news of these developments to circulate. When Mingo, a fisherman and former driver on a large Trelawny estate, “made a Ball … after the Conclusion of Crop” in the fall of 1791, slaves from neighboring estates who attended were astonished to see Brutus present. An incorrigible runaway serving a life term in the parish workhouse at Martha Brae for his role in organizing unauthorized maroon towns in the 1780s, Brutus had recently escaped and had already set about his old ways. At the ball, Brutus scoffed at his owner’s attempts to recapture him and affirmed rumors spread by recently returned runaways that he, together “with about eighteen other Negroes men slaves and three women of different Countries and owners” from Trelawny, Runaway Bay, and Clarendon, had established an impregnable new town in the backwoods of the parish. Many of those attending Mingo’s ball must have already known of Brutus Town; its residents had planted provisions and through “correspondence” with trusted plantation slaves kept the settlement stocked with “Rum, Sugar, Salt and other necessaries.” Months after Brutus’s dramatic appearance, slaves in St. Ann and Trelawny testified before local officials “that all the Negroes know of this Town” and “that if this Town is not destroyed [the planters] shall not be able to keep a single negroe from going there as they are all trying to get there.” In fact, Brutus Town was only one of several similar runaway settlements inspiring the imaginations if not the active participation of slaves all over “cockpit country.”12
The excitement of the fall and winter of 1791–92, magnified by the black revolution in neighboring Saint-Domingue, energized slave communication networks in Jamaica, and mobile runaway slaves like Brutus may have played a key if hidden role in spreading news from plantation to plantation. Two episodes from Jamaica’s north coast during this period illustrate both that slaves paid close attention to developments around them and that they devised clandestine ways to transmit information quickly and effectively. In November 1791, John Whittaker, proprietor of an outlying plantation, discovered that his slaves learned of recent developments on the coast before he did. After one of his workers informed him of a recent development in Montego Bay the night before word of the incident arrived by a messenger on horseback, Whittaker reflected with amazement and alarm that there must be “some unknown mode of conveying intelligence amongst Negroes.” In this instance, the grapevine of the slaves overcame several significant obstacles. Whittaker’s estate lay in “a retired situation no publick Road leading through or near it,” and Whittaker had his slaves under constant supervision and was certain that “no Negro of mine could have been absent from their employment during the day.” Finally, the distance to Montego Bay, some thirty miles, “was too great to go and return in the night. Yet,” Whittaker related, his slaves “were particularly informed of every circumstance there in less than 24 hours after these Circumstances had taken place.” Around the same time, Montego Bay upholsterer Robert Parker caught an accidental glimpse of nocturnal communication when he left his bedroom one sleepless night. In front of his establishment he saw “four Negroes … very earnest in discourse,” evidently waiting for a scheduled meeting with “two more Negroes that were on the other side of the Bridge.” As they waited, their conversation concerned the number of “Guns and Soldiers” of the whites. Parker received a further surprise when, after the arrival of their friends, the four original companions abandoned English and began to converse in what Parker identified as “Coramantee.”13
The activities of runaway slave communities in Jamaica did not go unnoticed in nearby Cuba, underscoring the fact that the histories of maroon societies in the two islands
