Bonekickers

The history behind ‘Warriors’: Maroons

By Dr. Mark Horton

Maroons, or cimarróns were escaped slaves, living in often remote and inaccessible communities in the West Indies, Central and South America, and along the east coast of North America. Their history dates back to the very beginning of the slave trade to the New World, and as early as 1572 Francis Drake used them as allies on this attacks on the Spanish in Panama.

The larger islands of the Caribbean provided an ideal refuge and by the end of the seventeenth century, substantial communities existed in the mountains on Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Many intermarried with the indigenous Carib and Arawak populations and posed a sizable threat to the Europeans because they raided plantations and encouraged further slaves to run away. A series of maroon wars were fought to defeat them, but were generally unsuccessful as the maroons themselves became agile in early guerrilla tactics using the thick jungle and difficult terrain. In Jamaica, the British eventually signed a treaty in 1740 with the maroons that gave them their freedom and 2500 acres, in exchange for peace and an agreement to return any further escaped slaves.

In North America, communities of maroons lived in the swamps of Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. Only recently has archaeological work begun to uncover evidence for their settlements, as they are poorly documented historically. The Carolina maroons lived in the Great Dismal Swamp, an area of dense forest and lakes, which remained largely inaccessible up until the nineteenth century. One of the first people in 1763 to attempt to exploit the timber and drain the swamp was George Washington. There were probably at least a thousand escaped slaves living there in the 1770s.

Slaves fighting in war

Europeans realised that maroons could be useful allies in the colonial wars of the eighteenth century and they were actively recruited as irregular troops. The French raised a regiment of 5,000 Haitian maroons to fight in the American War of Independence, while ‘brigands’ (slaves freed after the French Revolution in 1792) fought against the British in the battles for control of the Windward Islands 1793-7. Another group were the Black Caribs, descendants of slaves escaping from a shipwreck on the island of St Vincent in 1645. They fought with the French as mercenaries, and had a reputation as being especially vicious and bellicose and were eventually removed from St Vincent by the British and resettled on the Bay Islands.

Black soldiers in the American War of Independence

Black soldiers fought on both sides during the American War of Independence. The British were keen to recruit additional soldiers, and encouraged slaves to escape from the Revolutionaries’ plantations and join their forces in exchange for their freedom.

Around 20,000 did so, but presented a serious problem at the end of hostilities, when they were first resettled in Canada and later on a new colony in Sierra Leone.

It seems that he had at least 200 blacks in his band - the most famous was Oscar Marion, who appears in a painting that hangs in the US Congress, and who incidentally was named in 2006 by President Bush as an ‘Afro-American patriot for his devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States.’

A prison was built in 1776, at Stapleton on the outskirts of Bristol to house prisoners from the American War of Independence. It is not known if black prisoners were held there from this war, but they certainly were from later conflicts.