"Guerilla Warfare in Eighteenth Century Jamaica" Topic
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Tango01 | 20 Dec 2016 2:50 p.m. PST |
"There is a story that when Christopher Columbus, after his second voyage to the New World in 1494, was asked to describe the new island he had found in the west, he crumpled a sheet of paper and set it before the Spanish king and queen. The Caribbean island was Jamaica, with its magnificent and craggy mountains. Though this story, like many such anecdotes, has been told of other explorers and other places throughout the New World, it helps us to understand how, a few centuries later, a relatively small number of fugitive slaves could very nearly bring Jamaican planter society to its knees. The rugged mountains made the interior of the island an ideal refuge for slaves who, in the 17th and 18th centuries, fled the plantations and created their own societies in the bush. These Maroons, as they were called, were not unique to Jamaica. They sprang up throughout the New World, not only in the Caribbean, but in Central and South America, and in the United States as well; wherever there were slave plantations, there was resistance in the form of slave revolts and runaways. And wherever geography permitted, the escaped slaves gathered together in the hush to form communities. The most famous of these Maroon societies, Palmares in Brazil, contained upwards of 10,000 people and withstood almost a century of Portuguese expeditions against it before it was finally destroyed in the 1690's. On a smaller scale, the southern United States was dotted with settlements of fugitive slaves who sought shelter in the mountains and swamps where they sometimes mixed with Indians. While most such communities were destroyed by the planter societies around them, in a number of cases the European powers could not overcome the Maroons and were forced to sign treaties with them; in Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Hispaniola, Mexico, Jamaica and Surinam, colonial governments offered terms to Maroons, recognizing their freedom and the territorial integrity of their settlements, But it is only in two areas, Jamaica and the Guianas, that the descendants of Maroons have continued as separate and distinct communities into the present. In Jamaica, descendants of the 17th and 18th century Maroons still live on the land their ancestors defended, ever conscious of their past as guerrilla fighters whom the British could not defeat…" Main page link Amicalement Armand |
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