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 in the eighteenth century were closely intertwined. First, maroons in the two islands virtually shared a common space. One of the centers of maroon activity in the Spanish colony, the steep and densely wooded Sierra Maestra ranging along the east–west coastline at Cuba’s southeastern tip, was a short sail from the edge of Jamaica’s “cockpit country,” and from points high in the sierra the peaks of the British island’s Blue Mountains were actually visible.14 The short distance between the two islands concerned Spanish officials, who feared that communities of runaway slaves in the Sierra Maestra might make common cause with hostile British forces in Jamaica.15
One chapter of the common history of maroons in Jamaica and Cuba was written in the 1730s, when the timing of the First Maroon War in Jamaica coincided exactly with a similar uprising among slaves working near the east coast of Cuba. In 1731, at precisely the time when the rebels in Jamaica were beginning their armed struggle for independence, slaves in the state-run copper mines near Santiago de Cuba revolted en masse and took to the mountains east of the city, near the present-day site of El Cobre. Like their counterparts in Jamaica, these so-called cobreros managed to resist repeated attempts to dislodge them and caused considerable concern for the planters in the valley below. By the 1780s, descendants of the original rebels, now numbering more than a thousand, had fanned out from El Cobre into smaller settlements scattered throughout the surrounding sierra.16 Again during the 1790s, the cycle of unrest and official anxiety over maroon activity affected Cuba as much as Jamaica. Governors of Santiago de Cuba, now heavily involved in Cuba’s full-fledged and growing investment in African slave labor, reported that their best efforts to bring the cobreros under control had failed. In fact, by the middle of the decade, El Cobre welcomed all kinds of fugitives from slavery, “cobreros as well as other slaves,” and was home for several infamous characters who had been on the run for years.17 Apprehensive that the Jamaican Maroon War of 1795–96 would spread to the Cuban mountains, as it apparently had in the 1730s, Cuban officials did not hesitate to show solidarity with their British neighbors; when the Jamaica Assembly