Contested Conquests: African Maroons and the Incomplete Conquest of Hispaniola, 1519–1620

On July 13, 1571, King Philip II of Spain, via a real cédula, authorized the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to enact plans to "conquer" a community of African cimarrones (maroons, runaway slaves) located about 36 miles from the city of Santo Domingo. The king offered to those who ventured forth compensation in the form of the cimarrones they captured as slaves.¹ At face value, the substance of this order was not particularly unique. Since the 1520s, runaway African slaves had formed maroon communities in remote regions bordering Spanish conquests. By the 1570s, African maroons could be found in practically every part of Spanish America.² The uniqueness of Philip's order comes from the choice of language, in particular the decision to label the expedition a conquest. In most cases, the monarch or his officials used words like 'reduce' (reducir/reducciones), 'pacify' (pacificar/pacificación), 'castigate' (castigar), or 'dislodge' (desechar) to describe the goal of such campaigns. By describing an anti-maroon campaign as a conquest, this cédula went against the dominant Spanish narrative of the sixteenth century, in which resistance, especially by Africans or native groups, signified a punctuated disturbance of an ostensibly stable and coherent postconquest colonial order. The wording of the cédula, and the maroon movements to which it responded, explicitly link anti-maroon campaigns to the process of Spanish conquest. This article suggests that Spanish-maroon contestation on Hispaniola should be construed as an integral piece of a prolonged and often incomplete Spanish conquest. More importantly, this reevaluation of the conflict reveals maroons to be conquerors in their own right.

The English word 'maroon' derives from the Spanish cimarrón. Dating from the earliest years of Spanish settlement in the Caribbean, cimarrón could be applied to indigenous groups, Africans, and even livestock that had 'gone wild' or fled outside of Spanish control. The word derives from the Taino root símara meaning arrow. Within decades after contact, Spaniards had appropriated a derivation, símaran, meaning 'wild, savage, gone astray,' as cimarrón.³ On Hispaniola, the first significant use of the term came in 1519 when an indigenous leader, Enrique, fled with members of his community to a remote region named the Bahoruco where they lived outside Spanish control for over a decade. In the years that followed, runaway slaves who chose to establish themselves in remote communities came to be known as cimarrones.

Marronage constitutes one of several forms of resistance to the institution of slavery.⁴ Scholars divide marronage into two forms: 'petit marronage' and 'grand marronage.'⁵ Slaves engaging in petit marronage typically fled for short periods, individually or in small groups. Absences lasted days to weeks, and slaves often returned of their own accord. Grand marronage differed from petit marronage in scale and intent: it involved large groups of slaves, who having fled slavery, banded together to form autonomous communities.⁶

This article examines African individuals who engaged in both forms of marronage. In looking back at sixteenth-century Hispaniola, the division between petit and grand marronage appears blurry. Spanish sources often use negros cimarrones (black maroons), negros alzados (black rebels), and negros huidos (runaway blacks) to refer to Africans who had fled Spanish masters and resisted recapture, at times interchangeably. The first two terms correspond to manifestations of grand marronage, whereas the third is more commonly associated with petit marronage. Sadly for the historian, the documents do not allow for fine-grained differentiation between slaves engaged in short-term flight and those seeking a more permanent escape.⁷ Moreover, the documents suggest that on Hispaniola petit marronage could transition into grand marronage quite fluidly as individual slaves or small groups became incorporated into long-standing maroon communities. Consequently, in order to assess marronage in its varied forms I use the term maroon to refer to individuals engaged in both forms of flight.

This article challenges traditional assumptions about slavery, slave resistance, and colonialism. Most scholars of maroons on Hispaniola and elsewhere view marronage as a problem of colonialism, not a problem of conquest.⁸ Following...