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“…marronage in Suriname was continuous and consequent. Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, large numbers of enslaved people escaped from the coastal plantations, in many cases soon after their arrival from Africa. They fled into the forested interior, where they regrouped into small bands and began forging a viable existence in the new and inhospitable environment. This daunting challenge was made even more difficult by the persistent, massive efforts of the government to eliminate the threat they posed to the colony’s thriving plantations….
The organized pursuit of maroons and expeditions to destroy their settlements date at least from the 1670s, soon after the colony’s founding, when a citizen militia was established for this purpose. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, numerous small-scale military expeditions were mounted, sometimes at the personal expense of particular planters. But these rarely met with success, for the maroons had established and protected their settlements with great ingenuity and had become expert at all aspects of guerrilla warfare. It was between the 1730s and 1750s, when ‘the colony had become the theater of a perpetual war,’ that such expeditions reached their maximum size and frequency. We know from archival documents, for example, that one was sent out in 1730 that included 50 citizens and 200 enslaved men, and that another one, in 1743, was composed of 27 civilians, 12 soldiers, 15 Indians, 165 enslaved men, and 60 canoes. Although one of the military expeditions of this period returned with ‘47 prisoners and 6 hands of those whom they had killed,’ most were fruitless. By the late 1740s, the colonists were finding the expense overwhelming, with typical expeditions costing more than 100,000 guilders and having to traverse (as one document put it) ‘forty mountains and sixty creeks’ before reaching the maroons’ hidden villages. It had also become clear to the colonists that the expeditions themselves were contributing to further marronage by making known to the enslaved both the escape routes from the plantations and the locations of maroon villages.”
-Richard Price & Sally Price on maroonage in Surinam from Maroons in Guyane
