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Negro resistance to slavery and the Atlantic

slave trade from Africa to Black America

111

1676, 1683, 1686, and Domingos Jorge Velho, 1692,1694 (Portuguese-Brazilian

expeditions).

The capital of the quilombo of Palmares, Macaco, fell on 26 February 1694

after a siege of twenty-two days. The fighting went on in the other mocambos:

Una, Catingas and Engana-Colomim.

The death of Nzumbi, who was killed by the Paulistes on 20 November

1695, put an end to this gallant quilombo. After the destruction of Palmares, a

number of quilombos continued to give vent to the threats of the Negroes up

to the time of the nineteenth-century insurrections, which broke out in the

colonial towns of Bahia and Säo Paulo.

Maroons and privateers slip through the Hispanic American net—

sixteenth to nineteenth centuries

With the Maroon Negroes holding sway at Nombre de Dios on the Panama
route and controlling the traffic from Mexico City to Vera Cruz, a whole system
was being overturned and America began in the sixteenth century to slip out of
the grasp of the Spaniards. With the support of these rebel Negroes, British,
French and Dutch adventurers weakened the defences of the Spanish monopoly.
The Negroes armed themselves in the process and were better able to hold their
own, for example, in the isthmuses. They built fortifications on land, in Vene-
zuela and Colombia, where they constitued a threat, and at the end of the
eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth, they played an
important part in the liberation movements in those countries. As an example,
one has only to mention Venezuela. The insurrections of Maroon Negroes in
the Coro peninsula were a determining factor in the building of the nation.

Caribbean Maroon Negroes

Several slave-struggle sectors can be distinguished in the archipelago of the
West Indies :
The Lesser Antilles (Leeward and Windward Islands), seventeenth to nine-
teenth centuries.
The 'Maroon' wars in Jamaica, 1655 to 1860.
The Cuba stockades and the slave uprising in the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries. The wars which took place in the second half of the nineteenth
century, the Ten Year War and the 1898 War, in which Negro troops
led by Antonio Maceo won renown, must be studied as part of this
process of Maroon Negro revolts.
The slave uprising at Santo Domingo, from the time of La Española and the
revolt of Enriquillo, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which
Spain had such difficulty in suppressing, to the destruction of the slave
system.