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3. DIAGNÓSTICO ACTUAL
3.3. ADMINISTRACIÓN DE INVENTARIOS
Runaways from slavery had formed communities in forests and hinterlands throughout the Americas since the sixteenth century. In the provinces of Cartagena and neighboring Santa Marta, the mountainous area known as Sierras de María was an epicenter for the formation of
communities of runaways, as were the banks of the Magdalena River (see Map 3). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, colonial authorities and slaveholders saw fugitives from slavery as a threat to rights to property, not only because they had fled enslavement but also because they raided nearby farmlands and villages.4 As early as 1540, the King of Spain attempted to solve the threat that cimarrones posed to the colonial order by offering a royal pardon to the fugitives of Cartagena and its province, on condition that they submit to royal authority. The crown later employed similar strategies to negotiate with maroons in New Spain, Panama,Venezuela, and again in Cartagena. The peace terms often included the possibility of legal freedom from slavery to palenque residents in exchange for their obedience to the crown and their help in containing other fugitives. However, colonial officials often used their local judicial authority to decide whether to implement the royal decrees or to attempt to suppress palenques militarily. In Cartagena, they usually chose the latter.5
As the number of captives who arrived and remained in Cartagena as slaves increased, so did the number of fugitives. This correlation between arrival of captives and increase of runaway activity was obvious to local authorities, who petitioned the King to establish a new tax destined exclusively to fund military operations against cimarrones. In 1624, the King granted a Real Cédula that allowed Cartagena authorities to charge asentistas (holders of charters allowing them to import captives) six reales per each captive they brought to Cartagena. This money was
4 Navarrete, Cimarrones, 115.
5 Jane Landers, “The African Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias and its Hinterlands,” in The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eds. Jorge Cañizares- Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 154. For the 1540 royal pardon, see: Roberto Arrázola, Secretos de la historia de Cartagena (Cartagena: Hernández, 1967), 242.
exclusively to pay for “the conquest, imprisonment and pacification of the black fugitive cimarrones.”6
Map 8. Relief map of Cartagena, Santa Marta, and the Sierras de María. Map by A.M. Silva
Cartagena authorities found it hard to acquire these funds because slave traders usually tried to make as much profit as possible by evading taxes. Correspondence from the subsequent decades suggests that local authorities tried hard to find funds to fight against the maroons. They
6 “Su Mgd que Dios guarde hizo merced a esta dha ciudad de que pudiese cobrar y cobrase seis reales de cada cabeza de negros esclavos que entrasen en este puerto para la conquista, prisión, y pacificación de los esclavos negros cimarrones fugitivos.” Real Cédula, September 3, 1624. Juan de Uriarte contra Joseph Bustanzo, por el pago de derechos de esclavos, f. 1, exp. 2, leg. 575B, Escribanía, AGI.
had to pay for salaries for the soldiers, in addition to the food and weaponry necessary for these weeks-long campaigns. Since the military campaigns against cimarrones were indispensable in the eyes of both colonial officials and Cartagena residents, many of them contributed their own funds when taxes alone were insufficient. Whenever these campaigns were successful in their objective of capturing runaways, the expeditionaries would bring them back to the city. In Cartagena, those who had claimed rights to property in any of the recaptured men, women, and children were supposed to pay a sum to the local authorities for bringing the captive back. Sometimes, as we will see, competing claims to property over those recaptured led to lengthy and complicated legal procedures.7
Military campaigns against cimarrones figured prominently in narratives that celebrated the resilience of the city and its inhabitants against external enemies. In a 1685 account that the city council of Cartagena sent to the Council of the Indies as part of a request for additional Crown funds, for instance, the authors recounted the history of Cartagena as a series of efforts and sacrifices in which bravery and loyalty—expressed through the residents’ monetary
donations—had allowed the city to defend itself against English and French pirates, and against cimarrones. They reported that the city had spent 14,000 pesos “in the pacification of four hundred and more black fugitives” who had threatened the city “for over twenty years.” The main accomplishment in this narrative had been the dismantling and removal of the fortification, “the palenque the cimarrones had made for their defense and protection.”8
7 For the correspondence, see for instance: Memorial del cabildo de Cartagena, March 28, 1685, leg. 207, Santa Fe, AGI.
8 “Otro de catorce mil pesos que dha ciudad dio al gobernador Francisco de Murga y se gastaron en la pacificación de 400 y más negros fugitivos que havía más de veinte años traían alvorotada e ynquieta a aquella provincia […] quitando y desbaratando el palenque que tenían hecho para su resguardo y defensa.” Memorial del cabildo de Cartagena, March 28, 1685, leg. 207, Santa Fe, AGI.
Military expeditions launched from Cartagena and Santa Marta throughout the
seventeenth century were indeed numerous and sometimes successful, forcing runaway leaders and survivors to form new palenques in different places or to join another existing palenque.9 For this reason, the Sierras de María, for instance, were home to palenques that appeared and
disappeared in response to attacks by colonial authorities. Many runaways and their descendants lived in one of those palenques, known as La Magdalena, during the decades of 1630 and 1640. A military campaign led by Cartagena governor Pedro Zapata in 1650 forced the surviving cimarrones to relocate to palenques called San Miguel and Arenal.10 Other palenques coexisted with San Miguel and Arenal or were founded as a result of the destruction of other settlements. In the Cartagena province, there is evidence of several palenques that emerged during the seventeenth century, including Arroyo Piñuela, Limón, Duanga or Luanga, Joyanca, María Angola, Manuel Embuyla, Sanagual, and Matudere or Tabacal. Many cimarrones spent part of their lives in several of these palenques. Descendants of runaways who settled in La Magdalena in the 1630s, for instance, still lived in nearby palenques in the first half of the 1690s. Despite the constant communication among some palenque residents, estancias, and even the city, other residents, especially those who were born in these palenques, might only see the city of Cartagena for the first time in their lives if they were captured by colonial authorities and brought from the forests through the gate at Media Luna.11
9 Jane Landers sees the military campaigns against maroons as characterized by the language and character of Christian crusades. Landers, “The African Landscape,” 152.
10 Roberto Arrázola, Palenque. Primer pueblo libre de América (Bogotá: Todo Impresores, 1986), 17, 58. Navarrete, Cimarrones, 115.
11 Navarrete, Cimarrones, 116. For other palenques in the region, see: Orlando Fals Borda, Historia doble de la Costa, Tomo I, Mompox y Loba (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980), 52-54.
The military campaigns against palenques
At the end of February 1693, the priest Baltazar de la Fuente returned to Cartagena de Indias after a long stay in Madrid. He brought with him a document that generated a series of rumors, legal disputes, a war, and public executions in the city. The document was a Real Cédula in which the King of Spain granted legal freedom to the runaways from slavery who had settled years earlier in the palenques of the Sierras de María.12 The King’s cédula
responded both to the failure in defeating the runaways militarily, and the maroons’ apparent desire to end the fighting and obey the Church and the crown. The local authorities of
Cartagena were reluctant to obey the King’s orders, fearing that runaways from other palenques in the province would also embrace the freedom decree. The authorities were especially concerned about the recent hostilities between Cartagena’s soldiers and some runaways from palenque Matudere, also known as Tabacal.13
After Baltazar de la Fuente arrived in Cartagena with news of the alarming cédula, the governor of Cartagena commissioned a Jesuit priest named Fernando Zapata to survey the palenques, meet their leaders, and evaluate their reaction to the freedom decree. In his report to the governor, the priest offered a description of one palenque named San Miguel
Arcángel.Father Zapata had begun his journey from the village of Tenerife. From there, he traveled about five leguas, one along the Magdalena River, one across the riverbanks, and
12 Carta del Teniente General Pedro Martínez de Montoya, July 19, 1693, folio 315, legajo 212, fondo Santa Fe, AGI.
13 Real Cédula dada por Carlos II, ordenando la reducción de los negros que se hallan fortificados en la Sierra de María, August 23, 1691, ff. 21-23, L. 11, leg. 994, Santa Fe, AGI.
three through the monte. Upon arrival, he identified “a large fundación” (“reconocí fundación grande”), about four blocks long and one block wide, with many bohíos, or huts.14
Father Zapata’s description of palenque San Miguel Arcángel is striking. In contrast with the Spanish ideas of cimarrones as inseparable from the “wild” spaces that they inhabited, Zapata employed the term fundación to describe the palenque. This term usually referred to the process by which Spanish conquerors consolidated their rule over a settlement, officially incorporating a given territory—including its people and buildings—into the
jurisdiction of the Spanish crown.15The built environment of the palenque as described by Zapata is also striking. The regular “cuadras” forming a long and narrow rectangle are more evocative of the gridded urban centers of Spanish America than of the savage environments that colonial authorities imagined palenques to be. It is impossible to know whether Zapata’s description conveyed what palenque San Miguel Arcangel actually looked like. However, his description did evoke European ideas of civility, perhaps because Zapata was himself in favor of granting freedom to the inhabitants of this palenque. Throughout his report, father Fernando Zapata referred to the residents of San Miguel Arcángel as negros. He never used the term cimarrón to describe them.16
14 Representación del padre Fernando Zapata, Tenerife, April 21, 1693, f. 609, Pacificación y reducción. For a study of the political organization and forms of leadership in the palenques of Sierras de María, see: María Cristina Navarrete, "De reyes, reinas y capitanes: los dirigentes de los palenques de las sierras de María, siglos XVI y XVII," Fronteras de la Historia 20:2 (2015): 44-62.
15 Germán Mejía P, La ciudad de los conquistadores: 1536-1604 (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012), 23-24
16 See Representación del padre Fernando Zapata, Tenerife, April 21, 1693, ff. 608-615, Pacificación y reducción. In her study of the maroon community of Amapa in Mexico,
archaeologist Adela Amaral has characterized “maroon groups as self-constructing architects of a colonial built environment, as people constructing their histories within a world of power they did not completely control, but whose limits they nonetheless partially integrated.” Adela