This book is a collection of documents dealing with the problem of runaway slaves in Puerto Rico. The documents were selected from the Archivo General in San Juan. Despite the dates given, only two items are from the eighteenth century, so these documents really illustrate the changing nature of the local slave society at its peak, as reflected by maroons, would-be maroons, and other servile discontented. There is a short but highly informative introductory essay in which the author makes some valuable observations about the historical period and how the selections in the book illuminate the nature of the Caribbean slave society.
Nistal-Moret points out that there were relatively few escapes by maroons in Puerto Rico, especially by Caribbean standards for the large islands. However, there were more escapes by slaves than has been assumed. The documentation in the archives is spotty, yet what exists is sufficient to indicate that the problem was no less endemic than in any other slave society. The peak period for slave escapes coincided with the rapid expansion of the plantation system and the sugar boom, which occurred between 1800 and 1850. After that date, several factors reduced the rate and changed the nature of marronage. First, the forests which provided havens for refugees began to disappear, yielding to the cultivation of coffee, sugarcane, and provisions. Then, the decline of the transatlantic slave trade reduced the number and proportion of Africans among the slave population. A new demographic component evolved which was more creolized to the local environment and less prone to spontaneous group resistance. But if large-scale escapes declined, the number of individual desertions from the regime of slavery increased enormously, a change noticeable in the surviving documents. Indeed, after 1850 the group complaints began to look like trade union demands: better clothing, shorter working hours, better labor conditions, better food, less sexual exploitation, and increased negotiation between slave and master. Long before the abolition of slavery, the slaves had begun to manipulate the system with equal astuteness if less efficacy than their masters, and the social and legal institutions began to reflect that.
This selection of documents indicates clearly the varied nature of the increasingly complex relationships between masters and slaves in Puerto Rico. Although lacking the scope of the documents in Robert Conrad’s Children of God’s Fire, this book will be especially valuable to specialists who can handle the nonmodernized spelling, and who have access to the excellent two-volume work, El proceso abolicionista en Puerto Rico: Documentos para su estudio, published by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña between 1974 and 1978.
