The Wolf, the island and the sea: truancy and escaping slavery in Curacao (1837–1863)

ABSTRACT

Between 1837–1863, the government on the Dutch colony of Curacao registered the escape attempts from all enslaved persons on the island. By combining the structured information of the ‘register of runaway slaves’ with other sources, it becomes clear that running away during slavery was a multi-faceted phenomenon. The 1,613 registered escape attempts included not only escapees, trying to flee the island, but also a majority of truants who fled temporarily but stayed on the island. Escapees were mostly young men, who normally worked in groups and had to prepare their attempts well, in order to have a chance to escape the island. An analysis of the profiles of truants show that they were a wide range of persons, from pregnant women to elderly people, fleeing alone or in groups. All these people not only needed an opportunity to flee, but also a place to go to. Together, they created a ‘maroon landscape’, a mental map of opportunities available to enslaved people. Their mental landscape did include locations, people and circumstances on Curacao, but also the sea surrounding it. Moreover, seasonal effects like harvest time and changes abroad altered the ‘maroon landscape’ continuously and lead to an adjustment of behavior, which is most obvious after the abolition of slavery in nearby Venezuela in 1854.

KEYWORDS:

• Slavery
• truancy
• escape
• Caribbean
• Curacao
• maritime marronage

1. The flight with the schooner Wolf

On Sunday 25 July 1841, the schooner Wolf ploughed through the waters of the Caribbean Sea north of Curacao. On board of the sailing ship were nineteen people: four of them were free and fifteen enslaved. Yet this was no slave ship, but a flight to freedom. The nineteen had boarded the night before in the remote Daaibooi Bay in Curacao. Their destination was the city of Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola, which at the time was part of the republic of Haiti where slavery had been abolished since 1804. The refugees were a group of men and one woman, all between the ages of 17 and 48.¹ Most had worked either at Van der Meulen’s shipyard in Willemstad or as sailors on the ships of the De Haseth family, the owners of the Wolf.

The Wolf‘s flight, and three other escape attempts on the island on the same day, led to turmoil in Curacao. That same morning the De Haseth family sent out the swift sailing schooner Jan Ernst to search after the refugees. On board of this ship was second lieutenant Slengarde, the adjutant of the commander of Curacao, who wrote an extensive report of this search mission.² By the evening of 27 July, the refugees reached the coast of Hispaniola somewhere east of Santo Domingo. As they sailed westwards towards the city, they noticed a large ship anchored in front of the city flying a red-white-blue flag, which they feared was a Dutch warship.³ From the opposite side, they saw the Jan Ernst appearing in the distance. A huge tropical downpour came to their rescue. Due to the rain the crew of the Jan Ernst did not notice them and the panic-stricken refugees took advantage of this to run their ship into a beach east of Santo Domingo. They jumped on the shore and fled towards the city. When the Jan Ernst entered the port of Santo Domingo on 28 July, they stood on the quay watching, secure in the knowledge that they were beyond the reach of the Dutch government. Slengarde’s attempts to get the ship and those on board back via the Haitian governor of Santo Domingo were unsuccessful; the governor refused to hand over the escapees and the schooner Wolf only returned to the De Haseth family after the payment of a handsome finder’s fee.

The newspaper Curaçaose Courant of 7 August 1841 reported extensively on the chase and the events on Hispaniola. In his conclusion, the newspaper editor emphasized that the flight was not at all in the interest of the enslaved. In fact, a number of them had wanted to return immediately, according to him:

On the arrival of the boat JAN ERNST in the city of St. Domingo, several runaway slaves were seen among the curious crowd - two of them, slaves of Mr. PH. DE HAZETH, sailors of the WOLF, seemed to have been taken against their will; for, with tears in their eyes, they prayed to be allowed to return with their master, but the [Haitian] government would not allow it. They will all regret having taken this step; for most of them, if not all, did it out of wantonness. They were in the best of circumstances here [on Curacao], and though slaves, as seamen and tradesmen they had many liberties and won much money. They are now free, but for four years they must serve the [Haitian] government as soldiers or workers at the public works.⁴

In his report to the commander of Curacao, Slengarde does not mention sailors who wanted to return to Curacao. He quite clearly spoke to some of the escapees and wrote admiringly of the organization of the flight, which he said had been organized by the enslaved Simon together with the freeman Theodorus, a crew member of the Wolf. Slengarde also warned that the escapees had suggested that more people on Curacao had been involved in the flight and that more escape attempts could be expected.⁵ That warning came true immediately: at least seven other people ran away in the days following the flight and three months later, five men successfully escaped to Coro in Venezuela. They fled from plantation Groot St. Michiel, which was on the route between Willemstad and Daaibooi Bay. Like the escape with the Wolf, this escape was also connected to a number of individual escape attempts from neighboring plantations.⁶

The story of the flight with the Wolf has a number of striking aspects. The first aspect is how well organized the flight was. Despite the large group, the escapees managed to keep their plan quiet. At least part of the group also managed to walk more than twenty kilometers from Willemstad to Daaibooi Bay during the night across Curacao’s countryside without being detected. Finally, they sailed directly to Santo Domingo, although none of them had ever been there before, according to Slengarde’s report. A tribute to the skills of these enslaved sailors (Dawson, 2013). The second aspect that stands out is the information the enslaved apparently had at their disposal. The group from the shipyard knew in advance when the schooner would be in Daaibooi Bay and they also knew that Santo Domingo was a safe haven to flee to. The information about the flight must have been shared with other people as well, not only to avoid raising the alarm prematurely, but also to provoke smaller escape attempts that would cause confusion about the flight. A third aspect that stands out is the cooperation between free and enslaved people. The Wolf‘s free crew members were clearly allies during the flight. A fourth, and last aspect, is that the flight was the supporting escape attempts did not end in escapes. All persons involved in these added attempts stayed on the island. For them it was at most a temporary relief from slavery.

In this paper we discuss escape attempts of enslaved in the Dutch island of Curacao, mainly based on information from the so-called ‘Register of runaway slaves’, which covered escape attempts by both escapees and truants from 1839 until the abolition of slavery in the Dutch Caribbean in 1863. The literature on marronage and related resistance is vast. Especially for the Caribbean, there has been much emphasis on maritime marronage (Beckles, 1985, Heuman, 1986, Hall & Higman, 1992, Chinea 1997, Handler, 1997, Rupert, 2009, Dawson, 2021). For Curacao, research on marronage has focused on the early modern period, when Curacao was a trading hub for the Dutch West India Company (Rupert, 2009, 2014, Jordaan, 2013, Oostindie, 2014, Vink, 2023). In 1816, Curacao became a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Hardly any research has been done on escape attempts of enslaved people in Curacao in the 19^th century.

We will discuss whether the fugitives tried to flee the island permanently or whether their escape attempts were temporary (Price, 1979, Thompson 2006, Moomou, 2015), but rather than treating this in the context of ‘grand’ versus ‘petit’ marronage, we will work with Diouf’s (2014, pp. 72–96) concept of a ‘maroon landscape’, with interdependent, and often blurred, spaces of slavery and freedom. On an island like Curacao, the ‘maroon landscape’ also included the surrounding sea, which could be both a place of opportunity and a limitation for fugitives, because a flight overseas would cut off the ties with relatives on the island (Scott, 2018, Roitman, 2016).

In this article, we talk about escape attempts or flights and fugitives or fleeing persons. A person who has escaped slavery is called an escapee, while we reserve the term truant for those who returned to the place they fled from, in line with Camp’s (2002, 2004) concept of truancy, to indicate that escape from slavery also had a clear gender connotation.

2. The ‘register of runaway slaves’

Much research on flight conduct of enslaved persons is based on search advertisements placed in newspapers by enslavers (Mullin, 1972, Heuman, 1985, Waldstreicher, 1999, Nelson, 2017, Hunt-Kennedy, 2020, Newman, 2022). Such ads also exist for Curacao, but they are scarce and often uninformative, as they usually contained only the name of the person who fled and the name of the enslaver, along with general wording warning readers not to shelter the truant.⁷ Advertisements seem to have been less necessary because the colonial government started to register all escape attempts from 1837 onwards. The function of advertisements was fulfilled by the ‘Register van Weggelopene slaven’, literally the ‘register of runaway slaves’.⁸

This ‘register of runaway slaves’ was only one of a number of registers designed to control the enslaved population of Curacao. In the decades before the abolition of slavery, the colonial government started an extensive registration of the lives and activities of the enslaved inhabitants (Van Galen, 2020). The most important one was the ‘slave register’ (1839–1863) in which the legal ownership, and changes therein, were registered for almost all enslaved on the island on a day-to-day basis (Langenfeld et al, 2020, Van Galen et al, 2023). Other registers included a register of exported enslaved (1846–1863), registers of the birth and death of enslaved persons (1838–1863) and a register of punishments given to enslaved people (1857–1863) (Van Galen, 2020).⁹ Finally, the government checked the whereabouts of all registered enslaved persons in 1863, just before the end of slavery (Siwpersad, 1979, Allen, 2007).¹⁰

The information from the different registers can be combined to research the lives of enslaved persons in Curacao. Especially the ‘slave register’, ‘the register of runaway slaves’ and the final check of 1863 taken together enable us to understand which people tried to escape and to indicate what the ratio was between truants and escapees.

The ‘register of runaway slaves’ started as early as 1837 (see Figure 1). The aim of the register was to keep an overview of every enslaved who fled from an enslaver. In this register was kept:

1. The date the flight was reported

2. The names of the enslavers

3. The name and description of the fugitive

4. The result of the escape attempt

5. The location from where the enslaved person fled

6. Remarks

Figure 1. First page of the ‘register of runaway slaves’ of Curacao. Nationaal Archief Curaçao, 005 Archief Koloniale Overheid, 3 Arbeidszaken, inventory 8 Register van weggelopen, teruggekeerde en opgevatte slaven, juli 1837–mei 1863 (NAC 005-3-8).

The value of the ‘register of runaway slaves’ is that it brings together in a uniform way all recorded escape attempts from Curacao, between June 1837 and the abolition of slavery on 1 July 1863, a period of 26 years. This makes it, in theory, a better source for research on truants than newspaper advertisements, because it makes comparisons over the years possible and it involved not only those who made a successful escape but also people who fled temporarily. In total, there were 1,613 recorded escape attempts, an average of about 64 persons per year. This suggests that on average, each year about 1% of the enslaved population tried to flee. The actual number of reported escape attempts per year varied widely, from seven people in 1847 to 198 in 1857 (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Overview of escape attempts in Curacao between 1837 and 1863, as registered in the ‘Register of runaway slaves’ of Curacao (NAC 005-3-8).

The value of the register is enhanced by the possibility to connect the names of the refugees and the enslavers with their registrations in the slave register, to show their lives before and after the escape attempt. This makes it possible to make connections which are not visible in the original sources. Take for example the 17-year-old Flora, the only woman in the group which escaped with the Wolf. According to the slave register, she had been sold to Curacao in March 1840 from St. Thomas, an island near Hispaniola. On Curacao, she was sold on twice before ending up with the De Haseth family.¹¹ Moreover, through a previous enslaver in Curacao, she knew two people who had been sold as labourers to the shipyard of Van der Meulen. Her knowledge of the northern Caribbean, her work in the household of a ship owner’s family and her connections to the ship crews and the shipyard workers, gave her a central position in the information network which was necessary for the flight of the Wolf. A central position which is not visible, unless we combine the information from a number of sources.

The description from the register can also be combined with the slave register to create an overview of all people whose escape attempts were registered. The average age was 29 years, but that picture is somewhat distorted by a number of elderly truants. The median age is therefore slightly lower, at 24 years. Of the 1,613 registered escape attempts, 60.9% were made by men and 37.1% by women (the gender of the remaining 2% is unknown), a sex ratio of 1.64. But this is also an average: in a number of years, especially in the 1840s, the number of escape attempts by women was higher than that of men, as can be seen in Figure 2. In 68% of the escape attempts, the location were the enslaved escaped from was mentioned in the register. Of the known locations, 54.7% were in Willemstad and 42.6% in rural districts. Two men, Johannes and Leonard, escaped while working abroad as enslaved sailors. Johannes was a sailor aboard of the aforementioned schooner Jan Ernst. He escaped during a stop in Jamaica in August 1853.¹²

This first overview of the people who attempted to escape already shows that they were not a cross-section of the enslaved population. They were overwhelmingly male and a majority fled from the city. However, two thirds of the general enslaved population lived in rural areas of Curacao and worked mostly as farm laborers. The remaining one third lived and worked in Willemstad, often as craftsmen or domestic workers. This division of labor led to a skewed distribution of enslaved men and women across the island. On the plantations men were in the majority, in the city women because of their work as domestic staff. This is reflected in the sex ratio among enslaved people: in 1845 it was 1.2 in the countryside, and a very skewed 0.51 in the city. For the island as a whole, the sex ratio was 0.9. Thus, there were more enslaved women than men on the island, especially in the city of Willemstad, where the ratio was two to one.¹³

The register also gives qualitative information. Especially interesting is the description of the fugitives, because this information is lacking in the slave register, which only mention the first name, mother’s name, names of the enslaver or enslavers and changes of ownership.¹⁴ It gives us an opportunity to know something more about the people in slavery. To give an example; Flora, who fled with the Wolf, is described as:

Flora, daughter of Martina, 17 years old, 5 feet tall, face oblong, forehead ordinary, eyes black, nose flat, mouth big, chin long, hair black and frizzy, eyebrows black. Distinguishing marks: bent knees, flaws on the toes.¹⁵

This description thus provides the name, mother’s name, age and indications of height, ethnicity and any distinguishing marks. Like Flora’s description, many descriptions were quite detailed, but the descriptions in the column ‘name and description of the fugitive’ had no fixed form. Sometimes they were relatively extensive, sometimes they were very limited: in 44% of the cases, the description was limited to the name only. This makes it hard to quantify types of information which are sometimes mentioned, but which cannot be checked with other sources, like ethnicity or height.

What the descriptions show well are the things that enslavers valued or disliked. Bastiaan, one of the persons who also escaped with the Wolf, was described as having ‘brazen and dishonest’ looks, while Alexander, a 20-year old man who fled from plantation Van Engelen in 1850, was ‘ugly faced’ according to enslaver H.C. Henriquez.¹⁶ In 1846, enslaver Rynardus Berch knew little else to say about the 19-year old Martina than that she had ‘two extraordinary big breasts’.¹⁷ This could explain why Martina had fled from the enslaver.

The descriptions quite often mentioned signs of malformation, bruises and scars, a reminder of the harsh conditions in which enslaved people lived in Curacao and the risks of mistreatment by enslavers. The descriptions also show how mixed the enslaved population was. Most of them were from African descent, but with a mix of European and indigenous-American influences which could be so extensive that some enslaved persons had blond hair and blue eyes. This was the case for Jogemus, one of the men who flew from plantation Groot St. Michiel in October 1841.¹⁸

In general, the earlier descriptions of fugitives are more informative than the later ones. The quality of the declaration ultimately depended on the effort the declarant was willing to put in. Figure 2 shows that the amount of declarations fluctuated quite a bit over the years. This was partly due to actual escape behavior, such as group escapes in 1841 and in 1855 and 1856. It was also influenced by the extent to which slaveholders were concerned about escapes. Attention was greater around 1840, just after the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. It fell after the Dutch and Venezuelan governments signed an agreement for the exchange of escaped enslaved in 1841 (Gibbes et al, 2015, p. 110). It increased again after 1854 when the abolishment of slavery in nearby Venezuela made escapes somewhat easier.

In the years between 1844 and 1854, there was less concern and fewer escape attempts were recorded. There was certainly some under registration here. In the 1855 Colonial Report for the Dutch Parliament it was estimated that enslavers registered only about half of the escape attempts.¹⁹ For example, according to the slave register a woman called Hosepha or Josefa gave birth to her son Leonardus ‘in the forest’ on an unknown date in 1850.²⁰ She was clearly on the run, but this specific flight was not recorded in the runaway register, although eight other flight attempts by Hosepha or Josefa were recorded in the early 1840s and late 1850s.

3. Where to flee from, where to flee to?

The different composition of the group of people recorded as running away compared to the enslaved population as a whole indicates that running away was not a random process. To truly escape or run away, a person did not only need to have a reason, but also the ability to flee and knowledge of a place to flee to. They needed a mental picture of the maroon landscape available to them.

Every escape attempt in Curaçao was influenced by the island’s natural geography. Curaçao is a relatively arid island, approximately sixty kilometers long and four to fourteen kilometers wide. It is situated about 70 kilometers off the coast of Venezuela. Due to its relatively dry climate the island was unsuitable for large-scale plantations, but the excellent harbor of Willemstad made it a natural trading hub, with regular connections to various ports in Venezuela, St. Thomas, Puerto Rico and other islands (Jordaan, 2013). The plantations on the island were mainly mixed farms, supplying food to this trading hub. Around 1860, the island had nearly 20,000 inhabitants, of whom approximately thirty percent were still enslaved. Most inhabitants lived in Willemstad or in the countryside surrounding the city (Renkema, 1981, pp. 336–337). See Figure 3 for a map of Curacao.

Figure 3. The island of Curacao in 1838. The red circles show two locations which were used as places of refuge by runaways: Willemstad and the more empty and rugged western part of the island. Source: R.F. van Raders, Kaart van het eiland Curaçao (1838). Collection University of Amsterdam.

It is hard to say anything about individual motivations of refugees and we may assume that each of them had her or his own reason to flee. In general, living conditions on the island could have played a role, especially the availability of food. The register shows that people were least likely to flee in March to May, just after the harvest. Scarcity of food due to bad harvests in the early 1840s and late 1850s could, to some extent, explain the rise in the number of escape attempts in this period (Renkema, 1981, pp. 112–119 & 360–361).

Based on the concept of a ‘maroon landscape’, we may expect that the places to flee from often overlapped with the places to flee to (Diouf, 2014, pp. 72–96). The possibilities for escapes and the presence of the necessary information probably explain the relatively larger number of escape attempts in and around Willemstad. The port of Willemstad employed many enslaved people who had experience as sailors and in Willemstad it was easier to get information from the many Dutch and foreign ships that visited the port. Moreover, those ships offered an opportunity to embark or depart from Curacao as a stowaway.

A particular hotspot within the ‘maroon landscape’ of Willemstad was the Van der Meulen shipyard, where some of the refugees from the schooner Wolf came from. Over a period of 25 years, at least ten escape attempts were made by groups of people from this yard. The shipyard mainly employed men in the prime of their lives, who had skills that made them attractive workers outside Curacao. On the wharf, they also met people who could tell them about travel destinations, ship movements and other relevant information for a flight. In addition, Van der Meulen often hired skilled workers from other enslavers on the island. These men were already removed from their social environment. This may have lowered the threshold to flee.

In the countryside of Curacao, the possibilities for escape were more limited. This was especially true for the eastern and western areas, which lay further away from densely populated areas. Proportionally more people fled from farms in the so-called ‘Middendistrict’ of Curacao. This district was close to Willemstad and there were some good sheltered bays at the south coast. People in the remote western district were least likely to flee. The limited chance of getting away undetected from the well-guarded plantations in this thinly populated area and the lack of accessibility to the sea probably played a role in this.

Where did they flee to? We may assume that enslaved people had a mental map of the ‘maroon landscape’, locations where they could flee to, before they made their attempt. Some, like the escapees from the Wolf, aimed at enduring freedom which could only be found overseas. Truants looked for temporary locations of freedom could be found on the island as well. This could be micro locations, only available to specific individuals, like the attic in a house where a family member worked or the sheds of friends. Other locations were more general.

Escapees and truants used their networks, which were not limited to other enslaved persons. Although no active abolitionist movement existed on Curacao, by the 1850s two thirds of the population on Curacao was free. The vast majority of the free population did not enslave people, they were poor people who descended from slavery themselves. The recurring warning in newspaper advertisements not to assist refugees suggests that there was a level of support for refugees among the free population. Many enslaved persons had free relatives or could at least hope to find some support from free Curacaoans. For example, the crew of the Wolf consisted of both free and enslaved sailors. Furthermore, it is striking that Slengarde refers to the free seamen only by their first names. He explicitly calls Theodorus a freeman. This indicates that these free sailors themselves had been enslaved once and apparently had their sympathies with their enslaved shipmates.

The ‘register of runaways’ obviously gives the perspective of the enslavers and the government and therefore offers little information on where people fled to. If a flight did not end in a definitive escape, then in most cases the register only mentioned that the enslaved person had ‘returned to the master’, leaving open where the escaped person had been. If it was specifically reported that someone had been arrested, it was sometimes mentioned where this had happened. Two temporary locations of freedom on the island are mentioned more often: Willemstad and the wilderness in the west of the island.

Willemstad was not only a place to flee from, the city itself offered escape possibilities. The mixed urban community made it easier to blend in (Niall Mitchell, 2019, Müller, 2020) and to stay hidden in plain sight as part of the hustle and bustle of the harbor (Newman, 2018). This was especially true for the neighborhood of Otrabanda which lies opposite the city center at the other side of the harbor entrance. In the mid nineteenth century, there was no bridge between Otrabanda and the rest of the city, which made the neighborhood somewhat isolated. Otrabanda’s population of freedmen and their descendants provided some shelter for truants who wanted to escape their enslaver but did not want to leave the island, or those hoping to make their way abroad through the harbor (Rockman, 2009, pp. 20–21). For those fleeing from plantations in the sparsely populated western part of the island, caves and other shelters made it possible to lead a marginal existence at the borders of the plantation world. Given the limited space on the island, this was always a temporary form of marronage used because fleeing to Willemstad or overseas was usually not a viable possibility for them.

For those people who wanted to escape slavery permanently, going into hiding in the city or wandering around in the wilderness was not an option. For them, a flight abroad was necessary. Fleeing abroad gradually became easier, as more countries abolished slavery. During the flight with the schooner Wolf in 1841, the only safe options were Haiti or the British colonies such as Jamaica. However, these areas were more than 700 to 1,100 kilometers away from Curacao. Only experienced enslaved sailors could hope to reach these shores.

The nearby coast of Venezuela seemed much more attractive, as there were regular ship connections between Curacao and the Venezuelan mainland. Furthermore, Spanish posed hardly a language barrier for the population of Curacao, who spoke Papiamentu, a Portuguese/Spanish creole language (Jacobs, 2013). Venezuela had been an option in the 18^th century, but treaties had made an escape attempt to Venezuela far more hazardous by the early 19^th century (Rupert, 2009, pp. 366–367). In 1841, an agreement was signed between Venezuela and The Netherlands for the exchange of escaped enslaved persons (Gibbes et al, 2015). As Figure 4 shows, this had a direct effect on the number of registered escape attempts. The numbers fell, but they rose again after Venezuela abolished slavery in 1854. From 1855 onwards, it was frequently mentioned that persons had escaped to ‘the coast’ either by stealing a boat, as stowaways, or with the help of ship crews.

Figure 4. The results of escape attempts from Curacao between 1837 and 1863, as recorded in the ‘Register of runaway slaves of Curacao’ (NAC 005-3-8).

However, even with free Venezuela seventy kilometers away, a flight required good cooperation, organization and preparation. In June 1855, Lucas and Coralien’s escape attempt failed due to bad preparation; they hide on a boat that was not going to Venezuela but to the neighboring Dutch island of Aruba. To escape by boat, several people were needed. The most successful escapes were therefore group escapes, often consisting of groups of men who already worked together before their escape. This was true for the group of the schooner Wolf and other escape attempts from the shipyard of Van der Meulen, but also for thirty people who fled from two groups of neighboring plantations in central and western Curacao on the 29^th of October 1855.²¹ A number of organized group escapes also occurred in the years after 1855.

4. Runaways or escapees?

The ‘Register of runaway slaves’ is an overview of all registered escape attempts, a mix of runaways who were only temporarily absent and refugees who tried to escape slavery permanently. The register indicates that 47% of the fugitives had returned to the enslaver. It was not indicated whether this was by force or voluntarily. In the case of 5.2%, it is stated that they were arrested and handed over to the enslaver. So these people came back under duress. Finally, for 9.8% of the people who fled it was stated that they had escaped the island. This percentage is certainly an underestimation, because it was only from 1855 onwards that the register mentioned that people had fled successfully. Before that time, the column in which possible returns were recorded was left blank. Even in the case of the Wolf refugees, whose fates were known, no mention was made in the register of their successful escape.

We should not conclude from this that all 37.8% of cases where no outcome is mentioned refer to successful escape attempts. A comparison with the registrations in the slave register shows that most of these people demonstrably returned, because they were sold or had children after the date of escape. However, it does show that both the government and enslavers were reluctant to recognize successful escape attempts until 1855.

There seem to have been two reasons for this. A practical reason was that enslavers did not want to lose their claim on escapees, especially as long as the exchange treaty with Venezuela was still in place. If they were stricken out from the slave register after a successful escape, it would be more difficult to reclaim them later. On the other hand, the way the newspaper described the weeping fugitives on the quay in Santo Domingo seems to indicate a more ideological reason too. Enslavers liked to maintain the image that enslaved people were like immature children who fled on a whim and would return home like naughty children do. This fitted the image of the slaveholder as a stern but just family father. The formulation in the register that most fled enslaved people had ‘returned to the master’ fits well with this. It suggested a kind of restoration of social order, which was probably reassuring to enslavers (Oostindie, 1995, Lewis, 2000).

This attitude made enslavers reluctant to report successful escape attempts. In 1855, the colonial government estimated that only half of the escape attempts were registered.²² It also prevented enslavers from registering successful escapees in the slave register. Between 1838 and 1859, only 30 people were written off in the slave register as having fled. In addition, in 1843 enslavers received tax exemptions for seven people who were no longer present.²³ In 1860 the government organized a campaign to clean up the slave register and 123 people were written off as escapees. In addition, in 1862 enslavers had to report the enslaved people in their estates in order to claim the compensation of 200 guilders per person that they would receive when slavery was abolished. The government did not pay for enslaved people who were no longer present and therefore had all declarations examined by a committee. This committee concluded that 222 persons more persons were either escaped, absent or simply missing. Some of them had been away since 1855. Forty percent of them were never registered in the ‘Register of runaway slaves’, an under registration in line with the estimation by the colonial government.

These figures taken together brings the maximum number of successful escapees at 382 between 1839 and 1863. This means that almost three percent of the 13,100 enslaved who were registered in Curacao during this period escaped from the island. The literature emphasizes the role of young men as escapees (Lucassen & Heerma van Voss, 2019). In general, this is also true for Curacao. The group of successful escapees can be split in 305 men and 77 women. While women made more than 37% of the escape attempts according to the registers, they comprised only twenty percent of the successful escapees.

Notwithstanding the pivotal role Flora played in the successful flight of the Wolf in 1841, this could suggest that most women were truants, escaping on a temporary basis, but also that escape for women was much harder. This was especially true for women who had children or family members to care for (Camp, 2002). Fleeing women who were pregnant or who had one or more little children in tow hardly ever escaped the island at all. Hosepha or Josefa, the woman who gave birth to her son ‘in the forest’, was such a woman. Between 1838 and 1858 she fled at least nine times, often directly after the birth of a child. Five times she also took one or more of her children with her. In the end, she never left the island. She was still enslaved when slavery ended in 1863.

Jeanette had more success. In December 1856, she and her four children had been sold to enslaver Johanna Nicola Gomes, the widow of Paulus Giribaldi. Four years later, in January 1860, the 42-year old Jeanette tried to escape with her children, now 15, 12, 8 and 5 years old. This attempt failed, but a year later, after the death of her youngest son Claricio Fortune, she did a second attempt. Together with her 16-year old daughter Anna Mathilda and her sons Anselmo Albertus (13) and Fernando Elisio (9) she managed to leave the island. We know this because the enslaver did not receive a compensation for Jeanette and her children from the government when slavery ended in 1863.²⁴

Jeanette waited until her children were old enough to support her in the escape attempts. Presumably working together with her 16-year old daughter she succeeded. It is an example that people had to work in groups in order to escape successfully. However, a successful escape by such a family group was exceptional. Group escapes were mostly done by groups of relatively young men, sometimes including one or two young women like Flora. They were people who had the potential and the skills to build up a new life once they had escaped Curacao, as suggested by the remark in the newspaper that the escapees from the Wolf ‘though slaves, as seamen and tradesmen […] had many liberties and won much money’.²⁵

People who fled alone were a more diverse group, both in age and sex. They were mostly temporary truants rather than permanent escapees. An example is Martis Fidaal, who fled for the first time as a boy at the age of fourteen from plantation Brievengat in 1851, followed by eight more flights in the next ten years. On the other side of the age scale is Pedro Toto, who started to run away from the plantation Koraal Tabak when he was already in his late seventies. Despite his age and a swollen leg, he managed to escape at least four times between 1853 and 1855, the last time together with an elderly companion who suffered from inguinal hernia. They were caught and brought back to the plantation. There Pedro Toto died at the age of 82 in 1857, still enslaved.

We cannot ask Martis Fidaal, Hosepha or Josefa or Pedro Toto what their intentions were when they fled. Were they truants, or were they escapees whose attempts had failed, like the first escape attempt by Jeanette? In the case of Pedro Toto’s final attempt, there is certainly a feeling of despair surrounding the flight of these two elderly handicapped men stumbling away, but it is hard to imagine that they really thought they could escape slavery this way. Also the government did not always assume that people who had fled really wanted to escape. In 1862, Martis Fidaal was punished after his ninth flight attempt and received twenty lashes with the whip. He got this sentence not for trying to escape, but for ‘repeated overnight stays outside the plantation without the master’s permission’.²⁶

The ‘register of runaway slaves’ indicates that most people who were registered were actually truants, not escapees. In the period 1855–1860, the results of flights were fairly well recorded. These show that about twelve percent of the fugitives escaped successfully from the island during this period. Even if we assume that serious escapees took two attempts to escape, it is still safe to say that about three-quarters of those recorded were runaways and not refugees. Their reasons for running away may have been very serious, but they did not have the goal of fleeing the island permanently.

5. Conclusion: patterns in escapes in Curacao

The ‘register of runaway slaves’ of Curacao gives an overview of all reported escape attempts on the island of Curacao between 1837 and 1863. It thus provides an insight into the ‘maroon landscape’ available to the various individuals who attempted to flee from enslavers in Curacao. Combining this register with the slave register and other archival sources also gives us a more complete picture of the situation of enslaved people who attempted to flee. This applies not only to those who ran away, but also to those who did not. Each year, an average one percent of the enslaved escaped. An emphasis on this group makes it easy to forget that the majority of people did not attempt to flee. Some could not flee because they were too young or too old, some had obligations to others around them, and still others probably did not see how their living situation would improve if they did run away.

It is clear that the people who did make an escape attempt were not a cross-section of the enslaved population. The enslaved population in Curacao was predominantly rural and female, while the escapees were predominantly male and escaped from the city. This was even more clearly so among the twelve percent of them who actually escaped from the island. This group of escapees was a minority: up to three quarters of all registered persons used the social and geographical landscape of Curacao to run away temporarily. This group of truants was far more diverse, both in gender and age.

What emerges strongly from the ‘Register of Runaway Slaves’ is the importance of a network, both for support and information. An effective escape had to be organized in conjunction with others because refugees needed support and shelter and because it took several people to operate a boat. A network could also help refugees to get information about hiding places, escape options and ultimately a place to escape to outside the island. That information was effectively spread around the island is evidenced by flight of the Wolf, to faraway Hispaniola, but also by the rapid increase in the number of escape attempts after the abolition of slavery in neighboring Venezuela. In that sense, the register gives an indirect insight in the ‘maroon landscape’, a mental map of opportunities available to enslaved people. Their mental landscape did include locations, people and circumstances on Curacao, but also the sea surrounding it. Moreover, seasonal effects like harvest time and changes abroad altered the ‘maroon landscape’ continuously and lead to an adjustment of behavior, which is most obvious after the abolition of slavery in nearby Venezuela.

Finally, the ‘register of runaway slaves’ was not just a record of run-away attempts. Like other registration systems of the time, it was also in a way a ritual of slaveholders and the government to keep a grip on the enslaved community. The method of record-keeping maintained the illusion of a tightly ordered hierarchical system in which the natural state of things was that runaways would eventually ‘return to the master’. This was an illusion, of course. But the same is true for the illusion that all enslaved fugitives only had freedom and resistance in mind. The reasons were probably diverse, ranging from limited goals like a temporary retrieve from the plantation, to an attempt to build a new live in freedom abroad. Like the people on board the Wolf, people not only need a reason to leave, but also an idea of a place to go to. In this respect, the profile of escapees from Curacao is not substantially different from that of modern refugees attempting to flee from Africa to Europe.

Acknowledgments

This research is part of the Historical Database of Suriname and the Caribbean project, www.ru.nl/hdsc. The research for this paper was made possible by the Platform Digitale Infrastructuur SSH (www.pdi-ssh.nl), project ‘Diversity and dynamics. The population of Curacao 1839–1950’. We would like to thank the National Archives of Curacao for their support and the unknown referees of History of the Family for their valuable insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Platform Digitale Infrastructuur SSH.

Notes

1. Karel (35), Alexander (29), Martijn (24), Bastiaan (48). Louis (21) and George Mercel (24) enslaved by H. van der Meulen, Martis (33) and Flora (17) of C.Z. de Haseth, Simon (33), Clement (24) and Sem (17) of P.F. de Haseth, Martes (31) and Belli (33) of C.L. van Uijtrecht, Adam (21) of P. Danies and George (23) of the widow Rochemont. National Archive of Curacao (NAC) 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 29–31. The free men were called Theodorus, Martijn Pierre, Boniface and Hendrikus, according to Slengarde’s report: NAC 005-3-09 stukken betreffende opsporing slaven die met de schoener Wolf zijn gevlucht, (July–August, 1841).

2. NAC 005-3-09 stukken betreffende opsporing slaven die met de schoener Wolf zijn gevlucht, (July–August, 1841).

3. After the escapees entered the city, it turned out that the large ship was not a Dutch warship, but a French merchantman.

4. Curaçaose Courant, August 7, 1841, page 3. Translation is done by the authors, based on the Dutch text: ‘By de aankomst van de boot van de JAN ERNST aan de stad St. Domingo, zag men al dadelijk verscheidene der weggeloopene slaven onder de nieuwsgierige menigte.— Twee derzelver, slaven van den Heer PH. DE HAZETH, schepelingen van de WOLF, schenen tegen wil en dank weggevoerd te zijn; want met tranen in de oogen hebben zij gebeden met hunnen meester terug te mogen keeren; doch het gouvernement wilde zulks niet toestaan. Zij zullen allen zich berouwen dien stap te hebben gedaan; want de meeste hunner, zoo niet allen, hebben het uit brooddronkenheid gedaan. Zij waren hier in de beste omstandigheden, en schoon slaaf, hadden zij als zee- en ambachtslieden, vele vrijheden en wonnen veel gelds. Zij zijn nu vrij, maar moeten vier jaren lang als soldaat, of arbeider aan de publieke werken, het gouvernement dienen.’

5. NAC 005-3-09 stukken betreffende opsporing slaven die met de schoener Wolf zijn gevlucht, (July-August, 1841).

6. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 32–33; NAC Slavenregister Curacao InvNr 55, folio 339.

7. An online search in the Dutch newspaper website www.delpher.nl shows only one or two of these advertisements each year. See for examples De Curaçaosche Courant of September 14, 1839, November 22, 1845, and August 21, 1858.

8. The ‘register of runaway slaves’ is not yet online available: Nationaal Archief Curaçao (NAC), 005 Archief Koloniale Overheid, 3 Arbeidszaken, inv. 8 Register van weggelopen, teruggekeerde en opgevatte slaven, juli 1837–mei 1863.

9. Nationaal Archief Curaçao (NAC), 005 Archief Koloniale Overheid, 3 Arbeidszaken, inv. 12–18 and inv. 31, idem, 16 Openbare Orde, Inv. 48–79 and inv. 80–110.

10. Nationaal Archief Nederland, 2.02.09.08 Inventaris van het archief van de Algemene Rekenkamer 1814–1919: Comptabel Beheer, 223–248 Stukken tot opheffing der slavernij in West-Indië 1863–1868: https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/onderzoeken/archief/2.02.09.08/invnr/%40235~223–248

11. NAC Slavenregister Curacao InvNr 59 folio 875, InvNr 55 folio 303, and InvNr 54 folio 167.

12. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 56. The location of Leonard’s escape is unknown.

13. Among the free population, the sex ratio was 0.75 and both in the city and the countryside women were a majority. This suggests that many Curaçaoan men worked abroad, for example as sailors. The calculation of the sex ratio of the enslaved population of Curacao in 1845 is based on: Nationaal Archief 1.05.12.02 Inventaris van de archieven van Curaçao, Bonaire en Aruba, (1771) 1828–1845 (1914) inv 172 Bevolkingsstaten van Curaçao, 1 januari 1845.

14. Enslaved persons were registered with first name(s) only, because enslaved persons were not allowed to have surnames in the Dutch West-Indies.

15. ‘Flora, dochter van Martina, 17 jaar, 5 voeten, aangezigt langwerpig, voorhoofd gewoon, oogen zwart, neus plat, mond groot, kin lang, haar zwart en kroes, wenkbraauwen zwart, merkteeken: gebogen knieën, gebrekkelijk aan de teenen’. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 30.

16. Bastiaan: ‘brutaal en valsch uiterlijk’. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 29; Alexander: ‘lelijk van aangezigt’. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 53.

17. ‘twee buitengewone groote borsten’. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 47.

18. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 32.

19. Parlement II Zitting 1857–1858. Verslag van het beheer en den staat der Koloniën over i854, wat de West-Indien en de Kust van Guinea betreft. (Verslag wegens Curacao en onderhoorigheden), M. de slavenbevolking.

20. “geboren in ’t bosch (datum onbekend)”. NAC slavenregister InvNr 56, folio 517.

21. NAC 005-3-08 Register weggelopen slaven folio 63.

22. Parlement II Zitting 1857–1858. Verslag van het beheer en den staat der Koloniën over i854, wat de West-Indien en de Kust van Guinea betreft. (Verslag wegens Curacao en onderhoorigheden), M. de slavenbevolking.

23. Gouvernementsdispositie 28/12/1843 nummer 397/252. Enslavers paid a tax of two guilders a year for each enslaved person in their possession (GB 1828 no. 120).

24. The law stipulated that enslavers received 200 guilders for each enslaved person they owned when slavery ended. However, the government would not pay if the enslaved person had run away for more than a month.

25. Curaçaose Courant, August 7, 1841, page 3.

26. ‘Het herhaald overnachten buiten de plantage, zonder toestemming van den meester’. In the final years of slavery in Curacao, this was a fairly heavy sentence. Of the 81 persons who were sentenced for repeatedly staying away or trying to escape between 1857 and 1863, fifteen received between 8 and 30 lashes. Most people sentenced for repeated escapes were imprisoned or chained for 4 to 30 days. NAC 005-3-31 Register van door de politie gestrafte slaven, 1857–1862.