Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
Escaped Slaves of the Forest
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Alabi's World
by Richard Price
John's Hopkins University Press, 444 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Shortly after settling in the conquered New World, Spaniards began to use the word cimarrón, of debated etymology, to describe imported European domestic animals that had escaped from control and reverted to natural freedom. For obvious reasons the term was also applied in slave societies to escaped slaves living in freedom outside the world of the masters. It was translated into other masters' languages as marrons or maroons. That the same word should also be applied by the Caribbean buccaneers to sailors expelled from their community and forced to live the life of nature marooned on some island suggests that freedom was not seen as a bed of roses.
Review, 3558 words
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