This documentary history serves as a valuable resource for instructors and students interested in Spanish America, the African diaspora, anticolonial struggle, and the emergence of the earliest Maroon communities on the American continent. Drawing mostly on files held in the Panama and Patronato sections of the Archive of the Indies, Schwaller offers a chronological approach to the study of various Maroon settlements. The first part of the volume features early royal decrees and reports of military expeditions against the Maroons, along with an extensive translation of Pedro de Aguado's Historia de Venezuela. Here we learn of the feats of the legendary Maroon leader King Bayano. The second part documents the resurgence of Panama's Maroons in the 1560s and 1570s.
The third and fourth sections account for the bulk of the documentary history, which centers on the intricacies of the second Bayano War (1579-82). Approximately 40 of the 61 documents included in the volume focus on that conflict. These carefully translated sources reveal the Maroons’ complex interactions with English pirates and Spanish officials. The section also provides sources on the peace treaty that ended the war. Finally, the epilogue provides a useful synthesis of the emergence and decline of Santiago Príncipe and Santa Cruz la Real, two free autonomous towns settled and held by former Maroons from 1583 to 1623.
