Fugitive-Made Ecologies: Between the Matos of São Tomé and the Montes of the Caribbean in the Early 16th Century

In the early decades of the sixteenth century, across Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, a diverse assortment of Taíno and African people who sought respite from colonial duress came to be known to the Spanish as cimarrones; over the same years, across the ocean, Africans of diverse origins on the Gulf of Guinea island of São Tomé who fled plantation slavery and established themselves near the southern coast came to be called mocambos. In both cases, slaveholders and colonists drew from Iberian geographic categories of wilderness – montes in the Caribbean, and matos in São Tomé – to depict the spaces of cimarrón or mocambo fugitivity as opaque, remote, and characterized by tropical excess. Such evocations of the spaces and actions of flight, frequently repeated in scholarship, limit a more expansive understanding of the unfolding social and political consequences of marronage during a period of Iberian colonial consolidation in the Caribbean and São Tomé. Environmental historians and political ecologists have developed methodologies that trace the embeddedness of power relations within so-called natural processes, offering a perspective that can reframe how we situate marronage in relation to colonial history in the early Atlantic. For one, arriving at what I call a political ecology of marronage can shed light on a series of linkages that have yet to be systematically investigated between patterns of flight in São Tomé and the Caribbean between the 1520s and 1540s. Drawing from administrative and legal records, I argue that Iberian discourses around the nature of the montes and matos of the Caribbean and São Tomé during the early sixteenth century offer evidence of the collective impact of cimarrones and mocambos in structuring the Iberian colonial presence, and the relationship between empire and environment, on both sides of the ocean.