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By Root 2950 0

by young men whom Bayano ordered about with soldierly dispatch. Farther away was a second village for the community’s women, children, and elderly. Mixing Indians from Peru to Nicaragua and a dozen African ethnicities, Bayano’s mini-kingdom was an extraordinary cultural potpourri, one sixteenth-century priest remarked, with “every different mixture of people, all dissimilar in color to their fathers and mothers.” Their religion, too, was an equally various jumble of Christian, Islamic, and indigenous traditions, according to Jean-Pierre Tardieu, a historian at the University of La Réunion whose work I am relying upon here. Nobody knows what language they spoke together.

A new viceroy of Peru traveled to Nombre de Dios in 1556 en route to Lima. Infuriated by Bayano’s depradations, he established a fund to hire an anti-maroon force. Nobody accepted the offer. Finally the viceroy filled the roster by visiting the prison in Nombre de Dios and telling the inmates that they could either wage war against the ex-slaves or effectively become slaves themselves and be sent to the galleys. The response was positive. Seventy armed ex-convicts went out in October 1556, led by Pedro de Ursúa, an experienced soldier whom the viceroy had persuaded to take on Bayano.

Guided by a captured maroon who had become an informer, Ursúa’s troops hiked through the forest for twenty-five days to reach Bayano’s hilltop. Realizing that he could not successfully lay siege to the place, Ursúa instead persuaded the maroon leader to negotiate. He offered to split the isthmus into two kingdoms, one ruled by Felipe II of Spain, one ruled by Bayano I of Panamá. Bayano accepted the flattering offer and the Spaniards hung around for weeks, hunting and fishing with the former slaves and amusing themselves with contests of strength and skill. Just before leaving, Ursúa threw a celebratory feast. Bayano and forty of his court attended. The Spaniards drugged their wine, incapacitating them. The maroons were hauled back to Nombre de Dios and returned to slavery. Ursúa took Bayano in chains to Lima as a trophy for the viceroy. Other maroons learned a lesson from Bayano’s fate: Spaniards cannot be trusted.

The maroon problem did not go away. Not only did the remnants of Bayano’s community regroup, but others sprang up in its wake. Eradicating them, the colonists realized, would require a long-term military campaign with as many as a thousand soldiers, most of whom would have to be sent from Europe. To obtain a thousand soldiers, the government would have to import as many as two thousand, because new European arrivals (one part of the Columbian Exchange) fell at horrific rates to malaria and yellow fever (another part of the Columbian Exchange). Nombre de Dios in particular became so unhealthy that European visitors gave it a bleakly rhyming nickname: “Nombre de Dios, Sepultura de Vivos”—Buried Alive. The king, appalled at the dying, ordered the populace moved entire to a new location, Portobelo, in 1584. It was scarcely less deadly. Visiting the new city in 1625, the English priest Thomas Gage noted that the silver fleet, once landed in Portobelo, “made great haste to be gone”; nonetheless, the ships’ two-week stay in the “open grave” of Portobelo was enough to kill “about five hundred of the soldiers, merchants, and mariners.” Such losses would ensure that importing an anti-maroon force from Europe would be hugely expensive.

Nobody could agree on who should pay for it. Europeans in the isthmus were mainly agents for Seville merchants. Unlike the Portuguese sugar growers who fought Palmares, few of the Spaniards in Nombre de Dios and Panamá town intended to create permanent establishments; instead the goal was to make a quick killing and leave. Naturally enough, these people did not want to spend much of their potential profit on a project—expunging maroons—that would accrue most of its benefits after their departure. Instead they asked Madrid to ship in and maintain the soldiers. As the king stood to lose most from the attacks, the merchants reasoned, he stood