Hurricane Marronage: Reframing Histories of Natural Disasters in the Atlantic World

• In Event: Disaster, Conservation, and Sovereignty

Description for Program

Between August and November several ecological, societal, and geophysical cycles converged in eighteenth-century Martinique. In August, schools of tri tri, a benthic fish, migrated upstream, where people fished. The island’s hunting season legally began in the same month. And it was the height of the hurricane season. Fearful French merchants stayed away, causing scarcities and seasons of want. When hurricanes made landfall in Martinique, there was universal devastation, but histories of natural disasters in the eighteenth-century Atlantic rarely move beyond narratives of enslaved people’s suffering contrasted with the adaptive recovery processes of colonists. Studying the convergences listed above and combining social, environmental, and legal histories scholars can begin to challenge this binary. Reading French laws ethnographically and reconstructing Caribbean environments—in this case, Martinique specifically—my research reveals that among generations of enslaved people in Martinique, many men and women relied on temporary fugitivity to survive the aftereffects of hurricanes. Enslaved people who practiced what I am tentatively conceptualizing as hurricane marronage depended on their knowledge of local ecology and geography. Examining a hurricane that struck Martinique in 1766, the second-most severe storm of the century for the island, my paper argues that enslaved people in Martinique, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, were the epicenter of colonial disaster response at local and Atlantic scales. The enactment of hurricane marronage and other survival tactics that changed the contemporaneous conditions of slavery shaped, but did not determine, colonial hurricane response. Whereas enslaved people looked inward and sideways, using their local knowledge and the island’s resources, colonists looked outward across the sea. They looked to nearby islands and the metropole for aide. Hurricanes may have been universal ordeals, but the intensity of suffering and creative disaster responses splintered along lines of race, caste, and knowledge.

Author

• Phoebe Labat, Brown University