Route to Freedom

Route to Freedom
World document heritage
Dutch-French border on the island of Saint Martin
State (s):	Sint Maarten
Period:	1838-1863
Storage:	Government Archives of Sint Maarten
Register link:	Route to Freedom. A case study of how enslaved Africans gained their freedom on the dual national island of Sint Maarten / Saint Martin
Admission:	2017 ( session 13 )

Under the title Route to Freedom , documents of a successful escape of slaves from the Dutch colony of Sint Maarten were included in the UNESCO World Document Heritage in 2017 . These historical texts in Dutch and French were only discovered in 2004 in the main archives of Sint Maarten; As they were previously archived in an unsuitable manner, a restoration is necessary. The world document heritage encompasses all correspondence between the two parts of the island on the subject of slave flight.

Through the Treaty of Concordia (1648), the island of Saint Martin was divided between the colonial powers France and the Netherlands. Thus there was a land border between the French Saint Martin in the north and the Dutch Sint Maarten in the south - very unusual for the island world of the Caribbean. In 1817 the border was set and marked at some points; but since both states lived peacefully side by side, one could cross the border unhindered in both directions.

Slaves in other territories were well informed that the colonial powers Great Britain and France had abolished slavery in 1834 and 1848, respectively. In good weather, fugitive slaves could travel by boat, for example. B. translate to St. Christopher and achieve freedom on British soil. But it was much easier to do on Saint Martin.

On May 28, 1848, slavery was abolished in Saint Martin, France, while it continued until July 1, 1863 in Sint Maarten. Sint Maarten had the second largest slave population in the Netherlands Antilles . Just one day after the law came into force in Saint Martin, all the slaves of the Diamond Estate plantation in the Dutch part of the island, 26 men, women and children, fled to the Mount Fortune plantation on French territory. The Dutch commander Johannes Willem van Romondt wrote to his French counterpart Sir Munier and asked him to hand over the fugitive slaves to Sint Maarten. The latter refused the extradition request on the grounds that every slave who reached French territory was a free person. Successful escape is also important because people enslaved here took their fate into their own hands.

Since the border could not be secured and the most important resources of the island ( salt pans ) were shared, plantation owners, who expected their workers to flee on a massive scale, applied to the Dutch government for the abolition of slavery. This was rejected: the Netherlands could not abolish slavery in one of its colonies and not in all the others. The compensation that the government paid to slave owners for each slave who fled was, at 30 guilders, significantly lower than on the five other islands (200 guilders); later it was raised to 100 guilders. The consequence was the economic decline: plantations lay desolate, the owners emigrated.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fabian Badejo: Sint Maarten: The Dutch half in future perspective. In: Betty Nelly Sedoc-Dahlberg (Ed.): The Dutch Caribbean: Prospects for Democracy , Amsterdam 1990, pp. 119-150, here pp. 121 f.
2. ↑ Fabian Badejo: Sint Maarten: The Dutch half in future perspective , p. 121.
3. ^ Fabian Badejo: Sint Maarten: The Dutch half in future perspective , p. 122.