Notes for this book are posted here.
MAROONS
Even with all my reading over the past fifty years about "Indians" and Native Americans and indigenous populations, I never came across this, until now, "maroon communities."
Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery and formed their own settlements. They often mixed with indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures such as the Garifuna and the Mascogos.
Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron, meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'. (Despite the same spelling, the meaning of 'reddish brown' for maroon did not appear until the late 1700s, perhaps influenced by the idea of maroon peoples.
The American Spanish word cimarrón is also often given as the source of the English word maroon, used to describe the runaway slave communities in Florida, in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and in other parts of the New World.
Linguist Lyle Campbell says the Spanish word cimarrón means 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'.
In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "Symerons," a likely misspelling of cimarrón.
The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, "If there is a connection between English maroon, French marron, and Spanish cimarrón, Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America)."It is interesting to note that during "the 1590s" there was an explosion of new words, thousands of them first put into "public" use in the late 1500s by Sir Henry Neville (factotum: William Shakespeare).
HORSES
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