## Introduction  
The resistance of captives to enslavement is a recurring theme in the study of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic region. Until now, research has focused on the Caribbean area, particularly the revolt of enslaved black people in Saint Domingue (Danon, 2015). Only recently has consideration been given to opposition to enslavement in the Indian Ocean. For many years, stories about this topic took on a mythical tone. As early as the 1840s, at the height of the abolitionist era, two novels painted a very detailed picture of the role assumed by slave deserters in the Mascarene Islands: the novel by Louis Houat entitled The Deserters describes four enslaved people on Île de Bourbon (Bourbon Island) who talk about the difficulties of their existence and discuss possible means of escape, and Alexandre Dumas, in Georges, provides a description of marrons, or black slave deserters (Houat, 1844, p. 29; Dumas, 1848, pp. 270-272). Clearly, deserters had already become the stuff of romantic legend.  
During the era of slavery, forms of resistance ranged from enslaved people's flight from settlements through to their armed revolt against their masters. Countless methods of eluding their fate were available to enslaved people, of which desertion (or escape) and revolt are the best known. Escape was frequently an individual matter, whereas revolts required a degree of collective organization.  
According to Vink (2003), wherever there was slavery, there was desertion, which, in Stanziani's (2016) view, cannot be understood without taking account of the silence that surrounded the subject of enslaved people. Nonetheless, revolts among enslaved people were a rarity in the slaving system (Meillassoux, 1998, pp. 93 and 131).