area. This would raise the alert of a potential danger and consequently increase the dose of repression.  
Although they were mostly small in size and did not therefore pose a substantial threat to slavery, quilombos managed to fustigate the regime. One significant problem was that most of them emerged in sites near to sugar plantations, farms, towns and cities on the margins of slavery, instead of in isolated sites far from the surrounding society. This allowed new fugitives to join them easily and facilitated the development of work, friendship, kinship, and business relationships with slaves, freed and free people of colour, white and 'mixed-race' merchants (Reis and Gomes, 1996; Gomes, 2006; Karasch, 1987, pp. 311-315; Guimarães, 1988; Higgins, 1990, pp. 65-68; Reis, 2008, pp. 106-117; Ricci, 1993, pp. 62-63).  
Although the majority of the quilombolas - as the fugitive slaves were known - did not profess to eradicate slavery, but rather survive at its margins, the fugitives were still a terrible example in a society highly dependent on slavery, which explains the efforts made to repress them. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the authorities in Minas Gerais invented barbaric punishments, such as cutting off a slave's leg or their Achilles tendon. The authorities in Lisbon only gave their approval for the letter ' $F$ ' (of fugitive) to be branded on a fugitive's back with a smouldering iron and to cut their ear in the case of relapse (Vallejos, 1985, pp. 1-34).