| Year | Enslaved people captured |
| :-- | :-- |
| 1773 | 465 |
| 1774 | 400 |
| 1775 | 510 |  
Figure 5. Maroons captured on Île de France.
Source: Raphael Thiébaut.  
At the end of the eighteenth century, the number of enslaved people who escaped is estimated at between 1,000 and 3,000 . This number appears to increase in the early nineteenth century: the capture of 1,014 deserters was recorded in year XIII of the French republican calendar (1805) (Allen, 1983; Prentout, 1901, pp. 133-135). In 1820, there were 5,220 male and 1,355 female deserters in Mauritius, of whom 1,557 and 224 were not captured or did not return, respectively, within a year. In 1824, these figures were 7,096 and 1,758 and, in 1826, 4,844 and 1,130, or between eleven and twelve per cent of the servile population of the island (Scarr, 1998, p. 158). According to Fuma (2011, p. 246), between five and six per cent of the servile population of La Réunion were involved in resistance to slavery. ${ }^{17}$ Half of all criminal convictions of enslaved people in Bourbon were for marronage (desertion) (Ève, 2010, pp. 169-170). A quarter of the deserters were women and two thirds were enslaved Malagasy and African people, who were more likely than Creoles to desert (Ève, 2010, pp. 80-81). On the Cape, 429 enslaved people were convicted of desertion in the eighteenth century, while 754 runaways, or nine per cent of the population, were identified in the early nineteenth century (Ekema, 2016; Worden, 2007).  
Maroonage
![img-15.jpeg](img_ref_16)  
Figure 6. Enslaved people reported as deserters and captured in the Cape Colony between January 1807 and June 1809. (C) R. Thiébaut  
Source: Raphael Thiébaut.  
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[^0]:    17 Of the 784 deserters included in the statistics for enslaved people absconding for over six months, 438 were captured, 270 were killed in the forests, 26 died in prison or in hospital, and 50 were put to death over the period 1725-1765 (Fuma, 2002).