Seventy-two people try to row off Curaçao and five reach Venezuela

The third recorded Curaçao revolt began as mass marronage. All seventy-two enslaved people of the De Fuijk plantation tried to board a large canoe for Coro on the Venezuelan coast, roughly forty miles away. The escape failed. Five got across in a smaller canoe, the rest withdrew into the countryside and eventually surrendered or were taken by free blacks. There were no mass executions this time. The enslaver sold some twenty-five of them to Saint-Domingue. Klooster adds that in that same year of severe food crisis on the island, one hundred and forty enslaved people succeeded in escaping to Coro. The mechanism running underneath both figures is that Curaçao had no interior forest for maroons, so flight meant a sea crossing, and Spanish law granted freedom on arrival to those who converted to Catholicism.