A guerra do mato: Resistência à escravatura e repressão dos fugitivos na ilha de São Tomé (séculos XVI-XVIII)

For some three hundred years, a significant part of the island of São Tomé was outside the control of the colonial authorities. Although slave escapes had begun with the beginning of colonization, its highest moment coincides with the widespread implantation of sugar production. The attempts of the Crown and the farmers to recover the escaped slaves and the attacks of these to the “roças” to assure the survival, gave rise to more or less continuous conflicts, the call "bush war", whose beginning we can date of around 1530. The degree of intensity was not always the same over three centuries, but it was enough to create a climate of instability that not only was the cause of the rapid decline of the sugar industry but also marked the whole life of the island of São Tomé in the first phase of colonization