of Yucatán, while nominally under Spanish control in the province of Verapaz, were ruled by missionaries and exercised considerable freedom of action under the Spanish administration. For much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Spanish were content to allow the Caribbean side of Central America remain under loose control (as around the towns of Puerto Caballo, Trujillo or Portobello). They used the towns and the routes to them for transporting products of the Pacific side, including Peru to be shipped and exported to Spain. The African runaways By the mid-sixteenth century, slaves working the transportation routes which carried silver from Peru to Panama and then across the isthmus to Nombre de Dios, and later Portobello, ran away and formed independent communities in the mountains north of the city. The Spanish called such runaway slave communities cimarrons. A large community with multiple settlements had developed there by 1550, initially headed by a king named Bayano whose headquarters was in Darien. After he was captured in 1558, other men succeeded him as leader. Somewhat later, other groups formed especially drawing on the many slaves in Panama who were called up to carry silver across the isthmus of Panama from Panama to Nombre de Dios, the Atlantic port. By the 1560s there were two large communities, each with its own king, on both sides of the route. In 1572 the Panama Cimarrons allied with the English privateer Sir Francis Drake to try to take Nombre de Dios. In 1582, the cimarrons agreed to accept Spanish authority in exchange for their permanent freedom. Other cimmaron communities formed in Nicaragua and Honduras, especially slaves fleeing the mines and transportation corridors. Thomas Gage, the English bishop of Guatemala, noted several hundred escaped slaves in the early 1630s. English and Dutch challenges In the late sixteenth century, privateers, especially English ones, began to raid Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. Francis Drake, one of the more successful, allied with the Cimarrons of Panama in 1572 and, with their assistance, stormed the city of Panama. In the subsequent years, both Dutch and English privateers linked with cimarrons to attack the trading towns of the Caribbean coast. In 1630, the English Providence Island Company founded the Providence Island colony. They used it until the Spanish successfully counterattacked in 1641 to capture shipping and raid the coast of Honduras and Nicaragua. Following the fall of Providence Island, the English