Maroons are descendants of Africans in the Americas and Islands of the Indian Ocean who escaped from slavery and formed their own settlements. They often mixed with indigenous peoples, eventually evolving into separate creole cultures such as the Garifuna and the Mascogos. Etymology Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective , meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'. (Despite the same spelling, the meaning of 'reddish brown' for maroon did not appear until the late 1700s, perhaps influenced by the idea of maroon peoples.) The American Spanish word is also often given as the source of the English word maroon, used to describe the runaway slave communities in Florida, in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and in other parts of the New World. Linguist Lyle Campbell says the Spanish word means 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'. In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "Symerons," a likely misspelling of . The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, "If there is a connection between Eng. maroon, Fr. , and Sp. , Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America)." Alternatively, the Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word maroon further than the Spanish cimarrón, used first in Hispaniola to refer to feral cattle, then to Indian slaves who escaped to the hills, and by the early 1530s to African slaves who did the same. He proposes that the American Spanish word derives ultimately from the Arawakan root word , construed as 'fugitive', in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the island. History In the New World, as early as 1512, African slaves escaped from Spanish captors and either joined indigenous peoples or eked out a living on their own. The first slave rebellion occurred in present day Dominican Republic on the sugar plantations owned by Admiral Diego Columbus, on 26 December 1522, and was brutally crushed by the Admiral. The first maroon communities of the Americas were established following this revolt, as many of the slaves were able to escape. This would also give rise to a wave of Dominican maroons who would go on to lead the first maroon