In 1763, a regiment of mercenary soldiers stationed on the border of Suriname and Berbice in South America, rebelled.The men had Protectors been sent to help subdue a large slave rebellion.Instead, they mutinied and joined the rebelling slaves.This paper reconstructs the mutiny from Dutch records and uses it to look at the role of soldiers as border crosser in the Atlantic world.
Colonial historians have usually studied soldiers in their capacity of border enforcers, men who maintained the cultural and legal divisions that supported colonial authority.However, as I show, soldiers with great regularity crossed Pancake those same borders, threatening the very foundations of colonialism.