Slave insurgents compensated for missing weapons with camouflage, traps, and body armor

Evidence

When they lacked weapons, as they often did, the insurgents used startling “ruse and ingenuity.” “They camouflaged traps, fabricated poisoned arrows, feigned cease-fires to lure the enemy into ambush, disguised treetrunks as cannons, and threw obstructions of one kind or another into the roads to hamper advancing troops.” Some insurgents advancing on Le Cap stood firmly up to three volleys of shot, each of them “wearing a kind of light mattress stuffed with cotton as a vest to prevent the bullets from penetrating.” Some demonstrated a suicidal courage when they “suffocated the cannon of the enemy with their arms and bodies, and so routed them.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 377

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider literature on asymmetrical warfare and how materially weaker rebels innovate tactically, echoing anti-colonial resistance strategies elsewhere.