Girard reads the papers of a single estate, the Bréda plantation at Haut-du-Cap, and finds that flight from it was roughly ten times more common than the runaway notices in the colonial press would indicate.

The gap is widest for collective departures, the temporary walkouts long dismissed as something less than real marronage. These show up neither in the newspapers nor in the plantation's accounting records, yet on this estate they were both the most frequent form of flight and the one most likely to succeed.

If other plantation studies turn up the same pattern, Girard suggests, the long-running Debien-Fouchard argument about the links between marronage and the revolt of 1791 would need rethinking. His proposal is to set aside the division between small and large marronage and look instead at group flight, whose revolutionary potential has been undervalued.