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Biography of Theodore CanotName: Theodore CanotBirth Date: 1804 Death Date: 1860 Place of Birth: Alessandria, Italy Nationality: French Gender: Male Occupations: adventurer, trader, writer Theodore Canot Theodore Canot (1804-1860) was a French-Italian adventurer and slave trader. His memoirs, notable for their vividness and general accuracy, illustrate the conduct and character of every branch of the slave trade.Theodore Canot, whose real name was Theophile Conneau, was born at Alessandria, Italy, the second son of an Italian mother and a French father who was a paymaster in Napoleon's army. Theodore went to sea in 1819 as cabin boy on an American ship which took him to Salem, where he learned navigation. After a series of West Indian adventures he joined the slave ship Aerostatica at Havana in 1826 and "plunged accidentally," as he put it, into the slave trade at age 22. Henceforward Canot--ambitious and intelligent, daring and unscrupulous, with "no religion, many vices, and few weaknesses"--became one of the more famous, though not the most successful, slavers of the 19th century.Canot's story is filled with the lurid …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…the transgression. The universal human and historical failure which the slave trade represented was attributed not to the shared responsibility of its white and black perpetrators alike but to the modern myth of race--the racial ghost of African inferiority. Further Reading Brantz Mayer's introduction to Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver (1854) summarizes Canot's ideas concerning Africa, Africans, and the slave trade in relation to the American slavery question. The 1854 edition is the complete account, while Malcolm Cowley, ed., Adventures of an African Slaver (1969), reprints the narrative with minor deletions up to Canot's decision to abandon slaving in 1840 (on which he reneged) and provides an epilogue summary of his subsequent career. Cowley's introduction is a useful assessment of Canot's place in the new slave trade. Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (1962), includes a short account of Canot's career. |