Overview

The amazing, shocking, and true autobiography of a trans-Atlantic slave trader who plied the slave trade between Africa and Cuba for twenty years from 1820 to 1840. Dealing forthrightly with all aspects of this trade in humans, the book starts with a small biographical background before moving in to the core of his story, which can be divided into five major sections: how Africans were captured, how they were transported, how they were ""unloaded"" at their destination, how the European powers attempted to halt the trade, and finally, the role of the Arab Muslim slavers in the awful business. Canot's book contains many revelations which have traditionally been obscured in other accounts of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, namely that the Africans had in face been enslaved by their own people first and then just sold on to the foreign slavers, that the slave traders faced fierce physical attempts by the British, the French, and other European powers to halt the inhuman trade, and that the Arab Muslim slavers in Africa were, along with the Africans themselves, the main drivers of the capture and availability of Africans for the slave markets in both the East and West. It is a breath-taking book that has lost none of its emotional power since its first publication. Completely reset and contains all the original illustrations.

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9781647644543

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Theodore Canot (real name Théophile Conneau) was born in Italy in 1804. After first going to sea at the age of 16, he was shipwrecked off Cuba, and there was recruited as a crewman on a slave trader ship operating the trans-Atlantic route. He quickly earned his own command and was for many years one of the most prominent slave traders opening on the African west coast. After many adventures-which included being arrested by British and French forces, and spending time in a French prison-he attempted to set up a legitimate trading station on the coast of Liberia, only to have it destroyed by the British who believed that he was still engaged in the slave trade. Through the intervention of his brother-who had Emperor Napoleon III's physician, Canot was then appointed France's official agent of colonization in the southwest Pacific Ocean colonial territory of New Caledonia in 1854. He died on December 22, 1860, and is buried in Paris.

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