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The Diligent:
A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
Robert W. Harms
In The Diligent, historian Robert Harms uses an entirely
new approach to uncover the complex workings of the slave trade.
Drawing upon the recently discovered private journal of First
Lieutenant Robert Durand, Harms recreates the macabre journey
of a French slave ship and interweaves it with the remarkable
dramas of its slave route. The result is an astonishingly detailed
look at the voyage of a single  slave
ship that also sheds new light on the collaborative nature of
the slave trade and how it shaped morality, politics and economics
on three continents." "The Diligent began her journey
in Brittany in 1731, and Harms follows her along the African coast
where her goods were traded for slaves, to Martinique where her
captives were sold to work on sugar plantations. Robert Durand
was an ambitious 26 year old meticulously studying the workings
of a slave ship in the hope of one day becoming a captain. His
journal gives a dispassionate account of day to day life on a
ship navigating an extraordinary time in history, a time when
momentous changes were transforming the Atlantic world. In Europe,
the mercantilist economies of the seventeenth century were grudgingly
giving way to the private enterprise merchant capitalism of the
eighteenth century. In West Africa, the small trading states of
the Guinea coast were being overrun by new militarized African
empires financed by profits from the slave trade. And in the Caribbean,
the introduction of new plantation crops was creating an unprecedented
demand for slave labor." The gruesome details of daily life
aboard a slave ship defy contemporary imagination, but Durand
records his fifteen-month journey with unflinching detail. Harms
has supplemented Durand's journal with a wealth of archival research
that brings to life a world in which slavery was a commerce carried
out without qualms. |
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