The
Voyage of the Slave Ship Diligent in
1731-32
by
Robert Harms
In 1731 The Diligent left the
French port of Vannes on a 15-month slaving voyage to West Africa and the
Caribbean. It was an evil odyssey
that would pack 256 captive Africans into the 69 foot ship to be transported to
lives of forced labor on the sugar plantations of Martinique. Nine of them would
die in transit. The voyage took
place at a time when the Atlantic world was undergoing a transformation.
In Europe, the mercantilist economies of the seventeenth century were
giving way to the private enterprise capitalism of the eighteenth century.
In West Africa, the trading states of the Guinea Coast were being overrun
by militarized empires that were financed by profits from the slave trade.
In the midst of all this,
First Lieutenant Robert Durand, 26 years old, kept a detailed journal of the
events that surrounded him and illustrated it with some eighty drawings.
But Durand was by no means an innocent observer.
He personally directed the purchase of the slaves on the West African
coast, and he even purchased five captives for himself.
Before the voyage was over, both the King of France and the African King
of Dahomey would be drawn in to its activities.
This slide-illustrated
lecture uses documents, drawings, and maps of the period to explore the ideas,
practices, and personalities that animated the slave trade.
It focuses in on the motives of the participants and asks how it was that
otherwise ordinary people, both in Europe and in Africa, could get caught up in
such an evil activity. By following
the voyage of a single ship, we get a series of rare glimpses into the dark
underside of the emerging Atlantic World during a period of historical
transformation.