The Diligent:
A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade

By Robert Harms

31 March 2002
The New York Times Book Review
Page 16, Column 2, c. 2002 New York Times Company

Out of Africa

The largest forced migration in human history, the Atlantic slave trade, endured for centuries. It transformed Africa and the Americas by setting in motion millions of people, and by giving the concept of race enduring power. The sheer scale and brutality of this business beggars the imagination, even among those who admit that economic development has a human cost.

Contemporary Americans know the fundamentals: unwilling people crammed into the holds of stinking little ships, destined for death or a short lifetime of slavery. Collective white guilt and black nationalist assertions, however, reduce this epic to a simple, if horrifying, morality tale. There is much more to it.

Robert Harms's quietly passionate account of a single voyage of the Diligent, a French slave ship, shifts attention away from the idea of a monolithic Atlantic slave trade, expertly uncovering the local events, decisions and endeavors that made up this enduring commerce in human beings. An excellent section on slavery and serfdom in early modern France is part of the story, as is another addressing war and political squabbling on the African coast. The structures of racism are examined repeatedly, notably in a section on the Cape Verde islands, which, according to Harms, were "a kind of cultural 'halfway house' between the society" the sailors "had left behind in France and the ones they would encounter in Africa." Smuggling, fraud and seamanship on a grand scale play out here, as does the voyeurism of slave traders, who, "looking for symptoms of syphilis, gonorrhea or yaws...carefully examined the private parts of both men and women."

"The Diligent" can be read as a good detective story in which Harms has pursued lead after lead to reconstruct the slave trade. More than 40 period illustrations, including paintings, line art and maps, add to the book's somber appeal.

At its heart lies the remarkable journal of Robert Durand, a 26-year-old French ship's officer with a gift for watercolors, who in 1731 departed from Vannes, a French Atlantic port, for his first voyage to West Africa. Historians know of at least 27,000 slaving voyages across the Atlantic, and considerable information about many of them exists. But very few detailed accounts, much less illustrated detailed accounts, exist for individual voyages. Harms, a professor of African history at Yale, has transformed Lieutenant Durand's banal and businesslike journal of the Diligent's voyage into an informative book that challenges readers to think historically. "Although shocking to 21st-century bourgeois culture," Harms writes, the inhumanity of the slave trade "was distressingly ordinary in its own time and place."

The story is laced with ironies. As was often the case, the death rate of the Diligent's French crewmen exceeded that of their African captives. And when those captives finally arrived at Martinique, in the French Caribbean, they confronted slaves producing cotton that would be woven into cloth in France and then traded for more slaves in Africa. Works of nonfiction are driven (and restricted) by their sources, and Harms had to transcend the limitations of a seaman's journal. Much of his book's success originates in a larger-than-life cast of characters. Harms has chosen to portray the 18th-century slave trade through stories of the participants, some of them well removed from the Diligent itself. Pauline Villeneuve, a West Indian slave girl who achieved freedom in France by becoming a nun in the Benedictine Sisters of Calvary, is introduced to explore racial attitudes in France. The insatiable King Huffon, whose magnificent furniture, imported delicacies and fine wines in the Guinea coast port of Whydah rivaled those of any palace in Europe, exemplifies the African elites who profited from slaving. Then there are individuals double-crossed in this business of few scruples: Bulfinche Lambe, an English slave trader who became a slave himself to King Agaja in Dahomey, and "Captain Tom," a Dahomean who was variously a slave, a slave trader and a cosmopolitan traveler. Manuel do Rosario Pinto, the black archdeacon of the Portuguese diocese of Sao Tome, appears as a successful 18th-century man of color who was neither a slave nor a slave trader. Such engaging vignettes convey a "feel" for the worlds of the slave trade. As a comprehensive and multilayered appreciation of that trade, "The Diligent" has no peer.

Harms's sympathies clearly lie with the Africans below decks on the Diligent, but he knows virtually nothing about them: neither their names nor ethnicities, their origins or ultimate fates. Sources from their perspective do not exist. Given the narrative nature of the book, however, and its orientation to personalities, some readers may yearn for that missing connection.

Call this the "predicament of the protagonist" in a history related as story. Harms has drawn extensively on Lieutenant Durand's journal, corroborating and elaborating on it. But Harms's humanist values do not allow him to develop any affinity for Durand, an ambitious seaman who sought to elevate himself in the status-conscious French society of the mid-18th century, and who took risks, endured sacrifice and inflicted suffering on others to achieve his goals. Durand is certainly more knowable than the African captives, but even so, his journal reveals little of the inner man. In short, the would-be heroes, the slaves, remain veiled, and the man around whom the story revolves, the French lieutenant, never entirely steps to the fore. Readers are left in the wake of the Diligent, picaresquely following various venues and villains.

Harms has brought to this undertaking decades of training, deep knowledge of his subject and a historian's fascination with the strangeness of the past. He has produced an original book that will endure. Yet his determination to reconstruct the numerous worlds of the slave trade has impeded his ability to tell one story. The African slave trade was—and still is—so overwhelming that no single narrative can do it justice. This book's strengths, and its shortcomings, must be seen in that light.