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

By Robert Harms

February 2004
The American Historical Review
The American Historical Review Vol. 109, Issue 1 (February 2004)

By the 1730s, France had long since emerged as one of the leading European nations involved in transporting captive Africans to colonies in the Americas, where they provided enslaved labor for the production of colonial goods. One regional destination of the slave traders was the Caribbean, where the island of Martinique was a valuable French sugar colony. Ultimately, the French slave trade led to the creation of strong transatlantic links among France, the Atlantic coasts of Africa, and France's colonies in the Americas, three broad sets of worlds. Robert Harms offers a probing contextualization of the French slave trade of the early eighteenth century by exploring the interconnected worlds of the Atlantic basin as they were reflected in the trading voyage of a French slave ship, the Diligent, in 1731-1732. Hundreds of slave trading ships belonging to Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French investors crossed the Atlantic Ocean from the Atlantic African coasts to the plantation colonies of the Americas by the 1730s, so the voyage of the Diligent, a converted grain ship, although unique in some ways, also reflects much about Atlantic slave trading in general at this time. The volume also throws much light on the numerous interconnected segments of a complete slaving voyage.

This ambitious book was prepared with the general reader in mind. Harms relies heavily on a journal of the voyage of the Diligent from the small Atlantic French port of Vannes, not far from the major slave trading port of Nantes, to the West African coast and then on to Martinique and back to Vannes. The journal (113 pages of text and eighty-one drawings or sketches) was kept by twenty-six-year-old Robert Durand, first lieutenant of the Diligent, who was making his first voyage to Africa. Readers will be impressed by the breadth of research and the myriad questions that Harms has tried to answer sticking close to the journal's contents but often†appropriately†filling in missing information. Harms is perhaps at his best when he fleshes out contexts from slight references. In such an undertaking, he faced difficulties beyond those normally related to the publication of annotated documents, including accounts of slave trading voyages. There was also the challenge of making the complexities of the worlds of slave trading accessible to the general reader.

While Harms does achieve much success at historical contextualization and readability, the labor that went into the former sometimes seems to yield so much information that the Diligent, its crew, its mission, and the unfolding voyage become obscured. A good example occurs in the several chapters about conditions on the African coast, particularly at Whydah, Assou, and Jakin, and at the Atlantic islands of Principe and Sæo Thome off the coast, where the Diligent stopped or traded. The discussion of political, military, and commercial relations in these areas during the 1720s and up to the arrival of the slave ship throws considerable light on how these relations were shaped by the European demand for slaves, increasing opportunities particularly through warfare for the sale of captives. It also illuminates the significance of the immediate circumstances that led to the captivity and enslavement of thousands of Africans in the Americas. What role did such circumstances play in the adjustment of the African captive to colonial enslavement? Enslaved victims of the Atlantic slave trade should be considered first as displaced Africans whose particular backgrounds can greatly illuminate both the slave trade and colonial slavery.

The Diligent delivered 256 African captives to Martinique; nine captives died during the Atlantic crossing, as did four of the thirty-seven crew members of the ship. However, the voyage did not prove to be the success that its outfitters in Vannes, the brothers Guillaume and Fran¨ois Billy and Mr. La Croix, had anticipated. In his stirring reconstruction of the failed voyage of the Diligent, Harms has succeeded in revealing "the various 'worlds' through which it passed and the various local interests that conditioned its impact and outcome" (p. xx). That, in the end, is the book's most striking achievement: connecting the most important elements of the worlds of Europe, the African coast, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Americas to offer a broad-ranging and illuminating account of the Atlantic slave trade.

David Barry Gaspar - Duke University
© 2004 American Historical Association