author
Theodore Canot
1804–1860
An adventurer’s memoir from the brutal world of the Atlantic slave trade, his writing is remembered less as celebration than as a stark firsthand record of how that system worked. Born in Italy to a French father and later known as Théodore Canot, he lived a restless, seafaring life that eventually became the basis for a notorious memoir.
1 Audiobook
Captain Canot; Or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver
by Theodore Canot, Brantz Mayer
About the author
Born in 1804 in Alessandria, he was better known as Théodore Canot, though sources also identify him as Théophile Conneau. He was of Franco-Italian background, spent part of his youth at sea, and later became involved in the Atlantic slave trade.
He is chiefly remembered for the memoir usually published as Captain Canot; or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver, a vivid account of his years trading enslaved people along the West African coast and across the Atlantic. Modern readers approach the book less as an adventure tale than as a troubling firsthand document of a violent and exploitative system.
Because confirmed portrait images are hard to find, no reliable author photo is included here. He died in 1860.