Conneau, Théophilus, 1804-1860

Captain Théophilus Conneau (1804-1860) was born in Italy to French parents in 1804. He became involved with the slave trade in 1826, and for the following thirteen years, he was an agent to Cuban slave traders and a commander of vessels that smuggled captive African people into Cuba, working mostly on the coast of Guinea and Liberia. Conneau owned a fort where European goods were exchanged for enslaved people. Conneau was imprisoned by the English and French; his French sentence for active promotion of the trade of enslaved individuals in Senegal was commuted in 1835. In the 1850s, Conneau immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he reconnected with James Hall, whom he had known in Liberia. Hall convinced Conneau to write a memoir and referred him to journalist Brantz Mayer, who worked actively with Conneau to edit the manuscript and then published it, originally under his name, entitled Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver. They elected to use the alias Theodore Canot in order to allow Conneau to avoid prosecution for his illegal work in the slave trade and to avoid embarrassing his brother, chief physician to Napoleon III, according to the dealer's notes. Historians of the slave trade were confused from an early date regarding Canot's identity and the authorship of the work. In the early twentieth century, it was retitled Adventures of an African Slaver and attributed to Theodore Canot. In 1976, Conneau's original 1853 manuscript was found in the back room of the Washington, D.C. bookstore, Loudermilk's, and it was published that year as A Slaver's Log Book, or 20 years' residence in Africa, attributed to Captain Theophilus Conneau, based on the original documentation and letters between Conneau and Mayer.