Theodore Canot

Theodore Canot (1804–1860), born Théodore Canot in Florence to a French officer and an Italian mother, went to sea as a boy on American ships and in the 1820s drifted into the slave trade on the coast of West Africa, serving as clerk at the factory of the notorious Pedro Blanco, commanding his own ships to Cuba and Brazil, and establishing a slave station of his own at Cape Mount in what is now Liberia. His story, as told to the Baltimore writer Brantz Mayer and published in 1854 as Captain Canot, is one of the few first-hand narratives of the trade from the slaver's side.