C. Herbert Gilliland On December 12, 1844, an odd social event took place at Cape Mount (now Robertsport) in northern Liberia. As the 16-gun sloop USS Yorktown lay at anchor, one of her boats pulled up to the small landing and her captain, Commander Charles Heyer Bell, stepped ashore, accompanied by several of his officers. They were greeted by the local trader, Theodore Canot. On their way up to Canot's house, which was inside a fortified compound with eight cannon, Bell could observe acres of truck crops neatly laid out, a blacksmith shop and two dozen other buildings, a small shipyard with a partially built schooner, and other activities employing over a hundred Africans either hired or (many of them) owned by Canot. The relationship of these two men dramatizes in microcosm the state of the Middle Passage in the mid-nineteenth century. Though undistinguished in appearance, Canot, fortyish and born of Italian and French parents, was an intelligent, energetic and educated man, capable of wit and charm. Captain Bell and his officers were his guests for dinner. He set probably one of the best tables in that part of Africa, with meat, vegetables, bread, butter, cheese, salads (unheard of in that region until Canot arrived) and even fresh flowers grown in Canot's garden. Canot's wife Rosaline, a mulatto born in Georgia, refilled the glasses as they emptied. We glimpse Captain Bell at one point sitting on the veranda, glass in hand. What is odd is that Captain Bell's assigned mission was to interdict the slave trade, while Captain Canot was one of the best-known slave traders of the time. Sipping his drink, Bell could see within Canot's house compound four additional structures, which Canot described as storehouses or workshops, but which one visitor noted could also be used to hold 1500 or 2000 slaves. Bell and the Yorktown were part of the new U.S. African Squadron, sent to disrupt the West African slave trade. A forty-six-year-old New Yorker, Bell was motivated not merely by duty but by personal principle. By word and deed he had showed his strong opposition to the slave trade. In comments published in newspapers, and letters to the Secretary of the Navy, he urged stronger anti-slavery policies. He had also encountered Canot before. In late 1839 he had made his first visit to Africa as a lieutenant in command of the 10-gun brig Dolphin for a six-month cruise on the coast. At Monrovia, he first learned of Canot from Governor Buchanan. Buchanan told him Canot owned a slave factory south down the coast at New Cess. Encouraged by Buchanan, Bell actually threatened to raid the New Cess establishment. Since Canot was away, Bell addressed a letter to the other slave traders there, saying they must break up their establishment in two weeks or else he would "take such measures as I deem necessary to obtain this object." Response came in a note from the native prince, who had prospered from the trade, saying the slave factory was under his protection, and "I wish you would mind your own business and let me alone." When Canot returned, he too sent a letter to Bell, indicating he would resist any attack, and pointing out the American hypocrisy in permitting slavery to flourish in the Southern states. Perhaps because expected armed support from the Liberians did not materialize, Bell took no further action. The next year (1841) Bell and the Dolphin visited Africa again, with even less happy results. This time, because of a river expedition, Bell and most of his crew came down with fever, with ten deaths out of eighty crew. Recovered and back in Washington, Bell became one of the authors of the Paine-Bell Report, describing conditions on the African coast and making precise recommendations on the constitution of a possible U.S. naval squadron there. It was written at the request of Secretary of State Daniel Webster as he prepared to negotiate with the British Lord Ashburton what became the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. That treaty, among other provisions, obliged the United States to maintain a naval squadron of eighty guns on the African coast. To meet that obligation the U.S African Squadron was constituted under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1843. In late1844, Bell was ordered to take command of the Yorktown and join the squadron. Understandably, despite his anti-slavery sentiments, he felt it was someone else's turn to go, and told the Secretary of the Navy exactly that in no uncertain terms. But it was that or nothing, so Bell went. His first landfall on the African continent, in December 1844, was Cape Mount. His first footstep ashore was on Theodore Canot's front yard. So how was it that the staunch anti-slaver Captain Bell became the guest of this man who personified better than anyone the trade Bell was sent to suppress, and the man who had thumbed his nose in Bell's face only a few years earlier? Canot was retired. Or was he? There were skeptics. However, with the encouragement and assistance of the Royal Navy, Canot had voluntarily dismantled his factory at New Cess, and promised not to engage again in the slave trade. He moved his goods to Monrovia and thence ultimately to his new setup at Cape Mount. There, according to his own testimony in his memoirs, Twenty Years a Slaver, one of the great classics of the Middle Passage, he intended a new career as a legitimate trader. At the time he hosted Captain Bell, he seems to have kept that intent. His chief business was supplying fresh food to visiting ships, including the ships of the British, American and French navies. It was only good business to wine and dine the officers of those ships. And it was only good policy for Captain Bell to have a look at his old adversary's new establishment. Canot was already finding it hard to keep his promise to reform. Getting enough local labor to build and operate his extensive new place was difficult. Also, the local tribes found it easier to trade in slaves than other products. His former business associates kept in touch, too, and some were operating just a few miles north, in Gallinas. The infrastructure, as it were, remained. And his twenty-year career as a slaver meant that suspicion was cast his way at the slightest opportunity. The British and Americans and Liberians kept a closer and closer eye on him. Indeed, shortly after Bell's visit, Canot purchased the brig Atalanta, which had for years been in ordinary trade on the coast, and sold it to the slavers at Gallinas. The watchful British were so accustomed to seeing her go about her business that they let her go by--as it turned out, on her way to Brazil with hundreds of slaves. The Atalanta's owner, a Captain Lawlin, was with his other ship, far south and actually selling supplies to the Yorktown, at the time. He protested complete innocence, saying the sale for three times the ship's actual value was done by his hired captain without his knowledge or permission. As for Canot, he later said he knew he was breaking the spirit of his promise, but that after all he was not actually trading in slaves, and many supposedly upright others had done much the same. Then in September 1845, Captain Bell seized right off Cape Mount the schooner Patuxent, which Canot had chartered in New York. It had no slaves aboard, but had many earmarks of an intended slaver as laid out in Bell's instructions and international treaties: planking to make a slave deck, extra water and food supplies, odd movements, etc. Bell sent it back to New York as a prize. The legal system ground on, month after month, until the case was finally settled in March, 1847. The ship was found innocent, her value was more than eaten up in legal expenses, and Bell and his officers were sued by the Patuxent's captain. Nothing came of that beyond Bell's prize officer, Lieutenant William C. Chandler, having to post bond and make additional court appearances. However, it should be noted that fear of such suits disturbed captains of the African Squadron, and surely dampened their eagerness to seize all but the most blatantly suspicious ships. For example, Captain Isaac Mayo in 1854 commented that he did not want to "give the harpies who infest the purlieus of our courts an opportunity to bring vexatious suits . . . and seize upon my property which is tangible and open to their reclamations." (Mayo's property included his Maryland plantation worked by about a hundred slaves.) Canot in his memoirs expresses outraged innocence at the event. Three months after taking the Patuxent Bell captured the barque Pons, of Philadelphia. With over 900 slaves aboard, she would be one of the largest prizes ever captured by the African Squadron. Taken far south, off Kabenda, she had no direct connection with Canot. Yet she had earlier traded some equipment with the Patuxent, and when Bell's prize officer let her captain ashore in Monrovia on parole, he skedaddled to Canot at Cape Mount. The legal case, litigated in Philadelphia, was open and shut this time, and Bell's share of the prize money for the sale of the ship plus a bounty of $25 for each slave landed alive in Liberia, was over $2,000. In what proved to be a 20-month deployment to the African coast, Bell captured one other slaver (the Panther; no slaves aboard but successfully condemned in Charleston) and then returned home to await further orders. But shortly afterwards he became involved in the case of the Chancellor. The Chancellor was taken by USS Dolphin in March 1847. Canot had chartered her in New York to replace the Patuxent, and was aboard at the time of capture. Though he was dropped off on the coast, he showed up in New York for the condemnation trial. The Chancellor had no slaves aboard, but was suspect in every other way--large stores of food and water, boards that could be used for a slave deck, a change in appearance, etc. Her captain was the former mate of the Patuxent. Canot returned to New York to defend his property, claiming the cargo but not the vessel--though to keep the one he had to defend the other. American courts, and the court in New York especially, tended to be lenient toward the slave trade, much of which had New York connections. However, the case file for the Chancellor trial, some three inches thick, shows that Canot and company took no chances. Protesting complete innocence, they ascribed all suspicious activity and cargo to normal trade practice. They brought in the lumber merchant from whom the suspicious planking had been bought to testify that it was too expensive and the wrong dimensions for use as a slave deck. Doctor McGill, the physician in Cape Palmas, Liberia, and an official of the Maryland Colonization Society, testified to Canot's reformed character (his brother being married to Canot's wife's sister meant nothing, he said). Rev. John Seys, a Methodist missionary in Monrovia, also testified for Canot. Bell testified for the prosecution, apparently as to slave trading practices in general and Canot's involvement in particular. Captain Lawlin, the Atalanta's former owner, did not testify, but had helped finance the Chancellor charter out of his office in New York. The case was not fully closed until 1858, but the main points were settled much sooner: innocent on all counts. Unfortunately for Canot, in his absence the inhabitants of the Cape Mount region, encouraged by the British (who were convinced Canot was back in the slave business), had totally destroyed his establishment. Though he may have made some subsequent efforts to regain his footing, March 1847 marks the end of his real importance on the African coast. A few years later he turned up in Baltimore, preparing his memoirs while associating with members of the Maryland Colonization Society. (The president of the society, J. H. B. Latrobe, asked Nathaniel Hawthorne to edit them; Hawthorne declined.) Pausing to marry a new teenage wife in Philadelphia, Canot went to England and then France, arranging the publication in both countries. This eminent slave trader's brother had achieved his own prominence as Emperor Napoleon III's physician and closest advisor. This connection enabled Canot to break off his African association at last, when he was given a government job in the South Seas. Falling ill there, he returned to France and died there in 1860. Captain Bell's career continued for a total of 55 years, of which 44 were at sea. He retired a rear admiral, dying in 1875. This brief sketch suggests that in addition to the obvious risks and difficulty of African deployment--weather, disease, personnel and supply problems--an African Squadron commanding officer faced more subtle foes. Prize money, though good, was rare, and he could be sued; his seizure of a suspect ship would be often questioned and usually result in acquittal unless slaves were actually aboard; cases could drag on for years; and the foe was protean--a slaver today, an innocent tomorrow, a slaver again the next day. Works Chiefly Consulted Admiralty Case File, United States vs. the Bark Chancellor, etc. National Archives and Record Administration, Northeast Region. Admiralty Case File, United States vs. the Schooner Patuxent, etc. National Archives and Record Administration, Northeast Region. Admiralty Case File, United States vs. the Bark Pons, etc. National Archives and Record Administration, Midatlantic Region. Conneau, Captain Theophilus. A Slaver's Logbook, intro. by Mabel M. Smythe. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1976. This is the more complete publication of the book published in 1854 as Twenty Years a Slaver, by Theodore Canot (throughout his African career, Conneau used the name "Canot"). Gilliland, C. Herbert. Voyage to a Thousand Cares: Master's Mate Lawrence with the African Squadron 1844-1846. Naval Institute Press: Annapolis, MD, 2004. National Archives, Record Group 45.
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