Rhetorical Analysis Of The Diligent '

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On 1 June 1731, the Billy brothers, Guillaume and François, waved goodbye to their ship, the Diligent, as it set sail from Brittany. It was weighed down with Indian cloth, cowry shells from the Maldives, white linen from Hamburg, guns, ammunition and smoking pipes from Holland, kegs of brandy from the Loire Valley, and with the all-important supplies for the crew: firewood and flour, dry biscuits, fava beans, hams, salt beef, cheese, white wine and water. There was one other item to be loaded: 150 slave irons with their locks and keys, manufactured by the Taquet brothers in Nantes. Each iron could restrain two slaves. The Diligent was setting off on its first slave-trading voyage. The Africans who would wear these irons were destined for the…show more content…
As Harms points out, in France in the first half of the century there was barely any recognition that the conduct of the slave trade might be a moral issue, though this would change in the run-up to the revolution. So, when Harms asks rhetorically of Durand's opening sentence "How could [he] outline such an evil mission in such impersonal prose?" one suspects that he knows the answer. For investors like the Billy brothers the existence of the slaves was more virtual than real, but their decision to involve themselves more directly was nevertheless a big one: the risks were great, foremost among them disease and death, both of the human cargo and the crew. On average, slave traders in this period made returns of between 7 and 10 per cent annually - more or less in line with other branches of commerce. But the average clearly disguised huge variations, and huge expectations. The risks were high, but, if you were lucky, so were the…show more content…
The sheer numbers involved in the Atlantic slave trade make this clear. In the course of the 16th century around 370,000 people were taken from Africa; in the next century this would rise to nearly two million, and in the 18th to more than six million. It has been estimated that in order to deliver the nine million slaves who arrived at the coast in the period from 1700 to 1850, around 21 million Africans were probably captured; five million of these would have died within a year of capture, and seven million remained in Africa as slaves. The population of certain regions of West and West Central Africa was significantly
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