When Benjamin Franklin arrived in France in December 1776, he stayed with Jacques-Barthélémy Gruel, a Nantes shipowner who made a fortune in the slave trade.
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When Benjamin Franklin arrived in France in December 1776, he stayed with Jacques-Barthélémy Gruel, a Nantes shipowner who made a fortune in the slave trade.
Among Gruel’s ships was the Marie-Séraphique, which transported between 302 and 361 enslaved people on each of its four trips from Africa to the French West Indies between 1769 and 1773.
Franklin and some of his fellow revolutionaries sought the support of Nantes merchants and shipowners in transporting weapons and other goods across the Atlantic Ocean during the American Revolution.
We know of the ship and its history because of a rare detailed drawing in the Nantes history museum. The exhibit and a memorial to the abolition of slavery elsewhere in the city acknowledge that Nantes was the leading French port in the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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