The Seaflower Venture

The Seaflower Venture is a transatlantic research and photographic project exploring the history of Jersey's cod fishing trade with Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries and its international merchant networks and maritime routes.

The Seaflower Venture is a transatlantic research and photographic project exploring the history of Jersey's cod fishing trade with Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries and its international merchant networks and maritime routes. The project is centred around cod-merchant Charles Robin who founded the most successful Jersey firm on the Gaspé Peninsula and the extraordinary photographic archive and unpublished fictional biography of Robin’s life based on his own diaries written by Phyllis Gertrude Ross in the 1950s. Using her manuscript of some 275,000 words as a narrative structure, and probing this important history of Jersey’s maritime identity through a photographic discourse the project explore the creative potential for image- making between the fictional and non-fictional story about Robin's trading posts in the new British colonies in North America and its merchant networks in the West Indies, South America and Mediterranean.