Entrepôt

Entrepôt - a maritime photographic research project exploring the history of Jersey’s cod-fishing trade in Canada and its merchant networks in the West Indies, South America, Mediterranean and Baltic in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Through the prism of colonialism and family history Entrepôt, explore how, Jersey's original wealth generated by the proceeds from the North Atlantic fisheries and maritime trade lay the foundation for the island’s future prosperity.

This submission includes a short film, The Seaflower Venture (link here) and 8 images from Brazil.

The film is based on the life of Charles Robin, Jersey's premier cod-merchant who founded the most successful firm on the Gaspé Coast in 1766. Using extracts from his own diaries and an unpublished biographical narrative of Robin's life the film re-imagines a merchant triangle – a three-pointed trading system with production in Canada, management in Jersey and markets in Brazil, Italy, Spain, Portugal and England.

The narrative of The Seaflower Venture is created around a sea journey of a Robin ship loosely based on an actual abstract journal of a voyage recorded in a Deck Log written by sea captain Peter Briard who was employed by the Charles Robin Company and successfully mastered the Robin ships ‘Day’, ‘Oliver Blanchard’, ‘Christopher Columbus’ and ‘C.R.C.’ from Gaspé to Naples and Palermo, stopping midway in ports in Brazil every year for nearly twenty years between 1818 to the late 1830s.

Specific footage in the film and a set of curated photographs from the Recôncavo - Bahia's rich agricultural and industrial maritime district in Northeast Brazil - features images from a rural town Muritiba in the municipality of Cachoeira where a coffee plantation was owned by Jerseyman, Jean Gibaut and his son John Frederick Gibaut. From judicial records in Salvador a civic court case from 1851 confirmed that the Gibaut Estate was one of the largest plantations in the area using slave labour and pioneering mechanisation. Both Jean Gibaut’s brothers Moses Amice Gibaut and Francis Gibaut were sea captains working for Charles Robin Company in Gaspé.