CANOT, ki-n6, Theodore, Italian adven turer and slave trader: b. Florence 1807; d. 1850. His father was a French officer. He visited Boston, sailed to various parts of the world, was shipwrecked near Ostend, and again on the coast of Cuba, where he fell into the hands of a gang of pirates, one of whom claimed to be his uncle, befriended him for some time, and finally sent him to an Italian grocer at Regla, near Havana, who was secretly concerned in the African slave trade. Canot made his first voyage to Africa in 1826, landing at the slave station of Bangalang, on the Rio Pongo, Senegambia. After quelling a mutiny on board and helping to stow away 108 slaves under 15 years of age, the young adventurer entered the service of the owner of the station. He visited various parts of the neighboring country, collecting by aid of the African princes a stock of slaves for his newly-established depot at Kambia near Bangalang, which in May 1828 was destroyed by fire. He afterward pur chased a vessel at Sierra Leone, in which with a cargo of slaves wrested from a trader in the Rio Numez, he sailed to Cuba. Three more expe
ditions soon followed; in the first he lost 300 slaves by smallpox; in the last he was taken by the French and condemned to 10 years' con finement in the prison of Brest, in France, but after a year's durance was pardoned by Louis Philippe. He returned to Africa, and was the pioneer of the slave traffic at New Sestros. After a pleasure trip to England he returned to New Sestros and in 1840 shipped to Cuba 749 slaves. He now resolved to. abandon his illicit course, and obtaining from an African chief a valuable grant of land at Cape Mount, established there in 1841 a trading and farming settlement under the name of New Florence, which in March 1847 was destroyed by the British, who suspected it to be a slave station. Canot subsequently removed to South America, then to Baltimore, Md., and finally received from Napoleon III an office in one of the French colonies in Oceanica. Consult Mayer, Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver' (1854).