Théophilus Conneau collection on A Slaver's Log Book

Captain Théophilus Conneau was born in Italy to French parents in 1804. He became involved with the slave trade in 1826, and for the following thirteen years, he was an agent to Cuban slave traders and a commander of vessels that smuggled captive African people into Cuba, working mostly on the coast of Guinea and Liberia. Conneau owned a fort where European goods were exchanged for enslaved people. Conneau was imprisoned by the English and French; his French sentence for his active promotion of the trade of enslaved individuals in Senegal was commuted in 1835.

In the 1850s, Conneau immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he reconneceted with James Hall, whom he had known in Liberia. Hall convinced Conneau to write a memoir and referred him to journalist Brantz Mayer, who worked actively with Conneau to edit the manuscript and then published it, originally under his name, entitled Captain Canot, or Twenty Years of an African Slaver. According the the dealer description that accompanied the material, Conneau and Hall, elected to use the alias Theodore Canot in order for Conneau to avoid prosecution for his illegal work in the slave trade and to avoid embarrassing his brother, chief physician to Napoleon III.

Historians of the slave trade were confused from an early date regarding Canot's identity and the authorship of the work. In the early twentieth century, it was retitled Adventures of an African Slaver and attributed to Theodore Canot. In 1976, Conneau's original 1853 manuscript was found in the back room of the Washington, D.C. bookstore, Loudermilk's, and then published that same year as A Slaver's Log Book, or 20 years' residence in Africa, attributed to Captain Theophilus Conneau, based on the original documentation and letters between Conneau and Mayer.

The corrected proofs for the 1976 edition edited by Mabel M. Smythe were part of the original purchase by Howard S. Mott of the Canot material but became separated and were not included in the sale to Between the Covers (from whom the Houghton Library purchased them). The proofs included bibliographical references and index. Smythe was not credited as the editor of this edition but is known to have been. She was the second African-American female ambassador and the first African-American female ambassador posted to Africa.