A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies

Named 2014 Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

Recently rediscovered and never before published, Marc-Antoine Caillot's buoyant memoir recounts a young man's voyage from Paris to the port city of Lorient, across the Atlantic to Saint Domingue, and up the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Only twenty-one when he set sail as a clerk for the French Company of the Indies in 1729, Caillot was in many ways the ultimate company man. His descriptions of flora, f...