A film based on the life of Charles Robin, Jersey's premier cod-merchant who founded the most successful firm on the Gaspé Peninsula 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 Using extracts from his own diaries and an unpublished biographical narrative of Robin's life the film re-imagines a merchant triangle – a three-pointed trading system with production in Canada, management in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 film 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 (senior) 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 every year for nearly twenty years between 1818 to the late 1830s.
Specific footage in the film from the Recôncavo Baiano - Bahia’s rich agricultural and industrial maritime district in North-eastern Brazil - features images from a small rural town Muritiba in the municipality of Cachoeira where a coffee plantation was owned by Jerseyman, Jean Gibaut and later 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 enslaved 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. Today descendants of the Gibaut family still reside in Muritiba, where a street, Rua Gibaut is named after the plantation where it once stood.
The film premiéred on 18 January 2024 at The Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show at ArtHouse Jersey, Capital House alongside a selection of images from Brazil and some archive objects loaned from the Société Jersiaise.