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

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

Recently rediscovered and never before published, this buoyant memoir recounts a young man's 1729 voyage from Paris to the New World. An incorrigible rake—if not an outright rogue—Marc-Antoine Caillot documents a string of pranks, parties, and romantic escapades, and he speaks with immediacy across the centuries, illuminating racial and ethnic politics, environmental concerns, and the birth of New Orleans's distinctive cultural mélange. Enlivened by the author's own exquisite illustrations, A Company Man provides an intimate look at the early history of one of America's most storied cities, placing it and the fledgling colony it anchored within the nexus of the French Atlantic empire.

PRAISE FOR A COMPANY MAN:

"We are lucky that Th e Historic New Orleans Collection has invested the money, time, and expertise to bring Caillot's memoir to a wide audience. The book is beautifully and expertly produced. . . . And then there is Caillot himself, whose youth, spirit, and hormones make him an astute if unlikely guide to this complicated world to which he paid such great and painstaking attention."
— James Taylor Carson, Journal of Southern History

"A wonderful, careful, informed, and loving job of editing. The translation is well written and sensitive to nuances. I learned a lot, especially the determined merriment in the face of horrors which remains characteristic of New Orleans."
— Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century