Assumptions, The Void, and Scholarly Caulking

I very much enjoyed reading The Diligent by Robert Harms. I was very much stricken by what I have decided to call his scholarly caulking. There are plenty of voids created by Robert Durand’s journal for its purposes are clearly professional rather than personal. This seems to drive Harms bonkers for he is practically begging to hear more about Durand’s personal opinions and more intricate aspects of his ventures. He opens with ‘How could Robert Durand outline such an evil mission in such impersonal prose?’. (5) However, Harms must already know the answer to this. Slavery was a profitable business and slaves seen as a commodity. Harms even highlights the massive amalgamation of European ignorance towards African culture and slavery. Most noticeably this comes into play through the lack of inner African geography and the convenient ‘truth’ that they were saving the African from themselves. This is liberation through enslavement. Harms cites such a materialistic perspective through the words of Robert Durand in stating that slave trading is only a means to make a living and he was ‘simply doing his job’ (250).

Returning to such scholarly caulking created by the void of information, Harms turns his attention, when appropriate, to other such sources to give interpretations of events that ‘must have’ happened. A great example comes into play with the Carnivalesque tradition that took part on ships when celebrating promotions and initiating new sailors to the African trade. (106) Harms goes into great detail with what other scholars have called the steam-valve theory that comes into play with the inversion of social hierarchy. Harms describes how the crew called the shots, to some extent, on these days and the tub of seawater initiation practices. Such secondary source inclusions very much help to illuminate the voids created in the limitations of Durand’s journal. Such practices, I consider, to be staples of a good historian.

With such caulking however, one has to be transparent about where statistical probability ends and assumption takes root. There are many times in which he approaches such a gap in stating ‘perhaps’ or ‘could have’ which I find to be an appropriate undertaking. There are also those times in which Harms blurs the lines between what Durand said and what Harms thinks must have happened based off secondary source accounts. In these situations I find that such choices are made on the basis of literary conventions rather than historical accuracies. This theme tends to crop up time and time again in these micro-histories that we are reading. Do we want something that sounds captivating or something that is accurate? Are they mutually exclusive? I would assume not.

One example of such assumptions is that he states how Pauline Villeneuve, the slave freed through religious convention, felt. In fact, Harms makes profound assumptions in stating what she learned, what she felt and her inclinations. (8) Knowing that it was improbable she has any extant firsthand accounts looking at Harms citations confirms such a notion. This is something we have dealt with before and seems to be a byproduct of creating a relationship between the author, material, and the reader. But do such assumptions do more Harm than good?

Finally, Harms makes interesting claims in the introduction. I interpreted them in a very micro-historical fashion. He seemed to be saying that large historical trends are the byproducts of small local/regional interactions. However, upon reading more of his work I think that he might be speaking more towards the varying interactions of the European, American, and African worlds. The ship clearly seems to sail through all three and give vast insight to each on their own and the ramifications of their confrontations.  To that end, Harms seems to be illustrating more of a proto-Globalization account. Even that statement is imbued with baggage because I believe Harms is correctly trying to illustrate how our conceptions of globalization are flawed. These sorts of connections, conflicts, and synergy have been going on for a very long time.