Johann Peter Oettinger, A German Barber-Surgeon in the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Seventeenth-Century Journal of Johann Peter Oettinger, edited and translated by Craig Koslofsky & Roberto Zaugg. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. lxxxvii + 131 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00)
Johann Peter Oettinger was born in 1666 in the village Orendelsall in the region of Franconia in present-day Germany. Three years later his family moved to the town Künzelsau, where he died in 1746. To think that he had never left this area could not be further from the truth as becomes apparent from this personal journal.
Like many other German-speaking people, he traveled to the Dutch Republic to seek employment in the seventeenth century and offered his services as a barber-surgeon; he took an exam in front of the directors of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) in May 1688 and by July he had crossed the English Channel on the way to the Caribbean and Suriname. In 1692–93 he made a second Atlantic voyage in the service of the Brandenburger African-American Company (BAC or BAAC) that brought him to the West African coast and the Danish Caribbean. One of his main tasks as a barber-surgeon was to inspect and select the enslaved Africans, and to keep them alive during the voyage. Oettinger’s journal is “the only known German-language eyewitness account of an entire slave-ship voyage” (p. ix).
Craig Koslofsky and Roberto Zaugg had—independently of one another—read the manuscript in the reading room of a Berlin archive in 2010 and 2011. When they learned in 2012 that they were both working on the same diary, they decided to join forces and seek the publication of an English translation to remove obstacles for readers who couldn’t interpret the (early modern) German text. They complement the text with an introduction to relevant themes, and attach both (primary) documents for comparison and an annotated guide to sources.
The introduction provides relevant context about the author, slavery, European migration, chartered companies, the Holy Roman Empire, the West-African Coast, the Caribbean, and the history of the manuscript. Already in 1885, Paul Oettinger (a great-great-grandson of Johann Peter Oettinger) published the diary in German. An excerpt of this text was translated and published in English by Adam Jones in the second half of the twentieth century. As the original seems not to have survived, Koslofsky and Zaugg used a 1779 copy of the original that was probably the same copy that Paul Oettinger had used in 1885 for his publication. The added value, compared to the Adam Jones translation, is that they were certainly closer to the original, that they provide a clear and comprehensive introduction, and that they have added documents for comparison and contextualization.
The text is also enriched with small maps made by the Sciences Po cartography workshop (Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Sciences Po—Atelier de cartographie) to illustrate Oettinger’s travels. However, the mapmakers sometimes took some liberties with the text or the historical situation. For instance, Oettinger describes traveling “on foot to Maastricht and s’Hertogenbosch [sic] (…) by water to Rotterdam” (p. 8), which clearly implies that he took the Meuse River to Rotterdam from ’s-Hertogenbosch, but on the map it looks like he walked via Turnhout and Breda to The Hague. Similarly, Oettinger describes the city of Harderwijk as “it lies on the Zuiderzee” (p. 16), but on the map Harderwijk seems to be far from the sea and in the middle of the country because the mapmakers included the Flevopolder and Noordoostpolder—which are Dutch lands that were reclaimed from the Zuiderzee only in the second half of the twentieth century.
The translated text is a boon for everyone not able to read the original manuscript in the Berlin archive. The journal is of interest to people interested in slavery and slave voyages, as well as in European (or German-speaking) perspectives on African societies. Moreover, the journal is a very good illustration of the day-to-day realities of early modern intercontinental voyage, the porousness of the territorial borders of European empires, and the supranational character of nationally chartered Companies. To reiterate that last point, it should be realized that the BAAC was formerly a Company operating out of Emden and a Brandenburg-Prussian Company chartered by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, but as the editors mention on page 34, the meetings of the Board of Directors were in Dutch. In other words, the journal is an excellent example of a German-speaking transnational European experience of slavery and colonialism.