OVER the past seven years, Martin Toft has covered more than 60,000 kilometres across land and sea, exploring the history of Jersey’s cod-fishing trade in Canada in the footsteps of those pioneers.
One of the fruits of his labours is a short film, The Seaflower Venture, based on the life of one of the trade’s most successful exponents, Charles Robin, who set up business on the Gaspé Coast in 1766.
Premiering at the opening of ArtHouse Jersey’s Channel Islands Contemporary Art Show last week and part of the research for a larger project called Entrepôt, it reimagines the merchant triangle linking Jersey with South America as well as Canada.
“My journeys are planned by following the sea routes, the voyages of Robin’s ships,” Mr Toft explained. “I spend a whole year just focusing on one particular entrepôt or trading post, doing all the research I can and contacting all the people I can in advance.
“The film is built around Robin’s ship going from Jersey to Canada in the spring, then from Canada to Brazil, then on to the Mediterranean to Italy, Sicily, Spain and Portugal, on to Liverpool and then back to Jersey. It’s a voyage which the Robin ships would take. I know that because in the Société Jersiaise library we have the log of one of the sea captains who spent 40 years working for Robin. I’ve based the narrative arc around that sea voyage, starting in St Aubin where Robin was born and ending up in St Helier, so you see footage from all those locations. It’s not dissimilar if you go travelling yourself.”
Mr Toft’s approach to film-making owes much to what he describes as his “self-made trajectory” as an artist. It saw him develop experience as a freelance photographer, only later taking a master’s degree in art and design, a single photographer among a diverse group of creatives from whom he learned much. He describes himself as a polemicist who likes to be influenced by everything around him.
“I spend a lot of time in archives because I’m hoping to find what I call nuggets, little entry-points into a story, because essentially I’m a story-teller. I’m still a sucker for good old stories. I’m old-fashioned but with all this new technology you have to be more creative about how you tell a story. I hope by doing all the research that I’ll find something that sparks an idea and then I’ll just work on that,” he said.
In the case of The Seaflower Venture, two of those nuggets were provided by an unpublished biography of Charles Robin by Phyllis Gertrude Ross, looking back over its subject’s life from his old age, and Robin’s own diary written in his 20s. He distilled their 400,000 words into 1,000, later melded into a video script by Dean Conrad and narrated by John Henry Falle.
He acknowledges help from experts both in some of the remote areas he has visited and academic authorities on subjects which form part of secondary trade generated by the cod-fishing enterprise. Predictably, perhaps, not all are comfortable subjects.
Mr Toft approached with caution a meeting in Bahia in north-east Brazil with the descendant of slave owners linked to a Jersey family. When he arrived, their welcome was less warm than he might have hoped. They said little.
On their last meeting, as the atmosphere thawed, Mr Toft asked whether his evidence of the slave trade had upset them. “No, no,” his host told him, “what we were really upset about was the fact that you showed us that we came from a little island called Jersey, whereas we had thought we were French.”
The Seaflower Venture is the first in a series of planned outcomes for the Entrepôt project, which will include a set of publications and exhibitions. Mr Toft hopes the film will act as a “calling card” to help raise funds for the project and also to promote it overseas in some of the locations that appear in it.
His film can be seen at the Capital House Gallery in Church Street until 25 February.
