Jean Barbot (May 25, 1655 - December 27, 1712) was a French commercial agent on slave ships working for the Compagnie du Sénégal. Between 1678 and 1682 he made two voyages to the Guinea Coast; on the strength of these excursions he began to write an account based on his own journals as well as previously printed sources. He was made a refugee by French persecution of the Huguenots, fleeing to England in 1685. The interruption delayed completion of his work until 1688, at which point he discovered that so voluminous a French text could find no publisher in his new country. At his death in 1712 he was still revising and expanding an English edition of his work, which would not find a publisher until 1732. Barbot's 'A description of the coasts of north and south-Guinea, and of Ethiopia inferior, vulgarly Angola' provided a detailed description of what were commonly known as the 'Slave Coasts' and the Atlantic slave trade itself. Barbot's work was for centuries considered authoritative, although recent scholarship has revealed that a significant amount of his work relied on an amalgam of earlier writers, in particular Olfert Dapper (1639-1689).