From the deck in the dawn light, the island of St Helena appeared as a smudge on the grey horizon of the South Atlantic, a brooding apparition, something from Grimm. Another plunge and it was gone in a haze of sea mist and spume, a chimera. As we chugged closer, all that I’d read of its infamous, forbidding appearance could not prepare me for the starkness of those sheer basalt cliffs, their ridges shrouded in mist, plunging over 300 metres to murderous foaming rocks. All of us on deck were subdued.
‘It consists of one vast rock,’ wrote an 1815 visitor, ‘perpendicular on every side, like a castle, in the middle of the Ocean, whose natural walls are too high to be attempted by scaling ladders; nor is there the smallest beach except at the Bay . . . which is fortified with a strong battery of large cannon, and further defended by the perpetual dashing of prodigious waves against the shore, which, without further resistance, makes the landing difficult.’1
I was on the island’s own vessel, subsidised by the British government, RMS St Helena, the last operational Royal Mail ship in the world. There were 88 on board for this voyage, two-thirds of them St Helenians, or ‘Saints’ as they call themselves, descended from people stolen from the East Indies, Madagascar and Africa during two centuries of slave trading. It had taken five days to come from Cape Town, 3100 kilometres to the south-east, following the Benguela current, as did the great wandering albatrosses which occasionally and magically swooped in our wake.
We made a semi-circumnavigation north to the island’s only town and shipping roadstead, and a pod of some two hundred dolphins leaped and plunged beside us, the essence of life and joy. But as I gazed at those barren brown escarpments it seemed hard to credit that humans lived somewhere beyond them, that trees and grass grew, that birds sang. The island seemed saurian, like an ancient, hulking giant tortoise.
‘I almost feel sorry for Napoleon,’ I said.
‘He was a prisoner,’ growled an Afrikaner passenger, ‘he wasn’t coming here for any damned holiday. They should have shot him.’
‘The morning was pleasant, and the breeze steady,’ wrote William Warden, HMS Northumberland’s surgeon. ‘At dawn we were sufficiently near to behold the black peak of St Helena. Between eight and nine we were close under the Sugar-Loaf Hill. The whole of the French party had quitted their cabins, with the exception of Napoleon, and taken their respective stations. On the right stood Madame Montholon, with her arm entwined in that of the General her husband . . . On the poop-deck sat Madame Bertrand, and the Marshal stood behind her.’2
The flagship rounded a looming promontory behind the escort brigs and dropped anchor, heaving on the swell. Guns fired a salute from Munden’s battery on the cliff above, answered from the gun emplacement high up the mountain across the bay. Northumberland’s guns responded.
Bonaparte stayed below deck. His French courtiers, their children and servants, and the British officers and men stared at the forbidding crags. Countess Françoise-Elisabeth Bertrand, born to an Irish military father—General Arthur Dillon—and a French mother from Martinique, was a woman of the world, equally at home in France, Britain, Italy and the Caribbean, but she was in despair contemplating this godforsaken rock. She said it was something the devil had shat on his way to hell.3 Fanny, as her friends called her, was accustomed to the glittering life of the Tuileries palace where her husband had been Grand Marshal. It was feared that, in horror at what her husband’s loyalty had committed them to, she might throw herself through a porthole again. She had attempted this once before, off the British port of Torbay. This supremely elegant woman had been rescued when jammed halfway out, an undignified position.4 ‘Madame Bertrand really did attempt to throw herself into the Sea,’ wrote an aristocratic English gossip, ‘but there was stage effect in it, as assistance was so near at hand.’5
The Bertrands had shared Bonaparte’s previous exile on the island of Elba, occupying a large comfortable villa with pleasant gardens. At the prospect of this new, infinitely harsher banishment, she had persuaded her husband they should endure twelve months at most. He risked a death sentence in France but she had highly placed relatives in England.
Bonaparte did not leave his cabin for a full hour after they had anchored. Closely watched by Dr Warden, who set down his impressions for posterity, the portly man in the green Chasseurs uniform then ascended to the poop deck ‘and there stood, examining with his little glass the numerous cannon which bristled in his view. I observed him with the utmost attention . . . and could not discover, in his countenance, the least symptoms of strong or particular sensations.’6
The prisoner saw a compact settlement squeezed into a ravine between the steep sides of two mountains, their bare slopes devoid of vegetation and surmounted by gun emplacements. Behind a defensive wall at the waterfront were the whitewashed ramparts of the governor’s castle with the Union Jack flapping above and the square tower of the Anglican church; beyond them, pastel-coloured houses straggled the length of the narrow valley.
The former emperor’s dress was meticulous, presenting the image that had long become iconic: the cocked hat, the green cutaway coat with the scarlet cuffs, the Légion d’Honneur flashing on his waistcoat, the white breeches kept spotless by his 24-year-old valet Louis-Joseph Marchand. He was soon joined by his new personal physician—the appointment still a surprise to them both—Irishman Dr Barry O’Meara.
Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Knight Commander of the Bath, appeared in full dress uniform, ready to go ashore with Colonel Sir George Ridout Bingham, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Regiment. During the voyage the admiral had formed a tolerable relationship with Bonaparte, walking with him on deck of an evening, allowing him to preside at mealtimes, and actually standing up in deference when he left the saloon. But such courtesies were about to end. He carried instructions from Lord Henry Bathurst, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, conveying the wishes of the Prince Regent: ‘His Royal Highness . . . relies on Sir George Cockburn’s known zeal and energy of character that he will not allow himself to be betrayed into any improvident relaxation of his duty.’7 The prisoner, as far as British policy was concerned, was to be addressed as ‘General Bonaparte’—or preferably ‘General Buonaparte’, the Corsican spelling offering further disparagement. There was to be no emperor arriving on the island.
Bonaparte retreated to his cabin to brood, telling General Gourgaud, a former ordnance officer: ‘It is not an attractive place. I should have done better to remain in Egypt. By now, I would be Emperor of all the East.’ Madame Bertrand turned to the attentive man behind her with her own decided opinion: ‘Oh, Dr Warden, we are indeed too good for St Helena!’8
Taking in the whole scene was Count de Las Cases, the diminutive French aristocrat and the emperor’s former chamberlain who was to become Napoleon’s Boswell. When the anchor was put down in James Bay, he wrote: ‘This was the first link of the chain that was to bind the modern Prometheus to his rock.’9
The mythologising had commenced.
After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon had fled back to Paris, conceding only that all was lost ‘for the present!’ He remained confident of raising another army—but found that the French people now craved only peace. The Allies refused to negotiate terms while he remained in power. In the end he had abdicated rather than be deposed, but only after his strict condition was granted, the proclamation of his four-year-old son as Napoleon II. But the little emperor’s ‘reign’ was less than two weeks, because the Duke of Wellington had other ideas. Instead, he proclaimed the return of the Bourbons and invited Louis XVIII, the overweight successor to his executed brother Louis XVI, back to Versailles.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte stayed on at the Elysée palace. Here he met with his ex-wife Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, who was both his stepdaughter and, through her marriage to his brother Louis, his sister-in-law. He sought Hortense’s permission to come to the Château de la Malmaison where, in the days of the Consulate and before his marriage to Josephine soured, he had enjoyed family life with his wife and her children. When he had heard news of Josephine’s death in May 1814 when he was in exile on Elba, it was said that he locked himself in his room for two days.
Hortense still liked to be addressed as the ‘Queen of Holland’; Louis Bonaparte had been imposed on the Dutch throne by his imperial brother but had now been supplanted, and the couple had long since separated. It was an open secret in Paris that Hortense was involved in a passionate affair with General Auguste Charles, Comte de Flahaut, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp in the Russian campaign and at Waterloo.10 Four years earlier, in Switzerland, she had given birth to a son by Flahaut; it had been discreetly arranged for the child to be raised by a landowner in the West Indies.
Friends advised Hortense against taking Napoleon into her home but she did not heed them. Bonaparte’s mother and brothers arrived at Malmaison with a group of supporters. Among them was Hortense’s lover, Comte de Flahaut, who soon left on a hopeless mission to request more time from the provisional French government. However, he will appear again in an unexpected role in this story.
Instead of making his escape, Bonaparte lingered five days in some kind of emotional paralysis, reading novels and essays about America, where he planned to seek refuge. An adviser had suggested that from there ‘you can continue to make your enemies tremble. If France falls back under the Bourbon yoke, your presence in a free country will sustain national opinion here.’11 He thought often about Josephine and told her daughter: ‘Poor Josephine, I cannot get used to living here without her. I always expect to see her emerging from a path gathering one of those flowers which she so loved . . . How beautiful La Malmaison is! Wouldn’t it be pleasant, Hortense, if we could stay here?’ ‘I could not reply,’ wrote Hortense, ‘my voice would have betrayed all my emotion.’12
Guns rumbled in the distance. Blücher’s Prussian army was advancing fast and Bonaparte’s options for escape were closing. He decided at last to quit the country with his brother Joseph and sail to America—but he knew that the English anticipated this and their navy blocked the Channel. With Joseph and some faithful officers and servants he would aim instead for the port of Rochefort on the Bay of Biscay.
Finally, Bonaparte stood facing his strong-willed mother, Letizia, known throughout Europe as ‘Madame Mère’. Hortense reported that they gazed silently at each other, then Letizia stretched out both her hands towards him and in a clear sonorous voice said: ‘Farewell, my son!’ He gathered her hands in his, looked long and affectionately in her face and, with a voice as firm as hers, exclaimed: ‘Farewell, my mother!’13
Travelling in a series of carriages, spaced well apart, the fugitives reached Rochefort on 8 July. The valet Marchand rode in a carriage crammed with the accoutrements of gracious living that he had hurriedly packed—his master’s campaign bed, table linen, a Sèvres porcelain dinner service, gold plates, silverware, an assortment of snuff boxes and almost six hundred books. At Rochefort the group boarded the frigate La Saale, but it could not weigh anchor for Boston. The harbour was emphatically blocked by the 74-gun British warship HMS Bellerophon and two naval frigates.
Bonaparte resolved to surrender, bargaining on the British sense of justice he claimed to admire. He told General Bertrand: ‘It is better to risk confiding oneself to their honour than to be handed over to them as de jure prisoners.’ He had in fact few alternatives: the naval blockade prevented his escape by sea, while General Blücher and the Bourbons wanted him shot. First though, on 13 July, he penned a grandiloquent letter to the Prince Regent, comparing the English royal to the King of the Persians who offered safe harbour to his enemy:
Royal Highness—A victim to the factions which divide my country, and to the enmity of the greatest Powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to place myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim of your Royal Highness as of the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies.
—Napoleon14
It is doubtful if the Regent saw the letter until much later, but when he did, despite his image as a wastrel and a rake, the reference from Plutarch’s Lives would not have been lost on him; he was said to be ‘probably the only prince in Europe . . . competent to peruse the Greek as well as the Roman poets and historians in their own language’.15
Bonaparte sent Gourgaud and Las Cases under a flag of truce to deliver the letter to the Bellerophon. They were well received by Captain Frederick Maitland. Two days later, the former emperor and his companions stepped aboard the great warship, veteran of the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, known affectionately by its crew as the ‘Billy Ruffian’. As they came on deck the officers and seamen formed a parade of honour. A midshipman left an account: ‘And now came the little great man himself, wrapped up in his grey great coat, buttoned to the chin, three-cocked hat and Hussar boots, without any sword, I suppose as emblematical of his changed condition. Maitland received him with every mark of respect . . .’16
‘He is extremely curious,’ wrote one of the officers. ‘Nothing escapes his notice; his eyes are in every place and on every object . . . He immediately asks an explanation of the ropes, blocks, masts and yards, and all the machinery of the ship. He also stops and asks the officers questions relative to the time they have been in the service, what actions, &c, and he caused all of us to be introduced to him the first day he came on board . . . He inquired into the situation of the seamen, their pay, prize money, clothes, food, tobacco &c, and when told of their being supplied by a Purser or Commissary, asked if he was not a rogue!’17
Meanwhile, the devoted Marchand—a famous exception to the adage that ‘No man is a hero to his valet’—had arranged that the 250,000 francs they had managed to hide from British investigation, their reserve against hard times, ‘were in eight belts that we put around our bodies’.18 Walking in the stern gallery with Las Cases, Napoleon cautiously withdrew a weighty velvet band from under his waistcoat and gave it to his companion. The count wrote: ‘The Emperor told me soon after that it contained a diamond necklace, worth two hundred thousand francs, which Queen Hortensia forced him to accept on his leaving Malmaison.’19
The men on board were bound to romanticise their brush with the most compelling figure in contemporary history, having actually found him human. One of them wrote: ‘If the people of England knew him as well as we do, they would not hurt a hair of his head.’20 Captain Maitland wrote in his book that although it might appear surprising that a British officer could be ‘prejudiced in favour of one who had caused so many calamities to his country, to such an extent did he possess the power of pleasing, there are few people who could have sat at the same table with him for nearly a month, as I did, without feeling a sensation of pity, allied perhaps to regret, that a man possessed of so many fascinating qualities, and who had held so high a station in life, should be reduced to the situation in which I saw him’.21
But for all the graciousness and goodwill, when Bonaparte boarded the Bellerophon he had taken an irrevocable step: he was from that moment until the end of his life a prisoner of Great Britain.