He is very sallow and quite light grey eyes, rather thin greasy-looking brown hair, and is altogether a very nasty, priest-like looking fellow.’26

On 11 August, the Northumberland, with 1080 people on board, set sail. It was said that Bonaparte stood on deck for five hours, gazing at the receding coast of France; when it slipped from sight he was distraught.27

During the Northumberland’s 71 days at sea, twenty of them becalmed in the doldrums, Napoleon wondered aloud what to do with the dreary future stretching ahead. ‘Sire,’ answered Count de Las Cases, ‘we will live in the past—there is surely enough there to satisfy us! Do we not enjoy the Lives of Caesar and Alexander? We will have a still better: you will, Sire, re-read yourself!’ ‘Yes,’ Napoleon agreed, ‘we must work. Work is also the scythe of time.’28

The dictation of the memoirs began, the count hunched in a corner of the cabin, creasing his old naval uniform, his quill scratching across parchment. Dr Warden was amused by his ‘diminutive appearance’. Some Englishmen, he wrote, had ‘expected Herculean figures to be employed in the service of a man who had lately bestrode so large a portion of Europe’, whereas ‘Count de Las Cases does not exceed five feet and an inch in height, and appears to be fifty years of age, of a meagre form, and with a wrinkled forehead’.29

Bonaparte and Admiral Cockburn occupied cabins either side of the saloon and were civil without going out of their way to be friendly. The admiral deplored the prisoner’s habit of bolting his food—despatching his evening meal in fifteen minutes—and then abruptly leaving the table.30 Sir George Bingham thought he was a secret drunk: ‘he drinks regularly his bottle of wine at dinner; a bottle of claret is always carried into his cabin at breakfast, which never comes out again, but as his servants have no dislike to it, they possibly assist him’.31 (Bonaparte was in fact abstemious and tended to see the British as drunks.)

When they briefly hove to at the island of Madeira, Bonaparte looked down at the assemblage of people on the shore and remarked to Dr Warden ‘that he never beheld women with such beautiful bosoms’. Warden noted for his fiancée Miss Hutt: ‘He is very anxious to know every particular respecting the females inhabiting the island of St Helena. Upon my word, I scarcely think Bonaparte can live without a wife.’32

The former emperor walked the deck with the admiral and played games with Tom Pipes, Cockburn’s huge and amiable Newfoundland, throwing bones along the boards for the dog to retrieve, or he sat on a cannon and gazed at the flying fish. One day when a shark was caught, ‘Bonaparte’, wrote the admiral’s secretary John Glover, ‘with the eagerness of a schoolboy scrambled on the poop to see it’.33

He even took a few English lessons from Las Cases—who had spent years as an émigré teacher in Britain and promised he would have him reading an English newspaper in the course of a month. The lessons were soon cut short by Bonaparte’s pronouncement: ‘I well know that you think me a very clever fellow; but be that as it may, I cannot do everything; and among those things which I should find impracticable, is the making myself master of the English language in a few weeks.’34

Bonaparte’s questing intelligence was forever alert, collecting facts that might be of value, classifying and storing them in his capacious brain. He gained an astute understanding from Cipriani Franceschi, his butler and a fellow Corsican, about whom it was worth talking to, and who might provide useful information to help him win freedom. Cipriani’s espionage skills had made possible the escape from Elba and he would continue to be his master’s eyes and ears on their new island of exile.

Dr O’Meara became Napoleon’s companion for a regular game of whist and Italian conversation, so excluding others of the party. Barry O’Meara was 29 years old, a native of County Cork with an idiosyncratic past.35 He had previously been in the British army, serving in Sicily, where he had gained his knowledge of the Italian language. But he had contravened military regulations by acting as second in a duel and was court-martialled and dismissed. He had then contrived to join the Royal Navy as a surgeon. He retained an abiding resentment of the British army, and showed sympathy towards the former emperor for his difficult situation.

General Gourgaud simmered with resentment to see his hero enjoying such friendly relations with the Irishman. From the beginning he had his suspicions that the man was a British spy, ingratiating himself for a purpose. He was not altogether wrong. O’Meara was preparing an account of the voyage for Finlaison, aware now that it was likely to be read by First Sea Lord Melville, and perhaps by ‘the highest authority’, the Prince Regent. While waspish about some of the French, his comments about the prisoner were benign, simply describing his daily routine, the hours he got up, walked about, dined and retired. ‘He generally spoke a few words to every officer who could understand him; and according to his usual custom, was very inquisitive relative to various subjects.’36 When the clerk Finlaison received the letter, he passed it on to his immediate superior, John Wilson Croker, the influential Secretary to the Admiralty and a regular at the Prince Regent’s Carlton House dinners. A request came back from Croker to sight all further correspondence from O’Meara, in order to pass it up higher.

CHAPTER 4

THE BRIARS

I was quite prepared for the awefulness—and even the awfulness—of St Helena; what I had not expected was to fall in love with the island.

White fairy terns swooped against the harsh volcanic cliffs, and old cannon lay rusting along the waterfront marina. We passed over a moat—once there was a drawbridge—and through an archway in the town’s massive stone wall. Inside was an almost perfectly preserved Georgian main street, like a film set for a Jane Austen or Thackeray adaptation—as long as one’s eye did not stray to the grim cliffs looming on either side. The whitewashed castle—a seventeenth-century fort of the English East India Company—is still the centre of government administration. With brass cannon at its entrance and orange bougainvillea festooning the ramparts, it dominates the parade square and faces the old Company bond store and the eighteenth-century St James’s Anglican church. Next to it is the prison with its cheerful blue balcony and accommodation for just twelve miscreants. Behind are the basalt slopes of Ladder Hill and an almost vertical staircase called Jacob’s Ladder with 699 steps to the fort above. Brightly coloured Georgian houses, some with slave entrances to cellars, line the main street, along with a handful of shops, the post office and the Consulate Hotel, its wrought-iron balconies overhanging the footpath.

Accommodation for the ship’s tourists had been booked beforehand—at the Consulate or other lodgings in Jamestown.