. . so deficient was the island in the means of transport that almost everything, even the very stones for building, were carried up the steep Sidepath on the heads and shoulders of the seamen, occasionally assisted by fatigue parties of the 53rd Regiment.’2

Napoleon claimed to feel most compassion for the slaves, referring particularly to Toby, the old Malay at The Briars, and he criticised the British government for permitting the continuation of an evil it boasted elsewhere of having abolished. He was appalled when Gourgaud told him he had witnessed ‘a woman slave sold publicly’ in Jamestown.3

One day he stopped to chat with Mrs Balcombe on the road near The Briars’ front gate and was introduced to her companion, Mrs Stuart, a pretty young Scotswoman from a ship calling in on its home voyage from Bombay.4 He questioned her about the customs of India, Hindu saints and sadhus (holy men), and the difficulties of the sea voyage for women. As they conversed, Las Cases translating, Mrs Balcombe ‘in rather an angry tone’ indicated to a group of sweating slaves, laden with heavy timber beams, that they should detour around them. Napoleon interjected: ‘Consider the burden, Madame,’ and drew his horse aside to let them pass. Las Cases included an account in his Mémorial: ‘Mrs Stuart, who had been taught to regard Napoleon as a monster, was inexpressibly amazed by this touching incident. In a low tone of voice she exclaimed to her friend, “What a countenance and what a character! How different from what I had been led to expect!”’5

Of course, Napoleon’s own regime had been greatly enriched by the labour of slaves in the French possessions. Although the trade in human beings had been abolished in the colonies during the Revolution, he himself reinstated it.

A former slave, François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, had led the slave rebellion of 1791 in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), the most valuable sugar colony in the West Indies. After the new French republic abolished slavery, L’Ouverture allied himself with it and established control over the whole island, repelling British attempts to invade (including the 1796 expedition in which Balcombe participated). But in June 1802, the slaves’ revolution was savagely suppressed. Acting on First Consul Bonaparte’s specific orders, French troops seized L’Ouverture and sent him to prison high in the Jura Mountains of France, where he died the following year.6 Dictating his memoirs on St Helena, Napoleon was defiant about the decision: ‘There was no longer room for deliberation; the honor as well as the interest of France called for the annihilation of the negro chiefs, who, in my eyes, were nothing more than ungrateful Africans and rebels, with whom it was impossible to establish any system.’7

However, on another occasion, keen to burnish his new image as a benefactor to slaves, he admitted that the French brutality on Saint-Domingue was an error: ‘I have to reproach myself for the attempt at the Colony during the Consulate; it was a great mistake to have wanted to subdue it by force; I should have contented myself to govern it through the intermediary of Toussaint.’8 During the ‘Hundred Days’ of his reign in 1815 after his return from Elba, he decreed the abolition of the French slave trade, although some historians suggest that he did so only to win over British public opinion, particularly that of the Whig liberals.9 Once he was exiled to St Helena, French vessels were refitted as slave ships and the traffic from Africa resumed.

Since 1659, the British East India Company had used the slaves of St Helena for its vegetable gardens, plantations and stock, and for victualling and supplying water for its vessels returning from Asia to Europe. ‘It has been observed,’ wrote a visitor, Francis Duncan, ‘that whites will seldom work in a warm climate when they can get slaves to labour for them.’10 The slaves were primarily imported from Company possessions in the East Indies, the Indian subcontinent and the island of Madagascar, whose people, of mixed Malay, Arabic and East African descent, were prized. By 1676, the Company demanded that every English ship coming from Madagascar ‘was obliged to leave on the island [of St Helena] one Negro, male or female, as the governor chose’.11 As Company employees took up plantations on the island, more slaves were imported, some from West Africa. But whatever the slaves’ racial background—and although most were olive- or copper-skinned—they were usually described as ‘blacks’ or ‘negroes’.

In St Helena’s early days, the slaves’ treatment was some of the most horrific on record anywhere. In his Isle of St Helena, Oswell Blakeston wrote of the punishment of errant slaves: ‘hot sealing wax was dropped on naked bodies, with ferocious floggings . . . with orders for all slaves to bring one faggot of wood each to a pyre so that a slave could be burnt alive, a screaming example to discourage others’.12 A year after Napoleon’s arrival, a census taken on St Helena indicated that there were 821 white civilian residents, 820 garrison troops and 618 Chinese labourers. These three groups combined were matched in numbers by slaves, a quarter of whom were ‘free blacks’, meaning that at different times, and for various reasons, they had been emancipated by their owners.13 The slaves survived on a meagre diet of rice, yams grown on a Company farm, and whatever fish they caught themselves in their fraction of free time.

Sometimes when Napoleon had difficulty sleeping he wandered into the darkened garden and beyond to the orchard. Toby, the old Malay slave, was strict about entry to his domain, and according to Betsy none of the Balcombe family disputed his authority, but Toby had a soft spot for the occupant of the pavilion and always brought him the choicest fruit. ‘Our old Malay was so fond of the man Bony, as he designated the emperor, that he always placed the garden key where Napoleon’s fingers could reach it under the wicket. No one else was ever favoured in the like manner, but he had completely fascinated and won the old man’s heart.’14

Count de Montholon wrote in his memoirs: ‘The eldest daughter of Mr Balcombe one day seeing Toby carrying a heavy burden from the town, having learned the story of his misfortune and the bitter grief he felt at being separated from his children, conceived the idea of obtaining his liberty and sending him back to his home’. Balcombe said he would try to bring this about; he started slowly, by imposing no other labour on the old Malay than the care of the vegetable garden. Betsy applied pressure on Napoleon: ‘The younger of the two, who was very pretty and even more mischievous than beautiful, felt that she could do anything and say anything with impunity, and had all the boldness of a spoiled child. She took advantage of a happy opportunity to ask the Emperor to buy the Malay, and, after her own fashion, related to him one evening the history of her protégé. “I won’t love my father because he doesn’t keep his promise, but I will love you well, if you restore Toby to his children: do you know that he has a girl just of my age, who is very like me?”’

At this, we are told, Bonaparte softened. ‘He assured her that the next day he would give orders to purchase the slave, and request the admiral to send him back to the Indies by the first opportunity. But then the purchase was not in the power of the Emperor; it was not sufficient to pay the sum demanded by the master of the slave. In order to emancipate a slave, it was necessary to go through a long series of formalities, and our departure from Briars to Longwood surprised us before these formalities could be finished.’15 (The ‘ownership’ of Toby was confusing: he had been ‘purchased’ by a Captain Wrangham who had left the island, so in a sense was ‘on loan’ to Balcombe.