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.