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.

CHAPTER 3

FRIENDS AND FOES

Friendly Saints extended helping hands as we stepped from the rocking launch onto the landing place. I could see that when a swell was running this could be tricky. (The island’s governor, welcoming Prince Andrew in 1984, famously lost his footing and suffered a dunking, much replayed on UK television.)

RMS St Helena was moored out in the bay, its derricks already unloading vital cargo onto a barge, everything from frozen meat to roofing iron, refrigerators, cars, carrots, and cats and dogs. Our luggage, brought by an earlier barge, was stacked in the customs shed, where a copper-skinned policewoman—in her British bobby’s uniform and chequerboard bowler—led a beagle on a sniffing inspection. Returning Saints hugged family and friends they had not seen for months, sometimes far longer. The isolation of the island and the poor local wages mean that many residents have become long-distance commuters, taking up jobs in the UK, the Falkland Islands, and at the British and American bases on Ascension Island, returning on the ‘RMS’ when they can. The economic necessity of such unwieldy commuting will change for many of them when the airport under construction is completed. Tourism is the great hope.

My companion and I were greeted by our new landlord, Edward Thorpe, a tall young man from one of the oldest English families on the island. Passengers were already signing up for excursions. Of the thirty or so tourists from the ship, mainly from South Africa, few had expressed much interest in the island’s most famous exile. They were coming for the stark scenery, the Georgian buildings, the formidable hiking trails, and to visit the graves of some two hundred Boer War prisoners. However, most would devote a few hours of the nine-day stay—while the RMS made a circuit 1120 kilometres north-west to Ascension Island—to the ‘Napoleonic tour’ of Longwood House, ‘the Tomb’ and The Briars Pavilion.

‘Well, Papa, have you seen him?’ William Balcombe’s children at The Briars rushed him on his return from visiting the Northumberland.

He had not, although he had paid his respects to General and Madame Bertrand, General and Madame de Montholon and General Baron Gourgaud. He had been in discussion with Admiral Sir George Cockburn and Governor Wilks, who had decided that the prisoner and a few of his companions could be temporarily accommodated at Henry Porteous’s boarding house at the bottom of the main street next to the castle gardens, while the French servants would be billeted in nearby cottages. This was a concession on the admiral’s part.