Friday 27 October 2017

NAPOLEON AND ST HELENA

NAPOLEON AND ST HELENA 

By Brian Unwin{10}Washington Examiner, 8th August 2015{3}
Napoleon’s image [Saint Helena Island Info:Read articles about St Helena ]
Two hundred years ago, on Aug. 8th, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte embarked at Plymouth on a British warship for the second time in his life. On this occasion it was the ship of the line, the Northumberland. The first time had been only just over three weeks before when, following his comprehensive defeat at the battle of Waterloo, and after agonizing days of indecision, he had surrendered near Rochefort on the French West coast to Captain Maitland of His Majesty’s Ship, Bellerophon, to be conveyed to England. His initial plan, after fleeing from Paris, had been to sail on a French frigate to America. But the Royal Navy had blockaded the port, leaving him little choice but to surrender.
He was not allowed to land at Plymouth while the British Cabinet decided what to do with him. Out of naivety or sheer effrontery he wrote to the Prince Regent, the future King George IV, to “throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people” and seek a comfortable residence somewhere in exile in England. But the government of Lord Liverpool, which had for years fought a life and death struggle with Napoleon, would have none of this and decided to send him to St Helena, a remote volcanic island in the South Atlantic, then in the possession of the British East India Company.
Accordingly, on Aug. 8th, Napoleon and his entourage were transferred kicking and screaming from the Bellerophon to the Northumberland to begin the long sea voyage to St Helena. They were accompanied by transport ships containing about 2,000 British troops, and an admiral in command of a small flotilla to keep a day and night watch on the island. Napoleon had escaped once from Elba and they were determined that he should not escape again.
St Helena has been a British possession since the mid-17th century and (until a new airport opens in 2016) remains one of the remotest inhabited places in the world, some 1,200 miles from Angola and2,000 miles from Brazil. The only regular means of reaching it is still by the last Royal Mail Ship, St Helena, which makes the week long journey from Cape Town every three weeks or so. Napoleon landed there on the 15th of October and was to spend the next five and a half years in captivity, living with his 35 or more loyal companions in Longwood House, a damp and rambling converted farmhouse, whose amenities were light years away from the luxury of the palaces he had occupied in Paris and other great European capitals. Though free to roam the grounds of the house, he could not go beyond them except in the company of a British officer, and every evening at sunset British sentries with bayonets fixed closed in on and surrounded the house.
Napoleon fought tooth and nail against the restrictions imposed on him, which he regarded as a violation of every conceivable international law. He particularly detested the British governor sent out to watch over him, General Sir Hudson Lowe, describing him as “like a hyena in a trap” or a “Sicilian brigand,” and refusing to see him again after only six meetings in the early months. Lowe was not the most imaginative of jailors, but he tried hard to supply Napoleon with all reasonable amenities and comforts - except his freedom. He suffered, however, from strict orders to offer Napoleon what he regarded as the greatest and most provocative of insults, to address him formally as General Bonaparte rather than as His Majesty the Emperor Napoleon.
At first Napoleon believed, or hoped, that the British government and its allies would relent and allow him to return to Europe. But as time progressed, and some of his most senior companions left the island, he began to realise that there was no hope and that he would end his days there. He spent more and more time in his precious warm bath and his physical and psychological condition deteriorated.
Napoleon died a miserable and painful death at Longwood on May 5th, 1821. Although there are many conspiracy theories, some attributing his death to arsenic poisoning, it was almost certainly due to stomach cancer, from which his father had died at an early age. He was buried in a simple unmarked grave on the island, although the British government allowed the French in 1840 to disinter him and transfer his body to France, where it lies in state at Les Invalides in Paris.
Napoleon was a giant of his age, a great general whose legal and administrative reforms have also shaped much of the governance of France and the rest of Europe to this day. His death was the epitome of classical tragedy, the abrupt descent of a great man from the highest to lowest state. His last recorded words on his death bed were, “France, mon fils, l’armée, Joséphine” (“France, army, head of the army, Joséphine”){11} - four of the things that were most dear to him. What he did not mention was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and civilians from France and other countries that his imperial adventures had caused.
See alsoNapoleon Bonaparte

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