Andrew Roberts

My last chance to follow in Napoleon’s footsteps

St Helena, the island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled and died, is so far away from anywhere else that even pirates never discovered it. The only way to get there is by the last Royal Mail ship in existence, RMS St Helena, after a six-day journey from Cape Town, as I discovered this month when I visited in the course of researching my forthcoming biography of Napoleon.

Although the Emperor was violently seasick on his journey there in 1815, the seas were very calm for mine. Indeed, the calmness was almost eerie; for nearly a week we saw no planes in the sky, no other ships, nothing in the sea except some dolphins and flying fish on the last day, and no birds except two white-throated petrels. It was just sky and sea bisected by a totally flat horizon, for day after day after day.

St Helenans are called ‘Saints’, and they amused themselves on the journey playing deck quoits — a game that combines the skill of darts with the viciousness of croquet — and taking part in hard-fought general knowledge quizzes. I was a bit concerned when the ship’s doctor confidently asserted that the heart had two valves, rather than the generally accepted number of four, but otherwise the standard was pretty high. Sailing into the only harbour on the island, Jamestown, presented an incredibly imposing spectacle. Mists cleared to reveal dark red lava cliffs 600 feet high rising out of the sea on either side of the ship. Small wonder that Napoleon’s first response was: ‘It is not an attractive place. I should have done better to have stayed in Egypt.’ He must have known the moment he saw those massive rocks, the cannon defending them, and the Royal Navy frigates on 24-hour guard, that he was going to die on that tiny, 47 square miles of volcanic rock, which then as now only had around 4,000 inhabitants.

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