Whenever he encountered ordinary British serving personnel, espe
cially naval officers, Napoleon always impressed them mightily. Captain
Ussher of the Undaunted was no exception and he always remembered
the Emperor's 'unfailing cordiality and condescension'. On 3 May the
vessel anchored at Porto-Ferraio in Elba, where legend credits Napoleon
with having won over the hostile Elbans in a single hour. This was
necessary for, by an irony of ironies, in mid-April r8q the Elbans, still
ignorant of developments in Paris, revolted against Bonapartist rule and
were put down with much bloodshed. Because of plague in Malta, Elba
was quarantined at about the same time, so that it was just a day before
the Emperor's arrival that the r2,ooo inhabitants of the island learned
that their new ruler was to be Napoleon Bonaparte.
The polyglot population of Elba - Tuscans, Spaniards, Neapolitans -
were either employed in lead or granite works or in the iron mines of Rio
Marina; apart from fishing, these were the only sources of the island's
wealth. On this unpromising base Napoleon erected the panoply of a
court, with all the expected accoutrements. He established his palace at I
Mulini, a modest house built by the Medicis in the eighteenth century for
the governor's gardener. His court contained a Grand Marshal of the
Palace, a Military Governor, a Treasurer, four chamberlains, two
secretaries, a doctor, a chemist, a butler and a chef with seven assistant
chefs, two valets, two equerries, a Mameluke servant called Ali, two
gentlemen-ushers, eight footmen, a porter, a director of music, two
female singers, a laundress and a washerwoman; 35 men worked in the
stables which housed 27 carriages and his favourite horses.
For the first few months Napoleon enjoyed playing ruler of his
miniature kingdom. He reorganized administration, planted vineyards,
even started to build a theatre. He poured out a stream of decrees
covering all aspects of the island's agriculture: the harvest, irrigation,
forests, olives, mulberries, chestnuts, potatoes - nothing was too trivial to
escape his attention. Campbell reported: 'I have never seen a man in any
situation of life with so much activity and restless perseverance.'
Napoleon had grandiose ambitions for new roads, a new hospital, a
military school. But all these plans came to nothing, for two main reasons.
As rumours spread of tax increases and forced labour through corvee,
initial Elban inclination to give their new sovereign the benefit of the
doubt turned to sullen passive obedience. And, more to the point, there
was no money to implement these schemes as it gradually became
apparent that the Bourbon government had no intention of honouring its
commitment to pay the annual two-million-franc subvention.
Moreover, it soon became clear that Caulaincourt's portrait of Elba as
marcin
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