was sighted. Napoleon spent most of his time playing vingt-et-un with his
courtiers or whist with the British officers, but liked to be sociable and on
12 September took part in landing a shark from the ocean. Admiral
Cockburn, who bridled at the Emperor's habit of leaving the dinner table
as soon as he had bolted his food, nevertheless conceded that he was a
great fa vourite with all ranks and 'had descended fr om the Emperor to
the general with a flexibility of mind more easily to be imagined than
described'.
Doubtless thinking this would seem to his superiors in the Admiralty
as though he had fallen under the Bonaparte spell, he laced his reports
with uncomplimentary remarks about the ogre's intellect and intelligence.
Colonel Bingham wrote that 'General Bonaparte' asked questions which
revealed a depth of ignorance a cultivated Englishman would have
blushed to admit to, while Cockburn himself added that Napoleon's
ignorance was so prodigious that it took a kind of perverted genius to
remain so intellectually benighted. Another focus for deprecatory remarks
was the Emperor's (admittedly very poor) linguistic talent and his
inability to learn English: 'He was on board six weeks and at the end
could not even pronounce our names correctly.'
The Northumberland crossed the Equator at longitude 3°36' on 23
September, and on 16 October anchored at St Helena, a bastion of black
basalt- all that remained of an extinct volcano. Used as a watering place
by ships of the East India Company and a base fr om which to dominate
the South Atlantic by the Royal Navy, the island boasted a mixture of
inhabitants fr om all the races of the earth: Europeans, blacks, Malays,
Indians, Chinese. Its society was dominated, if not governed, by an
aristocracy composed of high officials from 'John Company' and great
landowners whose estates were still worked by slaves. To keep Napoleon
there the British government had earmarked z,z8o soldiers, 500 guns and
two brigs on constant patrol around the rocky coast. The total cost of
maintaining the covering squadron and the near 3,000 military and
civilians on the island was estimated at £4oo,ooo a year.
Napoleon was cast down by his first sight of the volcanic island, just
twenty-eight miles in circumference, and apparently as escape-proof as
Devil's Island. He is said to have remarked that he would have done
better to stay in Egypt in 1799. His first night on the island was spent in a
boarding house in the port of Jamestown. The East India Company had
retained all the best houses when they handed St Helena over to the
British government, so there was a dire shortage of suitable accommoda
tion. Accordingly, for two months the Emperor lived in a pavilion in the
marcin
(Marcin)
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