BOOK OF THE DAY: Terrible Exile: The Last Days of Napoleon on St HelenaBy Brian Unwin IB Tauris, 231pp, £20
WHEN CHARLES Darwin visited the island of St Helena in 1836, during the homeward journey of the Beagle, he enjoyed rambling around this "curious little world within itself". He was referring to the sheer, jagged cliffs which encircle the green interior like prison walls, noting in his diary that it was as if "the wide barrier of the ocean were not sufficient to guard the precious spot".
It is only when you search for the island on a map that you realise exactly what he meant. Isolated in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, with Angola the nearest mainland to the east 1,900km away, and Brazil the nearest mainland to the west almost 3,200km away, the island would seem to be more suitable as the location for the television series Lostrather than the final home of Napoleon Bonaparte following his defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815.
Named after the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, the island was considered the safest place to put the deposed French emperor. It was to be Napoleon’s detested home until his death in 1821, as his dreams of escaping to America or being given permission to live under a pseudonym in England were gradually extinguished.
His chief tormentor was Sir Hudson Lowe – who arrived as governor and commander in chief in 1816 – and the conflict between the two men is superbly brought to life in this book.
The morning after his arrival Lowe called to visit Napoleon, only to be told that he was indisposed and could not see any visitors. An astonished Lowe was then rebuked for calling so early and informed that 9am was not a time when emperors normally received visitors.
Relations did not improve when they finally did meet. Napoleon insisted on being addressed as “emperor”, while the instructions to refer to him as “Gen Bonaparte” meant the tensions soon escalated into open loathing.
Brian Unwin does an excellent job in reconstructing the day-to-day experiences of Napoleon in exile. He attempted to fill his days by taking long hot baths (much to the annoyance of Lowe, who complained that there was not enough water for his men), gardening and reading, as well as dictating accounts of his great campaigns in an attempt to protect his legacy.
Sexually frustrated – which led to various attempts to sleep with the wives of his aides, some successful, some unsuccessful – Napoleon became increasingly morose and unco-operative.
He refused to exercise outdoors unless he was allowed to walk unsupervised. Increasingly overweight, he installed a wooden seesaw in his residence thinking that playing on it would help him lose weight, but the other end had to be weighted down with lead so he could be lifted off the ground.
Despite the bleak and claustrophobic conditions, Napoleon refused to consider suicide, declaring that “People kill themselves to escape shame; they do not do it to escape misfortune”.
But by 1821 the accumulated misfortunes were too difficult to bear. Unwin reviews the various theories for why Napoleon died – from stomach cancer to arsenic poisoning – and concludes that the question of the precise cause of death must remain open.
However, he suspects that the harsh and unforgiving environment on St Helena might very well have sapped his will to live. In the Darwinian battle for survival Napoleon suffered his final defeat.
Patrick M Geoghegan is associate dean of research at Trinity College Dublin