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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon's Exile on St. Helena
It is difficult to overstate the remoteness of St. Helena. This tiny island protectorate of Great Britain (roughly 10 sq. miles), situated in the South Atlantic well below the equator and several hundred miles off the coast of Africa, is as definitively cut-off from the rest of the world as any place on earth. It is a place without an airport or harbor, reachable only via passage on a single ship, the RMS St. Helena, which leaves the Welsh port of Cardiff and arrives at Jamestown, the island's capital, two weeks later. So treacherously rocky is St. Helena's shoreline that this lifeline to the rest of the world must lay anchor off shore and transfer its cargo to the island in smaller craft. It's difficult, too, to overstate the strangeness of this place. Despite its proximity to the equator, its vaguely tropical temperament, this is not paradise — even if a hint of paradise occasionally wafts in on the breeze. Rather, St. Helena is an impossibly difficult and unforgiving place, "a grain of soil in the middle of the ocean...a scab on Neptune's skin." Essentially, it is a massive, perpetually wind-swept rock, the craggy face of which is softened only by intermittent patches of cacti and mixed deciduous growth. At times oppressively humid, it is place where, for the termites, nothing made of wood lasts very long. This strangeness extends beyond the island's physicality. St. Helena boasts 3 hotels and a single restaurant. The most persistent problem for the local police is public drunkenness on Saturday nights, when a good number of "Saints" (as the residents of the island are called) can be found "blowing off steam" in one of Jamestown's watering holes. Prisoners at the island's jail are permitted to leave their cells weekly for "football days" and to fish or swim in the ocean. It was into such a world that Napoleon was exiled after his final defeat at Waterloo, and here that the man who came perilously close to ruling all of Europe spent his final days. To exile the Emperor to St. Helena was Wellington's idea; the victor of Waterloo had stopped briefly at the island on a voyage home from India and immediately recognized in its fortress-like nature and balmy desolation the world's greatest natural penal island. Napoleon's captivity on St. Helena might be regarded as Wellington's parting, and perhaps cruelest, shot at his great adversary. The Black Room at Longwood is Jean-Paul Kauffmann's look at Napoleon's 6-year exile on St. Helena. More than a Bonaparte biography, however, the book is equal parts biography, travelogue and history; it is an idiosyncratic but highly effective mix that makes the book as compulsively readable as it is serious. As it turns out, Kauffmann is perhaps uniquely credentialed to pen such a book. A former journalist, he spent 3 years as a hostage of Shiite Muslims in Beirut, during which time his captors often kept him chained and blindfolded in a basement. We are told that to maintain his sanity and keep alive his hopes of eventual release, Kauffmann passed the time by conjuring the bouquets of his beloved Bordeaux wines. Napoleon's exile on St. Helena began on the fourteenth of October, 1815, when he arrived on the island aboard the HMS Northumberland accompanied by a small retinue of servants, attendants and aides-de-camp. After a short (and, Kauffmann tells us, comparatively pleasant) stay on the estate of a local family, the Emperor was removed by his British captors to Longwood, where a manor house of sorts had been cobbled together from stables, a former storehouse and various outbuildings. Situated on a plateau several miles from Jamestown and reachable from the capital only after what remains today a fairly grueling trek, Longwood, on the most inhospitable island in the South Atlantic, occupies a tract of land that is nearly uninhabitable. The winds, formidable elsewhere on St. Helena, are so strong here, so persistent, that trees in the area are bent nearly parallel to the ground. Although he would sometimes walk the grounds and, later, turned to gardening as a hedge against the crushing boredom of Longwood's cramped and musty rooms (the odor of which, for Kauffman, became the very scent of captivity), Napoleon, for the most part, spent his days on St. Helena dictating his memoirs to the various members of his entourage, each of whom had been assigned a segment of the Emperor's life to record. Each day, Kauffmann reports, Napoleon paced the long main room of the house "reeling off his memories." As Kauffmann notes, this endless reflection, and whatever pleasure Napoleon may have derived from it initially, rather quickly gave way to self-recrimination and second guessing, a perpetual cataloging of mistakes made and opportunities lost. More so than anything else, Waterloo haunted the Emperor's thoughts. "When things are going badly at St. Helena," Kauffmann writes, "you can bet that Waterloo is not far away." As early as 1816, less than a year into his exile, Napoleon began to look upon death as a preferable alternative to exile. "I am in a tomb," he confides to Bertrand, one of his companions. "I am only waiting for death to put an end to my torment." Almost from the start it seems, Napoleon realized that Longwood was one adversary he had no hope of vanquishing. Kauffmann, in elegant, often lyrical prose, carefully charts Napoleon's "slow disintegration," interweaving with the Emperor's story the narrative of his own stay on St. Helena: each chapter of The Black Room at Longwood records one of the 9 days Kauffmann spent on the island, 9 days being the time it takes for the St. Helena to refuel and take on stores for its return journey. Organizing the text thusly accomplishes several things. First, it allows Kauffmann to reveal St. Helena to us gradually in a way that, as much as possible, approximates the way Napoleon himself first experienced the island. Secondly, it enables Kauffmann to draw a comparison between the St. Helena of today and St. Helena circa 1815. Amazingly, we learn that except for obvious amenities like electricity and running water, the cars parked along Jamestown's narrow streets and the video tapes that locals clamor for every time the ship arrives to supply the island, little here has changed in nearly 190 years. To be sure, Kauffmann's own story — his quest for "Bonaparte the man" — is no less interesting than Napoleon's. As Kauffmann explored the island, he met a host of colorful characters, such as the pair of often tipsy, vaguely insulting English women who seem to appear at Kauffmann's every turn or the aloof and ironic French consul. (Longwood is officially French territory.) But most immediately, in The Black Room at Longwood, Kauffmann has given us a memorable, thoroughly absorbing portrait of a place that most of us will never see, a place whose remoteness and sheer weirdness make it truly unique in the world. Of course, the larger historical value of Kauffmann's books lies in its examination and explication of a chapter of Napoleon's life that many scholars, focusing instead on the glory years of the Empire, have only glossed. As Kauffmann points out in the book's prologue, Napoleon's years on St. Helena were held to be a "difficult and inscrutable period," one without a literature of its own — until now. Kauffmann does a remarkable job of digesting and synthesizing the material provided by his predecessors, particularly the memoirs published by Las Cases and Ali, the men with whom Napoleon spent the greatest amount of time at Longwood. Armed with a journalist's objectivity, and seemingly immune to the cult of personality that, at least in France, still manages to seduce would-be Napoleon biographers, Kauffmann fills in many of the blanks left by previous authors and succeeds in revealing Napoleon at his most nakedly human. No matter what opinion we may have had of Napoleon prior to reading The Black Room at Longwood, we can't help but come away from this book with a profound sympathy for the man — and for this Kauffmann certainly deserves credit. Ultimately, and perhaps most significantly, The Blackroom at Longwood becomes a meditation on isolation — or, more specifically, an examination of how the human spirit responds when faced with exile. Supporters of the death penalty might take note: Kauffmann's book — and the example of Napoleon and St. Helena — makes a strong case for the argument that robbing a prisoner of his dreams of escape, his dreams of a life beyond the immediate hell of his sentence, might be the cruelest punishment of all. As Kauffmann puts it, "for a prisoner, there is no worse suffering than remembering happier days." Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Tom Hartman has been a regular contributor to Pif since 1999. He lives in Philadelphia. |
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