‘Without Napoleon, there would be no St Helena,’ the French Consul once remarked to me. And it was, indeed, fortunate for the island that it had so illustrious a prisoner. The other choices for his confinement, according to Lord Liverpool’s notes of the time, were St Lucia, the Tower of London, Fort William, Dumbarton Castle,
Gibraltar, Malta and the Cape of Good Hope—one trembles to think of the present state of St Helena had the Emperor not been exiled there, and the island had been forgotten by everyone. His six progressively more wretched years—they started well enough, playing whist and blind-man’s buff with the flirtatious Betty Balcombe in the house that is now the island’s cable station—effectively produced two more colonies for Britain.
A garrison had to be sent to Ascension Island, and another to Tristan da Cunha, to foil any French adventures to free their subject. The houses constructed by the soldiers and marines, and later inhabited by some of them who opted to remain, formed the basis of pioneering colonial settlements; and St Helena, too, benefited hugely from the military interest placed upon her in consequence of her notorious guest. Nearly 3,000 soldiers were camped up on Deadwood Plain, within easy sight of the house eventually chosen for Napoleon’s residence (and now, like his empty grave, the property of the people of France, and presided over by a resident consul, complete with tricolour and diplomatically immune motor car).
Such cruise ships as arrive at Jamestown today do so because of Longwood House. Here are the mournful portraits and the billiard tables, the marble busts and the formal gardens where Napoleon walked along deeply incised paths so his hated sentries would not see him. There are the wooden shutters from behind which the Emperor would gaze at the stars—one hole for his telescope when he was standing, another below it for when he sat. Here is Vignali’s massive sideboard, used for the celebration of Mass, and there the great copper bath in which Napoleon would lie, soaking gently and dictating his memoirs. The visitors can twirl, if the watchman is dozing in the sun, the globes of earth and sky which still bear the marks of the Emperor’s fingernails; and they come to see the deathbed.
And one can scrabble about in the garden to look for shards of glass from old French wine bottles: no greater evidence of British insolence can be found, French visitors believe. For the Governor of the day, the much-loathed Sir Hudson Lowe, had demanded of
the Emperor that, after drinking wine, he return his empties to the British Government. Napoleon, not surprisingly, angrily refused, and had his staff smash the bottles and scatter the glass among the roses.
I met a pretty young girl one afternoon at Longwood House, walking around the gardens in a dress that looked uncannily out of date. She was, it turned out, from California, and worked at a dull task, punching out pieces for the insides of a computer. She had become obsessed by the sad story of Napoleon since her childhood, and had vowed to visit the island of his exile. Easier said than done. She worked hard, earned the necessary money to get across to England to catch the once-every-twelve-weeks boat from Bristol to St Helena.
This was her second visit. She had had some dresses made, along the lines of those worn by Josephine. A hairdresser had shaped her blonde hair in ringlets, just like the most famous painting of Josephine. And thus armed and fashioned, this otherwise normal young lady from San Mateo would glide around Longwood, or sit on the empty grave beneath the willows with wildflowers in her hand. She would read, and dream, and compose odd poems about the inhumanity of Sir Hudson Lowe and Britons involved in the defeat and humiliation of her hero.
She had ample reason to dislike the Government a few weeks after I first met her. An order was issued from the Castle dismissing her from the island, and though she hid in a clump of bushes, two policemen dragged her out and forced her on to a ship. I saw her in London a few weeks later: she was deeply hurt, and considered she had suffered as awful an injustice as had Bonaparte. The islanders had a soft spot for her, too, and were sorry to see her go. ‘Pretty girl,’ said the old man who drove me around. ‘A bit touched. But ’armless enough. Very American, I s’pose.’
The Crown took over all the running of the island in 1834; of all the disasters attendant upon St Helena’s history, this was quite probably the worst. None of the islanders wanted the change; most were appalled at the cavalier way King William’s men dismissed
faithful Company servants, slashed budgets, reduced the status of the island to a mere cipher in the grand colonial roll. Hundreds left the island for good, and settled in Cape Colony, or came to England. The Governors chosen to rule on the Sovereign’s behalf—no longer, that is, as representative of the Court of Directors—were henceforth the pygmies of Empire, paid less money, and less attention, than any other Excellency in any other colony. (The Governor of Nigeria by tradition always received the highest salary; the man in Jamestown Castle took home about a sixth as much.)
The tradition of exile and imprisonment of Her Majesty’s enemies, evidently spurred on by the success of Napoleon’s banishment, took hold; the Chief of the Zulus stayed there with his two uncles, and learned to play hymns on the piano; 6,000 Boer prisoners, including General Cronje, were put into huge prisoner-of-war camps up on the high meadows. Both groups evidently loved the island and its inhabitants, and one Boer baker was still alive and working in Jamestown sixty years after the end of the war. There was an elderly Zulu living on the island in the 1980s. The prison industry did brief wonders for the Saints’ economy: it was said that during the Boer War the place was crowded, rich and extraordinarily happy. But then the Boers went away, peace returned, and the old habits of neglectful superintendence once more held sway.
There were all manner of brave but brief agricultural experiments. St Helena coffee was briefly famous, particularly as Napoleon had said he liked it. A London firm was sent samples: ‘we find it of very superior quality and flavour, and if cultivated to any extent would no doubt amply repay the grower.’ It wasn’t. Admiral Elliot ordered cinchona trees to be planted, and for a while the island produced quinine. But later Governors wearied of the idea, and the plantation was allowed to run wild.
Only New Zealand flax did well. The huge plants, with their spiky leaves that often grew ten feet long, covered thousands of the island’s upland acres. The Colonial and Fibre Company built the first mill in 1874: seven more were put up over the next twenty years, and a rope factory was built in the 1920s. The familiar whine of the flax scutchers, stripping the long fibres from the leaves,
echoed across the hills for half a century. At its peak the noble
Phormium tenax
gave employment to 400 men, and the little factories made cloth, rope, tow and hemp, which was sold to the British Post Office to make string for tying up bundles of letters. A fifth of the hemp went to make Admiralty ropes—the
Manual of Seamanship
still quotes the breaking strain of St Helena hemp.
But this reliance on the flax industry proved, ultimately, as injurious to the St Helenian economy as was the making of lime juice to Montserrat or the milling of sugar in Barbados—too much of a concentration in one product meant, inevitably, that the colony became a prisoner of its customers’ whims. In this particular case the fatal day came when the Post Office decided it would be cheaper to use nylon twine for its bundles, and abandoned its contract with the faraway Saints. At about the same time the world price of flax and hemp dropped—St Helena’s crop no longer had a ready market.
But that was not the only reason. No one disputes that the Colonial Office must take the responsibility for its lamentable decision to turn St Helena into a one-crop island; but its sorry management of the finances of that crop contributed also to the economic disaster that followed, as a brief explanation will show.
Fluctuations in the price of hemp gravely affected the island, and it was agreed after the Second World War that the Government would help. It did so in a cunning manner. If the market price fell below a certain level, the millers would receive a subsidy. If it rose above the level, however, the Government would charge export duty. The net result was that more duty was paid in than subsidy was paid out—so the Government’s ‘support’ was carried out at no effective cost.
Nevertheless, the subsidy was regarded as irksome—not so much by the Castle, who tried to support the sole industry, but by London. On New Year’s Eve 1965 the then Governor, John Field, called the two major mill-owners to his office: from the next day the basic wage of government workers on the island would be doubled (to two pounds fifty a week—well below the poverty line, and about a tenth of the wage then paid in England), and to help finance the
increase, and at the insistence of London, the flax subsidy would be removed, instantly, and with no right of appeal.
The industry collapsed. The Government had no other ideas for the mills, and one by one, they all closed. The last scutcher sounded its rasping note in midsummer 1966. The Foreign Office, at whose behest the industry essentially collapsed, was accused of ‘grave irresponsibility’ by one miller; but appeared to show no remorse.
Coffee, quinine, flax—and shipping; a litany of failures and mishaps, poor planning, bad decision-making, the steel-eyed rule of uncaring accounts-men and faraway time-servers. Nothing could be done, of course, to help the island when the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the steamers bound for India no longer called at this convenient mid-ocean coaling station; when the Navy switched to oil the need for St Helena diminished further, and the last vessel recorded as having taken on some tons of Welsh steam coal for some Imperial adventure, or duty, was in the 1920s. Even before that there seemed to the War Office no real point in maintaining a garrison at the top of Ladder Hill once the coal was gone and the island’s strategic value was devalued.
And nothing could prevent the Union Castle line—‘Intermediate Vessels carrying First and Tourist class passengers are despatched at intervals from London for Cape Town, proceeding via Grand Canary and with calls with Mails at Ascension and St Helena’—from withdrawing its service. There had been two cargo vessels, one each way each month. But they were cancelled in 1967, and the final lifeline, the Cape Mail Service, was ended a decade later. Since then a single ship run by a firm in Cornwall, helped by a huge and grudgingly given government subsidy, has provided the colony’s only means of physical contact with the outside.
All the enginework of Empire remains on St Helena. In the Castle there are vast airy rooms hung with the oil paintings of past Governors—Robert Jenkins (of the War of Jenkins’ Ear—there is a plaque on his cottage at Sandy Bay), Charles Dallas, Sir Harry Cordeaux, Sir Edward Hay Drummond-Hay. There are shelves of leather-bound books of great age, rubbed with beeswax and fragrant
still. Clocks tick gently and when they strike, the booms shake the bougainvillaea and the banana fronds beyond the ever-open windows. There are great silver inkwells and blotters to match; in His Excellency’s office there is a spyhole so that his assistants—such as the Colonial Treasurer, the last to hold that title in the Empire that remains—can see if he may be disturbed. One expects periwigs and vellum, sealing-wax and quills, and the courtly language of Victoria’s diplomats, and the prosy essays to the Court of Directors. If there is a telex (and there must be, since the Foreign Office lists a number, 202) its vulgar presence is well concealed.
Plantation House, where Governors have lived since the East India Company built the mansion in 1792, is a gem—perhaps the loveliest house available for any senior British diplomat anywhere, though it is neither as large, nor as smartly furnished as some of the residences elsewhere, as Paris, Singapore, or Vienna. When I arrived the Deputy Governor was busily moving in; His Excellency had departed for home leave, and his Deputy wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to spend a few weeks in the place. ‘Best thing about the job,’ he said. ‘Pay’s rotten, as you know. But did you ever see such a perfect place as this?’
Visitors—if invited, and deemed at all important—arrive by black Jaguar (a silver crown in place of a number plate, and a small Union flag with the St Helena arms on the fly), which whispers up the gravel drive scattering the four tortoises which are, invariably, busily munching up the lawn. The tortoises are named Emma, Myrtle, Freda and Jonathan, the last—the biggest—said by experts to be 255 years old. Whether he has attained that great age—and he is blind, and staggers more than tortoises usually do—he is documented as having munched across the lawns for at least a hundred summers, and doubtless did the same on lawns in Mauritius for some years before. A Rothschild tried to buy one to take home, but was refused, whereupon the animal he wanted threw itself over a cliff. But however Methuselan the qualities of the Plantation House Quartet, they are not, by St Helena standards, as big as some of the local turtles. Many islanders remember an 800-pounder being landed—it provided soup for two regiments for three days, and the
shell was used by a soldier as a roof for a new house he was building for his family.
Plantation House, staffed by a dozen servants decked out in starched uniforms of white and sky blue, is quiet and fragrant. As in all colonial government houses there are portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip, and a photograph of the Prime Minister; there are acres of polished oak floors and polished mahogany tables, of silver salvers and Spode china dinner sets, each with a crown and a dark blue rim. The older rooms have brass plaques above each doorway—Governor’s Room, Admiral’s Room, General’s Room—dating from the Company days, and there is one room with a plaque saying ‘Chaos’ outside, and which is said to house a friendly poltergeist who hurls chairs about at night.
There is also a quite magnificent library, built by Sir Hudson Lowe during Napoleon’s stay—presumably to occupy his mind with other than the vexing matter of his dangerous neighbour. Distinguished visitors were often asked to address St Helenian society in the library: Joshua Slocum, who called in on his solo circumnavigation in his tiny boat
Spray
, recalled meeting Paul Kruger in Pretoria. When he told him he was going around the world Kruger snorted and said, ‘You mean
across
the world, young man!’ The crusty old Boer still believed the world was flat.