Napoleon & Saint Helena: On the Island of Exile

St Helena is one of the most remote, and yet most famous, islands in the world-it was the final place of exile for Napoleon Bonaparte until his death in 1821. The island remains a place of mystery as a unique colonial survivor, with the island's inhabitants still dependent on the support of the British government.

"In NAPOLEON and ST. HELENA: On the Island of Exile (Haus Publishing, $19.95) the German historian and journalist Johannes Willms travels by mail boat to the remote site of Napoleon's lonely final exile, a former victualing station for the British East India Company located 1,100 miles off the southwest coast of Africa. Approaching the speck of land where the deposed emperor spent the last six years of his life, from 1815 to 1821, Willms's boat pushes "through the long, rolling swell of the South Atlantic. As it draws nearer, the island looms up ever more forbiddingly and menacingly before the beholder's eye." St. Helena, he decides, "looks like a stage set for hell."

Willms travels around this economically moribund outpost, "a high security prison 122 square kilometers in extent," whose inhabitants survive almost entirely off subsidies from the British government. But the travelogue, in this translation from the German by John Brownjohn, gives way to a fascinating romp through Napoleonic history. Willms discusses squabbles within Napoleon's bedraggled court-in-exile, the plague of rats that assailed the emperor shortly after his arrival and the roughly 20-year campaign by French Bonapartists to repatriate their hero's remains. "The Emperor's handsome face was in perfect condition except for the nose,"a witness to the 1840 exhumation observes, in one of the many grotesqueries that pepper this curious book. It "seemed to have been somewhat misshapen by the weight of the coffin cushion resting upon it."
--Joshua Hammer, New York Times Book Review

ZB1542    Napoleon & Saint Helena: On the Island of Exile       $19.95

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