Dylan Thuras: Somewhere between Africa and South America, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass, there’s an island that’s 47 square miles, just about the size of Disney World. The island’s name is St. Helena, and St. Helena has a population of just around 4,000 people, which, for the record, is less than a tenth of the average daily visitors to Disney World. And on this remote island, with not very many people, is a place called the Longwood House. And for six years, this beautiful house was also the prison of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon Bonaparte, the guy who invaded Spain, Portugal, Russia, yeah, you know, Napoleon. And this prison was also this beautiful one-story farmhouse, complete with a pool table, dining room, and a well-groomed garden sitting around its front door. And after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, the British decided they needed to remove this former French emperor from society in a big way. So they brought him to St. Helena. And when Napoleon was forced to be there, this flashy, war-loving former emperor found some peace of his own.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we go to the Longwood House on the island of St. Helena to hear how one of the world’s most grandiose leaders spent the last years of his life on an island the size of Disney World out in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: The year was 1815, and the powers of Europe, the countries of England and Prussia and Russia and Austria, they had a problem: They needed to figure out what to do with Napoleon. He had famously lost the battle at Waterloo. He was in custody, and they needed to put him somewhere safe but remote. That way, he couldn’t be kidnapped by his enemies or escape. You see, Napoleon had been captured and exiled to an island off the coast of Italy in 1814. But in just under a year, he had escaped, returned to France, and regained power. Well, they got him again, and this time, they said, it is going to be different. They were going to send him to an island very, very far away. And what better place to send Napoleon than St. Helena? Even today, St. Helena is extremely remote. It’s really a beautiful place and really quite serene.
Michel Dancoisne-Martineau: It’s like to be totally out of the world, outside the world, outside of the box. It’s nothing happening here. It’s very quiet and peaceful.
Dylan: This is Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, and he is the curator of the Longwood House. He’s lived on St. Helena for decades.
Michel: Since ’85. It will be 40 years in November.
Dylan: Michel was just a 19-year-old kid living in a small town north of Paris. He was studying agriculture and didn’t know for sure what he wanted to do with his degree. But it all changed one day when he walked into a community center and saw a posting for a very unusual summer internship, working with the garden of the Longwood House on the island of St. Helena.
Michel: And there was no candidate because nobody in France wanted to get in such a remote island. And then I said, why not?
Dylan: Michel got the internship, was flown to St. Helena, and began working on the Longwood House garden. It was a pretty large garden, a couple of acres, and it was lovely and tidy, but also kind of, there was no real rhyme or reason as to why the plants were together. Like, you would see veggies planted right next to the daffodils. At the time, St. Helena had a population of around 6,000 people. Michel was from a quiet town in France. When he got to St. Helena, he realized the island was on a whole different level of quiet.
Michel: When you live in a small village in France or any country, you can always take a car and go. But here, you’re trapped. You are surrounded by ocean, and in my day, it was only a ship every two months. Now it’s a plane every week.
Dylan: Michel was really drawn to the serenity of St. Helena, and he would end up staying there, well, effectively forever, working at the Longwood House. Napoleon arrived at the Longwood House in 1815 and would live there for the final years of his life. It was an exile. It was not like the life he had been living in France. But at the same time, Napoleon was still living pretty well for someone who was technically a prisoner.
Michel: If we are using the word prison, then you expect, you don’t expect gardens and being able to ride a horse and walking around the gardens and so on.
Dylan: That was not it at all. Napoleon had a staff waiting on him. A few of his devoted generals had decided that they would like to be exiled with him, there to keep him company. Inside the house, there was a massive dining room where Napoleon would throw dinner parties. There was a living room with a pool table in it. It was a pretty swanky prison. But when Napoleon got to the Longwood House, he was focused on, at some point, returning to power. He would read often and dictate his memoirs and go on and on about his military successes. At the time, he saw the Longwood House as his temporary jail. But the key word was temporary. He was brought to St. Helena to remove him from society until Russia, Prussia, Austria, and England figured out what they wanted to do next. And it took a few years, but in November of 1818, these powers got together and decided his fate.
Michel: And then I’m quoting, it will be condemned for until your hateful fame will end.
Dylan: Until your hateful fame will end. Damn. It was a way of giving Napoleon a sentence longer than his life. Now let’s pause on this whole thing for a second. You might be wondering why they did not just kill him, a pretty common thing in 1818. Why go through all the trouble of paying a staff and putting him in this house so far away on St. Helena? The answer was because if he were to be executed, people would have seen him as a martyr. But by leaving him on St. Helena, way out in the middle of nowhere, they hoped that perhaps his legacy could be confined to the island. This actually did manage to make Napoleon kind of feel depressed. Despite being a grandiose leader and actually only being 47 years old at this time, it seems that maybe he realized that this time was going to be different. His days as a conqueror were coming to an end, and that perhaps it was time to do something different. And he began to look at Longwood House with new eyes.
Michel: The last two years of his life, he totally reshaped his cell and his surroundings by the garden. He used the word to be a man and nothing but a man.
Dylan: And what kind of things did a man and nothing but a man do? Basically, he really chilled out. Michel tells us that Napoleon began to take up gardening in a pretty serious way, but he would do it in this kind of odd, pragmatic fashion.
Michel: When Napoleon was in his garden, he mixed floral plants with veggies. For him, the best garden is the one which is useful.
Dylan: Useful like having artichokes in the same flowerbed as roses. Napoleon often used this garden for contemplation, enjoying long, reflective walks through it. Michel says that during this time, Napoleon would also think over his military successes, his losses, acknowledge some of his mistakes. But the French Revolution, he once stated, had the French been more moderate and not put Louis to death, all of Europe would have been revolutionized. Like many middle-aged people, one of his favorite places to think was his bathtub, which I should mention was this big, beautiful, massive copper tub.
Michel: Napoleon used to spend one or two hours a day in his bath.
Dylan: This relatively zen era for Napoleon ended just two years after his trial. On May 5th, 1821, Napoleon died from a combination of liver issues, hepatitis, and a damaged intestine. He died in the living room of the Longwood House. If you visit the Longwood House today, it’s actually going to look almost exactly like it did when Napoleon was there, taking his baths, going on his walks, having his dinner parties with his generals. Some of the actual furniture and artifacts are in museums, but the French government had everything recreated to give the house its exact, authentic feel. St. Helena, though, actually looks pretty different from when Napoleon was living there. One difference is there are actually fewer people living there now than when Napoleon was there. Back then, it was an island of around 8,000 people, and today it’s just half that. There’s a lot of reasons for that decline. About 2,000 of those people in 1818 were Chinese laborers or enslaved.
Today there’s an aging population, a declining birth rate, and folks are leaving the island for better opportunities elsewhere. According to Michel, those who do stay, it’s because the island is a really beautiful, secluded place with a much slower pace of life than most of the rest of the world. Every year, about 4,000 people visit the Longwood House. Michel says about 80 percent of those people are tourists. Some folks fly directly to St. Helena, and others happen to be on the rare cruise ship that stops by the island. Regardless of Napoleon and the Longwood House, what draws people there in part is just how remote the island is, its secluded, beautiful nature. It’s why Michel chose to stay after his internship, because it turns out whether you are a world-conquering military leader, someone who shows up for just a summer internship, or just a tourist stopping by on a cruise ship, St. Helena and the Longwood House, too, just turn out to be a beautiful place for a long, meditative walk through a garden. The easiest way to get to St. Helena is by cruise or flight from South Africa. Once you get there, the Longwood House is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Be a real bummer if you got there on a Sunday and you couldn’t go in, so, you know, plan accordingly. All right, I’ll see you next time.
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This episode was produced by Baudelaire. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holdford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall.