Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Even after what had gone before, that seemed to me a bit of a low blow.

  I, too, leaned on the mantelpiece, with old Benjamin beside me blowing dust off the back of an elegant dark wood chair with gold-leaf mouldings. The great battle pictures were here, or prints of them. David’s Bonaparte, Commander in Chief of the Army in Italy, and Delaroche’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps. Looking at them, I could understand the anguish of the man confined to this upholstered prison. It was easy to let the mind wander in this room; one could almost imagine the hum of the golden imperial bees; see the valets, Marchand and Ali, in their gold-and silver-embroidered uniforms moving discreetly round the dying man. Examining the pictures, my imagination swept me far from this cold house in the South Atlantic – to the swirl of the massed cuirassiers at Friedland, the irresistible charge across the bridge at Arcole, the earth-shaking thunder of the horses, the sun flashing on helmets and swords, the frozen exhaustion of the Grande Armée’s arrival on the banks of the Beresina at the end of the Russian disaster. And at Waterloo, at the end of everything, the hoarse cries of ‘Vive l’Empéreur!’ as the grenadiers of the Old Guard in their long white gaiters followed frantic, red-headed Ney, his bullet-torn coat and broken sword, up the slope in the last, hopeless throw.

  ‘I have to wear a couple of sweaters all the time,’ Mr Benjamin was saying. ‘I’ve had a heart attack.’

  We moved from room to room – eleven of them, none of them large and all with low ceilings. Some rooms retained the original wallpaper, or perhaps it was a reproduction: a plain cream with blue stars in one room; in the dining room, a rich red with golden laurel leaves. In a cramped room I came across the camp bed Napoleon had used at Austerlitz, tested it and found it hard. In size it was like a child’s cot, unsprung, with a mattress that might have been stuffed with straw. It had been very damp in Napoleon’s time, but it was an attractive house and I would have been pleased to live in it given adequate heating. With Longwood to myself I would never, as Napoleon had done, have cast covetous eyes at Plantation House; but then I have never been Emperor of France.

  I bent over the Emperor’s death mask, noticing that it seemed unnaturally small, diminished perhaps by the process of moulding. The closed eyes were deeply sunk into their sockets, the cheekbones harshly prominent, the nose under its fine long sweep of hairless brow as thin and sharp as a quill. ‘… at the head of the army’ – those were his last words, and then he had lain on view in this room in the uniform of the Guard and the cloak he had worn at Marengo.

  *

  I had expected to find Gilbert Martineau as rabidly pro-Napoleonic as John Massingham was clearly anti, but he didn’t seem to be much of a chauvinist. When I mentioned the story promulgated by some Napoleon worshippers, that the British – Sir Hudson Lowe again – had had Napoleon poisoned with arsenic, Martineau laughed the idea away without hesitation.

  ‘Ha! That was a story thought up by a weightlifter in Canada in cahoots with a dentist in Sweden. Well, that’s what I say. The obstacles to a methodical investigation of the Emperor’s medical dossier are innumerable. The doctors at his deathbed were notably mediocre. The journals of Bertrand and of the valet Marchand – well, neither was a doctor. You see, the autopsy showed a perforation in Napoleon’s stomach wall. When they opened up the stomach, Mme de Montholon found she could put her little finger into the hole. Symptoms were – exhaustion, loss of appetite, fever, vomiting of blood. The experts hesitated between a peptic ulcer and cancer.’

  Martineau certainly knew the details. ‘As for the arsenic, that came from the arsenic powder they used then to preserve people’s locks of hair. That’s all. Napoleon had an internal haemorrhage. His heart rate was below fifty all his life. Very unusual. He had always vomited when he flew into his furious rages and he ate all his meals in seven minutes. He’d have the whole meal set out, and he’d pick a bit of ice cream here, a bit of mutton there. Actually eating very little and drinking not much at all. He was a very sober man; like a camel.’

  So all those wines I had read about in the castle archives had been swilled down by the Bertrands, the de Montholons and the rest. They had to relieve the boredom somehow, so who could blame them?

  A sharp wind whisked through the hibiscus bushes beyond the window. ‘Cold,’ said Martineau. ‘But it’s not always like this. Sometimes the Emperor used to sit out of doors, reading Racine – Andromache was a favourite – to his entourage. He read badly and Mme de Montholon would fall asleep.’ I had the feeling that a short, stout figure with a sharp nose and wearing a cut-away coat might stalk in at any moment and order us to stop gossiping.

  ‘Napoleon was only fifty-two years old, you know.’ When I commented that the camp bed seemed hardly big enough for a boy scout, he said, ‘Well, Napoleon was about five foot six or seven.’

  Martineau even had a compassionate word for John Massingham’s remote predecessor, Sir Hudson Lowe. ‘You know what happened to Lowe?’ he asked me. ‘Well, after St Helena he was offered the Governorship of Ceylon, but by the time he got there someone else had the job. He died in poverty in Chelsea. Without a sou. And that was his reward for doing what he was told to do.’

  Before I left Longwood, Martineau talked of his new book – ‘Byron: Pilgrim of Eternity,’ he said. ‘Good title?’ He had a ouija board at Longwood and sometimes Byron spoke to him.

  ‘Byron talks to you? What on earth does he say?’

  ‘Oh, terrible things. Things like, “You are a very clever bastard. Why do you take the piss out of me?” That sort of thing.’ Martineau’s English was very good.

  ‘Byron says that to you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. And worse. What a fellow! What a diabolical fellow! Do you know what he said once? He said, “Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a real fuck-up.” What a devil! But what a fabulous letter writer.’

  He walked with me to the garden gate and looked calmly across the village green without noticeable scorn for its children’s swings.

  ‘Young people like the idea of Napoleon,’ he said. ‘I think it’s because he pushed things to extremes. You can’t do more, can you? Goodbye.’

  Martineau was doing a good job of looking after the pink house and the trim garden, that was certain. In a lonely place I was glad he had Byron for company.

  *

  Back in Jamestown I had time to say goodbye to Andrew Bell before he sailed off to England on the Centaur. Before leaving, he showed me a picture of his ship, the RMS St Helena, the only means of transport to and from their homeland that the islanders possessed. ‘Any time you want to come back here, I’ll arrange a cabin.’ I saw a neat little vessel, much smaller than the Centaur, a pleasing size, with a pale green hull and a white superstructure.

  ‘You can find me at the office in Helston. Curnow Shipping.’

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ I said. ‘Hold that cabin.’ Then I set off with Hansel Williams and his friend Stedson Stroud to tour the little island. St Helena is perfectly preserved, like a piece of old English countryside of the seventeenth century, long before the intrusion of pylons, airports, motorways or factory chimneys. It was as green and lush as the Vale of Evesham in summertime. Houses like dwellings in Jane Austen novels and tiny Georgian farmhouses sprang into view from behind folds in the hills and in terraced valleys full of spreading trees. Napoleon had chosen one such fold to be buried in; tucked away in a deep dell, it was quite hard to find. We walked down a short, wide path springy with grass to his original tomb – a slab of concrete enclosed by railings and clumps of amarylis and hibiscus and tall dark cypresses that stood to attention like grenadiers. Mynah birds chatted round a spring nearby and bees hummed round the stiff bayonetlike leaves of flax. Of course, the Emperor himself lay in Les Invalides in Paris. His body had been exhumed in 1840, nineteen years after his death, so the grave here was empty.

  I had brought a map of St Helena with me and spread it out on the car. It was crowded with marvellous Stevensonian names: Egg Island, Dry Gut Bay
, Half Tree Hollow, Lemon Valley, Buttermilk Point, Prosperous Bay and, of course, Sandy Bay, of which Hansel was the champion fast bowler. As we drove on through it, I saw that the island was not all green and English. At its centre there were knobs of rock high enough to be veiled in cloud. In Sandy Bay, passing the cottage where Hansel Williams’ family lived, a man waved from the roadside. ‘That’s Peter Mercury,’ Hansel said, waving back.

  ‘Nice name.’

  Stedson Stroud had spent two years in England as a domestic servant; a footman at first, then butler to the Duke of Bradford.

  ‘But I wanted to travel,’ he said. ‘So from the Duke I went to a château in France belonging to racehorse owners who spent six months in France and six months in Palm Beach.’

  ‘You certainly did travel, then.’

  ‘I did indeed. Africa, Europe, the Middle East. Now I want to stay in St Helena. Most Saints want to come back. Just to fish and do some gardening. We’ve a special magic here. Saints are special. If ever I was at a party in England I would know another Saint at once by his warmth, humour, friendliness.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that myself,’ I said.

  ‘We like the English, you know. Most houses have portraits of the Queen and the royal family on the wall. It’s a very genuine liking, you see.’

  A small stone chapel stood on a hillside, apparently quite unattached to any village. There were only one or two villages on the island. We could see the sea and a farmhouse out of which Fielding’s Squire Weston might have appeared.

  Two oddly shaped basalt columns dominated Sandy Bay, one named Lot, the other Lot’s Wife.

  ‘Don’t you miss the bright lights here?’

  Hansel shook his head. ‘I don’t go to movies or dances much.’

  I repeated the remarks I had overheard in the Consulate Hotel in Jamestown of two passengers from the Centaur, an American and an Englishman, discussing the island.

  ‘If only they’d do something here,’ one had said. ‘Build an airport. Build a marina. A decent hotel. Bring tourists in.’

  ‘Quite. A Holiday Inn or something. Bring St Helena to the twentieth century.’

  Hansel said, ‘I don’t rightly think people can ever leave anything alone.’

  ‘There’s not much we need,’ Stedson added. ‘Nobody starves on this island. Saints go off to work on Ascension Island, on Mr Bell’s ship or in Europe, and send money back. We don’t need no airport or things like that.’

  Had I discovered at last a place where everyone was content? Had there been no Fatal Impact here? An infinitesimal one, perhaps. I had had boiled eggs, bread, butter, cake and tea provided by the Consulate Hotel for the three of us. When it came to eating the eggs, Hansel took one bite, made a hideous face, and cried, ‘What egg is this, then?’

  ‘A hen’s egg, of course,’ I said. ‘What do you think it is? An ostrich egg?’

  ‘This ain’t no hen’s egg. Maybe it’s a wirebird’s egg,’ he answered with a laugh.

  ‘A wirebird?’

  ‘A bird only found here. It’s got big wiry feet and long legs.’

  Stedson Stroud laughed, too. ‘He means it’s an imported egg. South African, probably. We hate imported eggs. They’re not the same at all. Our hens wander about freely all over the place eating this and that, and so their eggs are real. These imported eggs – well, we can’t hardly eat ’em.’

  ‘So even the hens are happier here than anywhere else,’ I said. ‘That’s why Saint eggs are better.’

  ‘Hey, yes. Saint eggs are best.’

  Not only to detect an imported egg but to find it uneatable …. That shows how far our civilized taste has degenerated. I took the imported horrors and hurled them far away over a hedge.

  *

  I had to find a ship for the next stage homeward, and I was in luck. Solomons & Co., the island’s shipping agents, let me know through John Massingham that a small Danish cargo ship would be calling in a day or two, bound for Portugal via Ascension Island and Senegal. In response to a radioed request, the captain had agreed to take me.

  ‘How would that do?’ John Massingham asked.

  It would do perfectly. From Portugal there should be little difficulty in finding something to take me to England.

  ‘Pep Sirius,’ John Massingham said, ‘is the ship’s name. Rather an odd one. It sounds to me like some sort of toothpaste.’

  Thirty-eight

  ‘It’s called the Nursery, because that’s where all the dead children are,’ had said the pleasant wife of the Cable and Wireless Company manager. Ascension Island, seven hundred miles to the north, was not in the least like St Helena. It is in fact little more than a big clinker seven miles wide. But a lot of people have died there.

  ‘Then I’ll go and look for them,’ I told her.

  The cemetery lay under a red, cone-shaped hill, and the wind lifted the dust off it in trailing clouds. The children were by the sea. I stood ankle deep in thick red powder and tiny crunching clinkers and read the stones.

  One said: ‘Two-year-old Kate accidentally drowned in the Turtle Pond July 1855.’

  On a marble likeness of an open Domesday book was carved: ‘Baby Boy Obey, aged 5 hours. Remembered by his parents. Jesus said Suffer little children to come unto me.’ Remembered then by his parents, but who remembers now?

  Someone had used part of a rusted cot to make a cross. I read:

  To

  Jacqueline Rose.

  Jacquie’s gone to live up yonder

  How we miss her smiling face

  Though we very sadly miss her

  None will ever take her place.

  Further along the coast, in a place well named Comfortless Cove, I came across other old graves, many of them those of yellow fever victims. The winds of centuries had whipped the soft volcanic rocks into fantastic and frightening shapes round a kind of natural amphitheatre – I seemed to be encircled by leering gargoyles, the ravening heads of monstrous vultures, the snarling fangs of werewolves. In the centre of this terrible place stood a six-foot obelisk, a memorial to ‘Charles Baldwin Dyke Acland – 10 May 1837. Lieut RN. A beloved son. HMS Scout.’ Out at sea, two ships lay unloading cargo into barges. Here among the lonely graves and weird rocks, in a wind that wailed like an abandoned baby, I felt a shiver of fear, and scrunched my way back to the track from Georgetown, Ascension’s village-port.

  It was a relief to see living, smiling human beings again, but I hadn’t quite finished with the dead past yet. The central building, a low, white church, looked interesting and in it I found yet more naval memorials. One in particular was instructive. It was dedicated to the memory of twenty-two officers and men of Acland’s HMS Scout, and to ‘John Giles, James Bray, John Brison, boys of the 1st Class and John Reed boy of the 2nd Class. Also a landsman, a caulker and a college man.’ All died between 1836 and 1839, though some were actually buried in Sierra Leone. Nineteenth-century West Africa – the White Man’s Grave.

  I had felt a little ashamed of my frisson of fear at Comfortless Cove, but later I discovered a book about Ascension which quoted an article in a Scottish magazine called the Bulletin, written in 1936:

  This much is certain, men and women, walking alone on the island amidst the volcanic clinkers, are liable to take sudden panic, running this way or that, or collapsing to the ground and remaining motionless with terror. Some have been known to disappear. This is why the British community arrange some social function or sporting event for every day of the week to keep them from brooding about the mysterious atmosphere.

  The Cable and Wireless people on the island laugh at this, but Alan Nicholson, a communications expert, rattled off a list of recent ghostly apparitions he had heard of from apparently level-headed people – a woman in white, an invisible man who clambered into bed with almost anyone who slept in a particular house, an evil-faced marine in a nineteenth-century red uniform coat, and more. I didn’t feel quite so ashamed after that.

  The Pep Sirius would only be a day or two in Asce
nsion – the chief engineer had broken his leg falling on deck and the island’s doctor was making sure it was well plastered. The island was an air base, an essential refuelling stop conveniently situated between Britain and the Falkland Islands. All visitors to the Falklands had perforce to fly via Ascension; Thatcher herself had done so. But fortunately for me, since I find air bases as boring as factories, most of that technical activity was tucked away on another side of the island.

  It is an odd and unappealing place. Unlike Robinson Crusoe and St Helena, it has a dead feeling. The boobies, wideawake terns, noddies, canaries and waxbills are its only natural inhabitants, somehow surviving the roar of military aircraft over their nesting grounds. But there are no indigenous humans, just British and American servicemen and communications experts, a few Saints to serve them, and a large number of graves and ghosts. I took away a souvenir lump of shiny black obsidian that I found in a shallow valley in a volcanic waste where several wild donkeys snuffled among the clinkers looking for God knows what.

  I was delighted to come once more upon the tracks of that ‘eminent and excellent buccaneer’ Captain William Dampier, whom I had last seen, so to speak, on Juan Fernandez in company with Captain Woodes Rogers in 1709, rescuing Alexander Selkirk. Returning from the Far East, Dampier’s ship Roebuck had been wrecked on Ascension Island in 1701. He and his men scrambled ashore with sufficient stores but no drinking water, a serious predicament on what was little more than a burnt-out volcano. Needless to say, the dauntless Dampier discovered a tree with an anchor carved on it and a date, 1642, near which a tiny spring gave forth a drip of water but enough to wash down the land crabs, boobies and goats that were their basic diet. I trudged up to the spring, known to this day as Dampier’s Drip, and paid my respects to the old seadog once again.

  *