On our 2008 visit to Sandy Bay we viewed Mount Pleasant from a distance, but this time, with the kind permission of its owners, we were able to walk round the garden,
admire the wonderful views,
and sit on the very same steps that Napoleon used on his last sad outing from Longwood in 1820.(1)
We also learned some of Mount Pleasant's secrets.
Napoleon and Mount Pleasant: The Legend
After our visit to Mount Pleasant I was fortunate to meet Bernie Thomas, who was born at Mount Pleasant in February 1936. Bernie's family had lived as slaves/servants on the farm at least since the time of Napoleon. Bernie later accompanied me on a visit to Mount Pleasant and told me the stories about Napoleon that have been passed down through successive generations of his family.
Historians of the captivity are prepared to concede that Napoleon may have visited Mount Pleasant once before his well documented visit at the end of 1820. But according to the legend passed down in Bernie's family, he actually visited five times, and used to sit in the chair named after him, made out of rocks set in the side of the hill just before the house.
Opposite "Napoleon's chair" are two large Norfolk pines. Until recently there were five: one was planted each time Napoleon visited, or so the legend would have it.
Moving on towards the house, Bernie explained that in his childhood the lawn was larger than now, and to the right of the house a bush formerly grew. He was told that it had been planted to mark the spot on which Napoleon's picnic table had been set up in 1820.
Finally, according to the story passed down through Bernie's family, one of his forefathers assisted Napoleon in mounting the steps to go into the house.
The absence of folk memory about Napoleon on St Helena has hitherto been an accepted fact. I have always taken it to be a result of the dispersal of the white population from the middle of the nineteenth century. Visitors to the island before then, particularly to Napoleon's tomb, were certainly regaled with stories both apocryphal and true about the dead Emperor.
The slave and free black population, the ancestors of most who now live on the island were, from the very beginning, for security reasons, kept as far as possible from Longwood, and few had any contact with its occupants. So the lack of folk memory about Napoleon is hardly surprising. I would go further and say, from my admittedly limited experience, that apart from ghost stories, St Helena does not have a rich folk memory.
I felt it was important therefore to record these stories. The fact that these memories have been passed down, doubtless embroidered, from generation to generation in one family that did apparently have some contact with Napoleon, is of some significance. It certainly requires us to qualify the conventional view of the indifference of the St Helena population to their most famous inhabitant.
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1. An account of Napoleon's last outing when he breakfasted on the lawn at Mount Pleasant and was entertained by Sir William Doveton, has featured previously in this blog.