St Helena
This remote and peaceful island community seems an unlikely place to have attracted the attentions of the world's great historic empires. It was the Portuguese who discovered the island on 21 May 1502, St Helena's Day. Helena was the mother of Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Portuguese were building a sea-borne empire that would link territories in an arc from the Indian Ocean to Brazil, and St Helena looked a useful port of call between the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape Verde archipelago. The Dutch and the British followed with their sea-borne imperial interests in the Cape and the Indian Ocean. Four empires linked to one small island of 47 square miles.
Yet the island takes its place in history for another empire, a continental rather than sea-borne one, that of France, finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had tried to stage a comeback from the Elba in his "Hundred Days" campaign, was now condemned to exile and house arrest on this lonely outpost of the south Atlantic. Always a controversial figure in France, argument has raged down the generations as to whether he embodied or betrayed the ideals of the French revolution. His defenders depicted him in exile as an eagle on a rock and campaigned, after his death in 1821, to have his remains returned to French soil. Paradoxically, St Helena gave Napoleon his final victory for it was here that he dictated the memoirs that fired the imagination of generations of French people and secured the triumphant return of his mortal remains to Paris in 1840. So the answer to the question, "Who is in Napoleon's Tomb?" is "In St Helena, no-one!"
This remote and peaceful island community seems an unlikely place to have attracted the attentions of the world's great historic empires. It was the Portuguese who discovered the island on 21 May 1502, St Helena's Day. Helena was the mother of Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Portuguese were building a sea-borne empire that would link territories in an arc from the Indian Ocean to Brazil, and St Helena looked a useful port of call between the Cape of Good Hope and the Cape Verde archipelago. The Dutch and the British followed with their sea-borne imperial interests in the Cape and the Indian Ocean. Four empires linked to one small island of 47 square miles.
Yet the island takes its place in history for another empire, a continental rather than sea-borne one, that of France, finally defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had tried to stage a comeback from the Elba in his "Hundred Days" campaign, was now condemned to exile and house arrest on this lonely outpost of the south Atlantic. Always a controversial figure in France, argument has raged down the generations as to whether he embodied or betrayed the ideals of the French revolution. His defenders depicted him in exile as an eagle on a rock and campaigned, after his death in 1821, to have his remains returned to French soil. Paradoxically, St Helena gave Napoleon his final victory for it was here that he dictated the memoirs that fired the imagination of generations of French people and secured the triumphant return of his mortal remains to Paris in 1840. So the answer to the question, "Who is in Napoleon's Tomb?" is "In St Helena, no-one!"
