Looking northward across the Atlantic from Longwood. “To stare out across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop I travelled twenty thousand miles.”
THE PRISON PLACE OF A GREAT EMPEROR.
Both Longwood and the grave occupy the peculiar position of being French territory in the heart of a British colony, for half a century ago Queen Victoria presented the property to the French nation, an official appointed by the French Government residing on and caring for the place and showing it with mingled pride and sadness to the few visitors who make their way to this one of the world's far corners. It was an interesting but gloomy experience, that pilgrimage to the prison place of the great Emperor, for it visualised for me, as nothing else ever could do, the sordidness, the humiliations, and the mental tortures which marked the last years of Napoleon. As my vessel steamed steadily northward across the Atlantic, with the boulevards of Paris not three weeks away, I leaned over the taffrail and, staring back at the receding cliffs of that grim island, I seemed to see the short, stoop-shouldered, gray-coated, cock-hatted figure of the Emperor staring wistfully out across those leagues of ocean toward France.
To locate the next of these “Forgotten Isles,” and the most completely forgotten of all of them, you had better get out the family atlas and, with a ruler and a pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw a line due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost point of Africa, and another line due east from Cape San Roque, which is the easternmost point in South America, and where those two lines meet, out in the wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and partially submerged volcano. This rock, which is considerably smaller than its sister island of Saint Helena, seven hundred miles away, is officially designated by the British Government as H.M.S. “Ascension.” Entirely under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, it is unique in that it is the only island in the world which has the rating of a man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather manned, by a detachment of sailors and marines, and being administered in every respect as though it were a unit of the British navy. With the exception of a dozen acres of vegetable garden, there is not a single green thing on the island—grass, shrub, or tree. The island of Saint Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is bad enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm-tree. Ascension hasn't even that. How they get men to go there is altogether beyond my comprehension. If I had to take my choice between being sentenced to exile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement in Sing Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. There are people on Ascension, nevertheless, the population, which consists of officers, seamen, and marines, together with a handful of cable operators and a score of Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about one hundred and thirty. There were also four women—relatives of the officers—on the island when I was there. They had been there only six months, I was told, yet when our vessel arrived not one of them was on speaking terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one of the most flourishing “match factories” in the British empire, it being safe to say that any unattached female, no matter what her disqualifications, can get a husband in a week's stay on the island. A young Englishman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. She had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint Helena (which is not exactly a roaring metropolis itself), and had married one of the cable operators stationed at Ascension, who was taking her on her first visit to the outside world. She told me that the event of her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to a vessel to see a motor-car which was being transported to Cape Town. Here was an educated and intelligent English girl who had come to womanhood without ever having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building over two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred people. When we reached Teneriffe, in the Canaries, which is about as somnolent a place as any I know, her husband took her ashore to see the sights with keen anticipation. She rode on an electric car, she took tea in a four-story hotel, she attended a moving-picture show—and was brought back to the steamer suffering from violent hysterics. A week later we reached Southampton, where she was so completely prostrated by the roar and bustle of her first city that she had to go to bed under medical attention.
To those British officials and soldiers who are performing the manifold duties of empire along Africa's fever-stricken West Coast, the island of Ascension is a godsend, for an excellent sanatorium has been built by the government on its highest point, and to it come wasted, sunken-cheeked, fever-racked skeletons from all parts of that coast of death to build up their strength before going back to their work again. Not only is Ascension a coaling, cable, and health station of considerable importance, but it is also the chief habitat of the sea-turtle, which comes there in thousands between January and May, to lay its eggs in the sand. After having seen the enormous size these creatures attain, it is almost possible to believe some of those fantastic yarns about his trained turtles with which Baron de Rougemont set Europe gasping a few years back. During the year that I visited Ascension more than two hundred turtles were captured, ranging in weight from five hundred to eight hundred pounds apiece. Four of the monsters, each weighing close to half a ton, were put aboard our vessel, being sent by the officers of the garrison as a gift to his Majesty the King. They must have had turtle soup at Buckingham Palace for several days in succession after those turtles arrived.
It could not have been long after daybreak when a frousy-headed Greek steward awoke me with an intimation that we were off Canea. The evil-smelling mixture which was called coffee only by courtesy, and which was really chicory in disguise, held no attraction for me, for, through the port-holes of the dining-saloon I could see, rising from a sapphire sea, the green-clad, snow-capped mountains of Crete, the island of mythology and massacre.
Our little steamer forged ahead at half-speed and the white town kept coming nearer and nearer, until we could distinguish the caiques in the harbour, and the queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem windows which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm-tree silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even the crowd of ebony, tan, and coffee-coloured humanity that fought for posts of vantage at the water-stairs. It was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid colours and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in some gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed it sleepily from the steamer's deck I had a momentary feeling that I was only an onlooker at a play and that the curtain would go down presently and I should have to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again.