We crossed the equator on the 3d of January, in longitude 11° west, and when the “sun came up on the left” on the morning of the 10th, right ahead, perhaps in the very track of the Northumberland, looming sternly up from out the ocean, like the dark high walls of an ocean-prison that it is, we saw St. Helena. The tallest peak, that of Diana, is visible in the clouds for a great distance. At mid-day we anchored in the roadstead fronting James’ town, and shortly after saluted the flag of England with twenty-one guns. At no time, during a cruise of two years and over, did I hear any reverberation from our heavy pieces, half so magnificent. The sound of each explosion, at first seemed to recoil from the face of the immense rock which upreared itself in front, and then as if gathering strength from the temporary rebuff, it broke, in and up the wedge-shaped valley in which James’ town is situated, and appearing for a moment to die away, again went on over gorge and peak, tumbling, roaring, thundering in the distance, as if “Jura answered through her misty shroud.” The salute was returned by one of the number of forts that were looming away above us on the island.
In shore of us lay a number of sharp rakish-looking little vessels, slavers, that had been captured by the English cruisers, on the African station, and brought to the island to be adjudged by a local court of admiralty; better than our system where captor and prize have to return frequently, great distances to the United States.
The landing at St. Helena is made on a mole at one end of the small beach that lies only immediately in front of James’ town. A few minutes’ walk, and crossing a drawbridge, over a moat, you pass through an embattled wall, from which some iron pieces frown down on you, by a lofty gate, at which sentinels are always posted. On getting inside, a triangular street made of rolled gravel is before you. On the left are the guard quarters, the governor’s house and offices, and a public garden; on the right a church, hotel, and the ascent to Ladder hill, where is situated the highest fort of the place, reached by six hundred and twenty-five steps. Right before you, running from the apex of the triangle, is the road which leads to the spot which has made St. Helena famous, and England infamous for ever. As you ascend this road, you may look down on the settlements of the Chinese who have left the flowery kingdom to dwell in this place of isolation and desolation; also see the fine English soldier as he is being closely drilled from company to battalion, not by duke of Cambridge, or Earl Cardigan, all of whose bravery will not make up for want of tactical knowledge, but by sergeants.
Our stay at the island was to be only until we could get coal enough aboard to take us to Cape Town, and so on the following morning I started for Longwood and the now vacant tomb of Napoleon. I was not aware when I started on foot, that I had to walk a distance before returning to the town, of nine miles, and that too over a road of lava formation, and under the burning rays of a vertical sun. The ascent, at the first, is very great. Much fagged on reaching the summit point I sat down to rest, and surveyed the scene around. Near me on a road-stone, his bridleless and heavily-ladened little donkey cropping thistles not far off, in his parti-colored dress sat a Lascar quietly discussing his cigar. On the stone which he occupied, I read “1124 distance: 1180 feet elevation.” The road in the direction in which I was going was shut in by clumps of brushwood and some scrubby pines, above which, far away—its ragged top currying away the bottoms of the southeast trade-clouds which, blowing continually over the island, ever and anon drop their genial drops on the arid earth beneath—rose Diana’s peak hundreds of feet in air. But the view looking seaward: Sir Joshua Reynolds said that the horizon-line of the great and wide sea in mid-deep is one of the most striking emblems of the infinite and the eternal to be found in all the works of the Almighty. This idea, of all other places, arises in the mind when gazing from the eminences of St. Helena; but then, as you look upon “the sea here, the sea there, the sea all around,”—contrasted with the vast expanse, how small in the imagination becomes the spot on which you stand, and how coffined before death, must have felt the great spirit, to whom all Europe was once a theatre,—qui fait le tour du monde!
From where I sat, I could see in the gorge beneath, very plainly, the “Briers,” the home and habitation of Napoleon until Longwood could be gotten ready for his reception. It is situated behind a naked, stony hill, and must have been a warm abode, but Napoleon liked it for its quaintness and solitude; preferring it to better houses in the town, where privacy would have been impossible. The place is enclosed by low walls and rows of the prickly pear. On resuming my tramp, I passed some swarthy-featured, black-haired, fine-formed young women, barefooted, and lightly clad, carrying bundles of twigs on their heads, with which they walked, with apparently perfect indifference, notwithstanding the steepness of road and the intense rays of the sun. I soon reached and went by an old cottage in decay, a rusty signal-gun, a wayside inn with an embowered doorway, and then passing through a lane of trees, I entered upon a level road, which, in the space of three quarters of a mile, turned in crescent to the left. Some distance below, within this crescent, a lot of fir, cypress, and other trees, with grassy sod, terminated a small valley which commenced in desolation from the seaside. This spot was enclosed by a low, straggling fence, having a kind of sentry-box at its gate, and contains the vacant tomb of Napoleon. I descended to the place, paid the shilling entrance required of me, and entered the enclosure. The willow-tree which so invariably figured in all drawings of the spot, is now gone. The grave is enclosed by a plain iron railing, and, when I saw it, covered over with an awning. Its present appearance is that of the strong foundation of an elongated old spring-house, lined with cement. It is eight feet deep, having at the bottom a small recess sunk below the general level, which received the coffin, and about five feet wide. Desirous of getting the exact measurement of so much greatness, one of our party stretched himself at full length in this lower deep, but its chilliness soon made him have as little desire to continue there, as the old hero of New Orleans had to repose after death in the sarcophagus of one of the Cæsars, which the very considerate kindness of a commodore had brought for him. The whole surface of the plastering down in the tomb is covered with scarcely-legible names, or petty ambition’s trashy verses. The same very limited aspiration is to be seen in the pages of a register kept at the place, where the national animosities of visiting-strangers play shuttlecock and battledore. The obstinate and collected Englishman repeats the commonplace of Sir Walter Scott, in wishing you to behold the spot which held him for whom the earth was once too small, or ethically informs you, that one life being taken constitutes murder, but that of thousands makes a hero; then comes the mercurial Frenchman, who, after relieving himself by a great big “sacre” on the English nation generally and the island jailer in particular, says Napoleon is avenged, for Hudson Lowe “est mort;” or breaks out with “J’ai vu: J’ai maudit!” Next comes that peripatetic philosopher, Jonathan, who, smacking as usual of the shop, furnishes the edifying information that he belongs to the “Mary Brown, of New Bedford, has bin out over two years, and hain’t got but four hundred barrils of oil; hopes to be to ‘hum’ soon; and stopping at the island, has just come out to see Boney’s tomb!”
When the tomb contained the body of the great emperor, it was filled to within one foot of the surface, with earth, and covered in mound form with cement. The three slabs that closed the grave, were taken from the kitchen hearth of the Longwood jail. A cicerone, in the person of a gray-haired old negro woman, who saw both the interment and the exhumation of the remains of Napoleon, tells you in an Ethiopic vernacular, of the incidents of the spot; after enumerating the number of coffins in which the body was placed, she said, “Dare, sir, laid his head, and here was his feet.”—“He always used to drink at dat dare spring, dare.”—“I’s seen him many a time come down dat hill dare wid his snuff-box and one of General Bertram’s children.”—“When he used to stop still, he’d do jest so”—folding her arms. She was also quite minute in her mention of the “Prince de Jonnyville” in the “Belpooly.”
The spot was pointed out to me where Bertrand, Gourgaud, Las Casas, and Marchand, erected the tent to put the body under after exhumation, which took place amid wind and rain. All around the tomb was wet and miry; in times of heavy rains, now, the tomb is not unfrequently filled with water. The work of disinterment was begun after midnight, and by seven o’clock in the morning the stones that closed the lower vault were raised. The anvil employed by the men engaged upon the work to keep their tools in order, sank at every blow, and the men were ankle deep in mud. I have nothing pathetic or philosophic to add, upon the spot;
“Si ta tombe est vide Napoleon?
Ton nom ne remplit il pas l’universe.”
Ascending the hill on the other side, by a winding path which led up through a pretty garden, I stopped at the little residence of “Hutt’s gate,” formerly occupied by General Bertrand, with his family, previous to moving out to the building in the vicinity of Longwood. After resting here, I footed it a mile further, to the outer entrance to the grounds of Longwood. The prospect before me during this walk was of the dreariest and most desolate kind, presenting the most marked contrast to the verdure at the tomb. It was along this road that Napoleon walked to his favorite spring, and over which his Chinese coolies carried his water from it. After passing a dilapidated wall and gate, you enter upon a lawn of some hundred yards, on one side of which are straggling fir-trees, bent down in the same direction by the continual pressure of the southeast trade-winds, which are felt at this part of the island very strongly, and the other side was hedged by a long row of the stately aloe. In a few minutes you are in front of a dilapidated low building, with a small verandah in front of one of its wings, and partly enclosed in an old stone wall. This is Longwood as it now is. When I reached it, the place looked abandoned in the extreme, with the exception of the cows and a scrawny donkey that browsed around, or a solitary turkey who broke the silence with his gobble. There was the decayed and silent guard-house and signal-tower, its halyards rotted away and pole tottering, from which the restless bunting was for ever telling by day to the sedulous jailer at “Plantation House” how his great prisoner at Longwood, after the mental exhaustion of dictation, or the fatigues of a morning walk, now slept, or that, having slept, he was now feeding his pet fishes in the little pond in the rear of his cell abode. This quiet was soon broken; a dirty-faced, uncombed-haired English girl approached, and informed us that the fee for admission to the house was two shillings—Longwood, like the grounds around the tomb, being leased by the government to others, for the purpose of speculating on the interest of association connected with the great emperor. If we are the “dollar people,” can any man who has ever visited English domain say, that they are not entitled to the name of “shilling nation!”