Napoleon Arrived in Exile on Saint Helena
On this day · 15 October 1815
After a ten-week voyage, the fallen emperor reached the loneliest rock in the Atlantic, the prison Britain chose to hold him forever.
On 15 October 1815, the warship HMS Northumberland dropped anchor off Saint Helena, a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic roughly 1,200 miles from the nearest mainland. Aboard was Napoleon Bonaparte, defeated four months earlier at Waterloo and now a prisoner of the British Crown. The voyage from England had taken about ten weeks.
Britain chose the island precisely for its isolation. Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn had been ordered to deliver the former emperor and to guard against any escape or rescue. Napoleon reportedly waited until dusk to step ashore, unwilling to be gawked at, then spent his first night in the tiny capital, Jamestown.
“It is not an attractive place,” the exile is said to have remarked of his new home.
Within weeks he was moved to Longwood House, a damp, wind-scoured residence where he would remain under guard. He never left. Napoleon died on Saint Helena on 5 May 1821, ending the career of the man who had once ruled most of Europe.
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