Letters (119 page)

And with her all my hopes,
he writes,
no longer of saving Bonaparte from exile, but of ensuring if I could that he went to St. Helena instead of to the Wood of Suicides in Hell.
For he has now decided not only that a taste of true exile might be the best argument for inclining Napoleon to the Louisiana Project, but that with the aid of the Baratarians he is far more likely to effect a rescue from St. Helena than from the Tower of London. Almost before he realizes what he’s doing, therefore, he flings himself off
Eurotas
into Plymouth Sound, kicks away his boots, and strikes out for
Bellerophon.

A cry goes up from both vessels. Andrew has jumped from the side opposite
Eurotas’s
guard boats and nearer
Bellerophon’s,
which therefore pause in their labors to save him from drowning. Before he can be placed under arrest and transferred back to
Eurotas
and thence to shore, he shouts a warning to
Bellerophon’s
watch officer that the launch fast approaching bears the feared habeas corpus from the King’s Bench. Sure enough, Mackenrot stands in her bows, waving his paper—and now the Count de Las Cases has recognized “André Castine” and says something to Commander Maitland. Orders are given: to his great relief Andrew sees another boat lowered to fend off the redoubtable Scotsman; he himself, there being nothing else presently to be done with him, is fetched aboard
Bellerophon
with the guard boats and their crews as soon as the old ship has sea room enough to begin tacking under her own power out of the sound.

You have betray’d us, Las Cases complain’d to me
[he writes]
as soon as we could speak privately. Nor did my argument much move him; for while he agreed that rescue might be more feasible from St. Helena than from Britain, he vow’d the Emperor was still adamant on that score, and was prepared to take his life rather than submit voluntarily to exile. As for that, I thot, it was likely mere bluff, inasmuch as his sentence was now clear beyond doubt, and
Bellerophon’s
putting out to sea removed any hope of their being received ashore or otherwise delaying execution of that sentence; yet he was still alive. On this head, however, I held my peace, proposing instead what certain of those sign-boards had proposed to me: namely, that the Emperor might be dissuaded from suicide, and induced to go peacefully tho protestingly into exile, if he were shown the opportunity therein to increase his fame. His public confinement in Tor Bay & Plymouth Sound had workt considerably to his advantage in one respect: he was now more than ever the cynosure of all eyes, and his letters, from “Themistocles” forward (so I learn’d from Las Cases), tho undeliver’d or unreply’d to, had in fact been addrest less to their addressees than to History, which is to say, to Public Opinion. What better chance, then, to bend the world in his favor, than to turn his exile into public martyrdom, by writing his memoirs on St. Helena & smuggling them out for publication? He had made history; he could now re-make & revise it to his pleasure! Thus the world’s forgetfulness, which he fear’d would bury him, would bury instead his great crimes against mankind (I call’d them his
little misjudgments)
& eagerly believe whate’er he wrote.

Moreover (Andrew adds by way of clincher to his appeal), such a memoir will need delivery to the mainland, and publication, and collection of its author’s royalties. What better way for a trusted aide like Monsieur the Count de Las Cases at once to do his master a signal service and to abbreviate his own exile?

At 1st skeptical, the Count was by this last altogether convinced—if only, he declared, to save the Emperor’s life & honor. All that afternoon & evening, as we hove to to await
Prometheus, Tonnant, Eurotas, & Myrmidon,
and then beat southeast toward rendezvous with Admiral Cockburn, the Count prest my plan in private with Napoleon. That same night, I was gratify’d to hear, the unemperor’d Emperor dictated a grand letter of protest, addrest “to History…” And tho he still vow’d to the English officers they would never fetch him alive to St. Helena, I was pleased to gather, from Las Cases’ nods & winks, that our appeal was going forward.

He would have been further encouraged, could he have seen them, by editorials in the
Times
and the
Morning Chronicle
next day, expressing their writers’ conviction that the captive would have been securer from rescue in Stirling Castle, say, than on St. Helena, where “an American vessel will always be ready to take him off…”

Nevertheless, throughout that morning and early afternoon (154 years ago today), as they rendezvous with Cockburn’s squadron between Start Point and Bolt Head, exchange cannon salutes and visits between the admirals’ flagships, then move together to the calmer waters of Tor Bay in preparation for the transfer, Napoleon gives no public sign of acquiescence. Keith and Cockburn are moved to the extraordinary precaution of impounding the French officers’ swords and pistols, lest they attempt to resist the transfer with arms. Only when
Bellerophon’s
doctor reports to Commander Maitland that “General Buonaparte” has invited him to serve as his personal physician on St. Helena do the English—and Andrew—have reason to imagine that Napoleon has at last accepted his fate. Even then they fear a ruse (they have just learned that Las Cases, who has affected since Rochefort not to understand English, reads and speaks their language easily). Guard boats are posted to patrol the anchorage all night lest Mr. Mackenrot, or the habeas corpus people, or the Bonapartists, or the Americans, attempt rescue or obstruction, or the emperor fling himself from his cabin into Tor Bay.

At eight-thirty that evening Admirals Cockburn and Keith come aboard to read to Napoleon their instructions from the cabinet and work out the details of his transfer to
Northumberland
next morning; Andrew retires out of sight down to the orlop deck, where he had completed the “Washington” letter, and spends the evening drafting this one.

Rather (as I have done here on the first-class deck of the
Statendam,
where it is not to be supposed I have deciphered, transcribed, and summarized all these pages at one sitting, simultaneously wooing your future stepmother!), he extends toward completion the chronicle he has been drafting in fits and starts since Rochefort, as I have drafted this over the three weeks past. And as I expect any moment now this loving labor to be set aside for one equally loving but more pressing (Jane is in our stateroom, preparing for bed and wondering why I linger here on deck), so my namesake’s is interrupted, near midnight, by good news from the Count de Las Cases. Not only has the emperor agreed at last, under formal protest, to be shifted with his party to
Northumberland
after breakfast next morning; he has made long speeches to History, to both the admirals and, separately, to Commander Maitland, from whom also he has exacted a letter attesting that his removal from
Bellerophon
is contrary to his own wishes. Moreover, he has prevailed (over Maitland’s objections) in his insistence that Las Cases be added to the number of his party, to serve as his personal secretary; and he has clapped the count himself on the shoulder and said, “Cheer up, my friend! The world has not heard the last from us; we shall write our memoirs!”

Even as I,
Andrew concludes,
am writing mine, in these encipher’d pages, my hope once more renew’d. Tomorrow Admiral Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” will weigh anchor for St. Helena with the Scourge of Mankind: a voyage of two months, during which I shall make my own way back from England to New Orleans, hoping against hope, my darling Andrée, to find you there. Where, if all goes well, you & I & Jean Lafitte will devise a plan to spirit Napoleon from under George Cockburn’s nose before he has unpackt his writing-tools!

And even as I, dear Henry, hope against hope that upon my return to “Barataria” next week I shall find
you
there: the present point of my pen overtaken, the future ours to harvest together!

I go now to Mrs. Mack, to fertilize and cultivate that future. A fellow passenger remarks, in nervous jest, upon the “secret of the Bermuda Triangle”: the hijacking of cruising yachts by narcotics smugglers to run their merchandise into U.S. harbors. I pretend to know nothing of that scandal. Small wonder, my companion replies: the Coast Guard and the tourist industry are keeping it quiet, inasmuch as they cannot possibly search every pleasure boat entering every creek and cove from Key West to Maine. Very interesting, I agree, thinking of the gift from Jane that awaits me in Annapolis.

A word to the wise, my son? From

August 13, 1969

Dear Henry,

Round Bay is a handsome widening of the Severn five nautical miles above Annapolis, itself some 125 up the Chesapeake from the Virginia Capes. Off Round Bay, on the river’s southwest shore, is
Little
Round Bay, in the center whereof lies a small high wooded pleasant island named after Napoleon’s exile place in the South Atlantic, some 7,000 sea miles hence.

This local St. Helena Jane Mack is of a mind to buy for our weekend exiles, as more comfortable and convenient than my Bloodsworth Island, and more private and spacious than my cottage on Chautaugua Road, not far away. Imagine an island of some dozen acres within twenty miles of both Washington and Baltimore! It is presently owned by acquaintances of Jane’s, with whom she is negotiating purchase, and who have kindly permitted me to tie up at their dock for the night. As a honeymoon house and vacation retreat it will quite do, though it is too much in view of the mainland (half a mile off all around, and thickly peopled) to serve your and my other purposes. We shall hold onto our marshy, inconvenient “Barataria.”

From a week of
dolce far niente
aboard the
Statendam
—a sort of final trial honeymoon itself, altogether successful—we flew home yesterday, Jane to return to her
métier
and truest passion, Mack Enterprises; I to take delivery in Annapolis of her birthday gift to me: the sturdy diesel yacht from whose air-conditioned main cabin I write this. All day the builders and I put
Baratarian
through its sea trials, as successful as Jane’s and mine; tomorrow or next day I shall return it to the boatyard for certain adjustments and modifications (I feign a sudden addiction to deep-sea fishing) to be made while I check out our human Baratarians. On the ides of August, Napoleon’s birthday, I shall fly briefly north to see how things go at Lily Dale and Fort Erie. I had considered a side trip to Chautauqua as well, to confer with my quondam collaborator there; but I now believe he knows nothing of you and is without interest in the Second Revolution. On or about St. Helena’s Day (the 18th) I shall go up to Castines Hundred (our ancient caretakers have retired; I have engaged new ones through the post), whence I shall return, ere the sun enters Virgo, for a more considerable trial run: the first real test of our operations for the coming academic year. Will I find you there, Henry, poring through our library like your ancestors, determining for yourself what I have been at such futile pains to learn, to teach?

Andrew IV never did return there, except in dreams and letters. The next to last of his
lettres posthumes
was written aboard Lafitte’s schooner
Jean Blanque
in “Galvez-Town, or New Barataria,” on August 13, 1820—five years and a week since its predecessor. Like yours truly, he is about to commence on the ides of August another journey: one by his own admission “more considerable but less significant” than the one he ought to make instead, to Castines Hundred.
Still curst by what I had thot long exorcised,
he confesses to Andrée,
I shall sail 9,500 miles in the wrong direction, from Cancer down to Capricorn, to “rescue” against his will a man the world had better not seen in the 1st place, rather than fly north to the seat & bosom of my family, beg your pardon for my errancy, put by for good & all my vain dream of 2nd Revolution & Western Empire, and spend content in your arms what years remain to me.

He refers, of course, to Jean Lafitte’s expedition to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena—the expedition which, in his last, he had hoped to expedite before the island’s defense could be organized. What has he been at for half a decade?

Rushing to Plymouth from Tor Bay
[so he begins this letter, with a
4)?(,
a
HSUR,
a
rush,
as if no more than a page-turn separated
Bellerophon
from
Jean Blanque,
1815 from 1820],
I found a fast brig just departing for Bermuda, where I took a yet faster packet to New Orleans. By mid-September, a full month ere Cockburn reacht St. Helena with his prisoner, I was back in Conti Street with Jean Lafitte, asking for news of you & the twins.

There is, we know, none.
I could only conclude my letters & entreaties were unwelcome at Castines Hundred; else the Mississippi, whose navigation from Great Lakes to Gulf of Mexico was secured now to the U. States, had borne you long since hither.

And why does he not straightway bear himself
thither,
to make certain those “letters & entreaties” ever reached their address?
’Twas not the current of the Father of Waters I shy’d from breasting,
he declares, not quite convincingly,
but the current of your disfavor, both of my long absence
[three years by then,
eight
by “now”!]
and of what I had accomplisht. Where was our free nation of Indians, Habitants, & liberated slaves? Even New Orleans I found more “American” than I had left it, and with the Union at last secured & at peace—tho set fast forever, as wise men had fear’d, with a standing Army & Navy—I could feel the country catching its breath, as ’twere, before plunging to the western ocean. There was no time to lose, or all would be lost.