My researches on Julio Lobo in my last blog, reminded me of another great Jewish admirer of Napoleon, the Canadian businessman, Napoleonic scholar, founder and President of the International Napoleonic Society, Ben Weider. Ben was one of the most indefatigable proponents of the theory that Napoleon was poisoned.
In my original planning of a trip to St Helena I came across some web pages describing his trip in 1975. I remember being slightly amused by the fact that, unable to get enough passages for all his family on the freighter "Good Hope Castle", he left his wife behind in Cape Town!
His account of his trip to St Helena, with a number of pictures and photos, including one of him and a youthful looking Gilbert Martineau is still well worth looking at.
Ben Weider's Journey to St Helena 1975
Anyway, my trawl of the net revealed that Ben died last October. I should have known, but didn't.
Aside from his Napoleonic scholarship he was a remarkable man. With his brother he founded a body building empire after the second world war. It was he who in 1969 encouraged the young Arnold Schwarzenegger to emigrate to the US. From what I read about the problems of the current Governor of California, some Californian Republicans probably think that that was a mixed blessing!
Anyway I attach a few web references for anyone interested.
Weider Obituary
Napoleonic Society
Just before he died he made a gift of a large collection of Napoleonic memorabilia to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
We were disappointed on our recent trip to Cuba to find scaffolding outside the Napoleonic Museum; a curt notice on the door informed us it was closed; no further information was available.
Anyway we took a few photos.
Including one of a workman on the roof.
We were unable to find out when the museum is expected to re-open; such information is inaccessible in Cuba!
On our return I decided to do a little bit of research about what we had missed.
Francesco Antommarchi
The first, most surprising thing I found, which perhaps I should have known, was that Napoleon's doctor and fellow Corsican, Francesco Antommarchi, died in Cuba. (1) Apparently one of the death masks of Napoleon that Antommarchi claimed he had made on St Helena still resides there, and is one of the artifacts in the museum. (2)
I also found that like St. Helena, Cuba has issued stamps featuring its Napoleonic Museum Cuban Napoleonic Stamps
Museo Napoleonico
Although the death mask is part of its collection, the museum has no connection with Antommarchi. It houses the collection assembled by Julio Lobo, a sugar magnate and one of the richest men in pre-revolutionary Cuba, who left in 1959 for the United States. (3) It is an unusual example of the connection between sugar derived wealth and art and museums (e.g. The Tate Gallery, London) propounded by Sebald in The Rings of Saturn ! Lobo had been told by his father to learn all he could about Napoleon, whom he admired because of his enlightened attitudes to Jews.
The collection apparently consists of some 7000 items, including a number of books and works of art. As well as the death mask, it also holds the spy glass that Napoleon used on St. Helena.
The museum itself is housed in a fine renaissance style mansion built in 1928; it is the former home of Italian born lawyer, writer and politician Orestes Ferrara. (4)
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NOTES
1. Francesco Antommarchi, born at Morsiglia, Corsica, in 1789, studied medicine at Pisa and Florence, and was chosen by Cardinal Fesch (Napoleon's uncle) and Napoleon's mother to fill the vacant post at Longwood House following the departure of Dr O'Meara. He arrived on St. Helena on September 20th 1819, and remained there until Napoleon's death. He performed the post-mortem on Napoleon. On return to Europe he lived in Poland, Italy and France. In 1825 he publishedThe last days of the Emperor Napoleon. In 1834 he emigrated to New Orleans, and in 1837 he moved to Cuba - apparently in search of a distant relative. He ended up at Santiago de Cuba, where there were a number of French immigrants from Haiti, including some senior officers from the Grand Army. He soon became ill and died of yellow fever. He was buried with military honours in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.
2. The following from the New York Times archives, reviews a book by G. L. de St M. Watson published in 1915 Napoleon's Death Mask It appears that the original cast was not taken by Antommarchi, but by an English doctor, Francis Burton.
3. Born in Venezuela, Lobo was Jewish. He was allegedly asked by Che Guevara to run the Cuban sugar industry after the Revolution, but moved to the United States, where he helped to finance the anti-Castro movement. He moved to Spain in 1968 where he died in 1983. His daughter, Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo, made a number of visits to Cuba from 1975, and collaborated with local artists and historians in amassing a large photographic collection. Her book, Havana: History and Architecture of A Romantic City was published after her death in 1998. Her ashes were returned to Cuba and scattered on one of the family's former plantations.
4. Ferrara held a number of high offices in Cuba, including that of Secretary of State during the Machado regime in the 1930's. He escaped an assassination attempt in 1940. He was exiled to Italy in 1960, and died there in 1972 aged 96.
I have been reading Napoleon & St Helena, On the Island of Exile (London 2008) by Johannes Willms. Willms, a German journalist currently based in Paris, is the author of two books on Napoleon. He visited St Helena in 2000. This work was first published in German in 2007, and translated into English in 2008.
Willms provides generally unflattering views of St Helena, of Napoleon, of the efforts of those who have tried to conserve the French properties on the island, and of those who take a different view of Napoleon from him. Supporters of Napoleon's gaoler, Sir Hudson Lowe, will also find that the tattered reputation of their man is not rescued by this author.
The introduction looked promising - full of irony, paradox and memorable phrases:
the island would long ago have lapsed into oblivion had it not been for his [Napoleon's] enforced presence there.
St. Helena the world's best-known, least-known island.
.. the sheer adventurousness of his long voyage to the island will compensate him [the traveller] for much of what his imagination has led him to expect, but which is not altogether fulfilled by the reality of what he finds there.
St Helena is a thoroughly old fashioned place, a remote and bizarre vanishing point ... In short St Helena is a philosophy of life. That is at once the great advantage and disadvantage of this singular island, with its kind and friendly inhabitants, which Napoleon abhorred primarily because it sentenced him to a fate he had always successfully avoided hitherto: a quiet life in a fixed abode.
Unfortunately the rest of the work does not really fulfill the early promise. It is neither a guide to St Helena nor a balanced or well documented historical account of the captivity. It contains no footnotes, no bibliography and no index. It is particularly disappointing in its coverage of the author's experiences on the island, and it lacks the reflection which is the hallmark of Kauffman's Dark Room at Longwood which the author dismisses as hagiography. I wonder if Willms ever read Kauffman's exploration of Napoleon's reaction to the carnage of the battle of Eylau?(1).
Kauffman and Willms of course had totally different aims: the former was trying to penetrate beneath the surface to try to understand what Napoleon really felt in the endless hours on St Helena as he tried to come to terms with his loss of empire, family and freedom. For Willms that is not an interesting question; he has made up his mind before he even steps on St Helena.
Is There Honey Still for Tea?
As the title indicates, the main focus of the work is on Napoleon and the French properties. There are a few pages on present day St Helena, including comments about the paucity of goods available in the shops on the island and the lack of fresh produce.
The author recounts meeting the widow of a former Governor on the RMS St Helena. Her husband had died after falling off a cliff in England, and she was returning to the island with his ashes. She told him to be sure to buy some local honey: it was the only local produce worth buying. Willms comments ironically: Although there were plenty of cliffs from which one could have fallen to one's death, this abundance did not extend to the island's famous honey, none of which could be found in any of Jamestown's shops.
The author appears unable to understand how Saints could say that they prefer their home to any place on earth: perhaps a state of not unduly perceptible collective poverty, coupled with the joys of colonial tutelage and freedom from the cares of existence, create a happiness hard to convey to outsiders.
The French properties: A Monument to French Historical Propaganda?
The author observes that the cultivation of Napoleon's memory on St Helena is an exclusively French preserve. In the British version of the island's history, the defeated Emperor's enforced presence plays only a very subordinate role ..
Against this, the role of King George VI in spurring the French to restore Longwood after World War II is dutifully noted, as is the generally favourable treatment accorded to Napoleon by most British writers in the century after his death.
Willms describes Longwood as "an antimuseum": an attempt to restore rooms to their original condition, rather than to fill them with lots of memorabilia. He is however very sceptical of the end results:
Today the highland plateau of Longwood presents a thoroughly deceptive appearance to the beholder, and so do the rooms in which Napoleon lived and died. These possess no more authenticity than a carefully arranged stage set. Nothing is as it really used to be; all is designed to accord as much as possible with the visitor's presentiments and foreknowledge. Longwood House is now, in its remoteness and heroic absurdity, a positively touching monument to French historical propaganda.
Elsewhere he appears to contradict himself by noting that the Martineaus, like their predecessors, have been clever in searching for household items and reinstalling them where they were in Napoleon's day. He notes however, that the iron beds displayed in Longwood are contemptible replicas. (2)
Among a number of questionable statements is his claim that Longwood House was the largest and most imposing building on the island other than Plantation House. It may have had a large number of rooms by the time the ramshackle extensions to it had been built - but imposing it never was! Even the modern traveller can see a number of architecturally more imposing buildings scattered round the island that existed in Napoleon's day. He claims also that the current Longwood complex is now only half its original size - which is presumably a French conspiracy to exaggerate the poor conditions which Napoleon and his entourage endured! I have incidentally seen no evidence myself to back up this claim and am inclined to doubt its veracity. I wonder if anyone else could comment on it?
For me the most informative part of the book is its account of the somewhat strange history of the properties and their curators after their acquisition by the French Government in 1858. This is probably of little interest to many potential readers however. The book is perhaps most disappointing in its sparse and generally downbeat coverage of St Helena itself. For those interested in the captivity there is still no better starting point than Lord Rosebery's Napoleon: The Last Phase (London 1900).
I have also been reading a more satisfactory book, The Road to St Helena, Napoleon After Waterloo (Pen and Sword, 2008) by J. David Markham, of which more later. Meanwhile I am off to visit a much larger island in the Caribbean, which entirely coincidentally happens to have a more conventional Napoleonic museum.
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Notes
1. Kaufmann's book is covered at length in my entry of February 11th 2008.
2. Napoleon's original bed is displayed at Les Invalides in Paris,
St Helena has had more than its share of problems in 2008 - escalating fuel prices which impact on everything purchased on the island; heavy rains and rock falls; problems with the ageing mail ship (RMS St. Helena) and now uncertainty as to whether the airport will be built.
For a short time though its inhabitants, like those of much of the rest of the globe, are putting aside the economic doom and gloom and celebrating the holiday season.
I liked the colour of this parade down the main street in Jamestown, and thought it worth sharing(and worth clicking on for a larger image).
It is comforting to note also that Jonathan - the island's most famous inhabitant other than Napoleon - who has attracted international attention this year and may or may not be the oldest animal in the world, continues to do what he has done through two World Wars, countless smaller conflicts, one Great Depression, numerous recessions, and the reigns of some half dozen British monarchs.
Long may his health and good fortune continue; and best wishes to all the other less well known residents of the island.
Best wishes and thanks also to the St. Helena Independent, the source of the images reproduced here, and an invaluable source of news and opinion on events on the island.
For some time I had been meaning to do an entry on the families who lived on St. Helena during the Captivity of Napoleon. Reading G.L. De St. M. Watson's interesting work on Piontkowski and St. Helena has finally spurred me to do this. (1) This book contains a list of over 30 people that Hudson Lowe suspected might have been involved in helping Napoleon to smuggle letters to Europe.
I hope that this entry may be of some help to those trying to trace the names of families who once lived on St. Helena. It does not pretend to provide a definitive record.
Gilbert Martineau, in his Napoleon's St. Helena breaks the white population of the island into two categories: "big" whites and "small" whites, probably an appropriate terminology to describe the hierarchical world that was the British Empire. Below these would be the trades people, the free blacks and the slaves. (2)
The first category consisted of the well established families who lived in the fine houses scattered around the island - the Doveton (Mount Pleasant) , Hodson (Maldivia House) and Brooke families (Prospect House).
Others who were admitted to Plantation House functions during the East India Company period included Robert Leech (High Knoll) and D. Leech, B.A. Wright, John De Fountain, David and John Kay, Thomas Greentree (Fairyland), George Blenkens, Robert and Henry Seale (Castle of Otranto), Anthony Beale, George Lambe, Charles Blake and Nathaniel Kennedy. These families tended to intermarry and held all the important positions on the island.
Other family names on the island at the time included Bennett, Brabazon, Carr, Shortiss, Kinnaird, Bagley, Knipe, Torbett, Mason, Legge, Robinson, Broadway, Firmin, Young, Carrol, O'Connor, Porteous, Smith, Haynes, Beale, Hunter, Den Taafe, Cole, Harrington and Fowler.
Sir Hudson Lowe's List of Suspects
Sir Hudson Lowe's list, referred to earlier, not only provides an insight into the paranoia and distrust of Sir Hudson Lowe, but also affords a glimpse of the commercial life of St Helena during the Captivity. (3)
Some on the list appear in the Judicial Records I have been working on, but the Records rarely give any indication of occupation. Few if any of the names are I think now current on St. Helena.
Most of the names on the list are reproduced below, with any additional information that I have to hand.
Samuel Solomon -the founder of the firm which still trades on St. Helena
Mr Bruce (clerk to Solomon)
Joseph Solomon
Mr Boorman - a plumber and paper hanger often employed at Longwood; he and his wife assisted Darling with the funeral arrangements.
Mr Paine - a painter and paper hanger, an employee of John Bullock (London) sent out to from the UK to work on New Longwood house
Mr Darling - another employee of John Bullock; served as undertaker at Napoleon's funeral; assisted also at the exhumation.
Mr Heywood
Mr Lowden
Mr Cole - postmaster
Members of the firm Balcombe, Cole & Co - Messrs. Fowler (Oaklands), Waring and Banks. The Balcombe family had by this time left the island.
Mr Scriven - warehouseman
Mr Wright - late captain St Helena Regiment - who was acquitted of murder in the duelling case in 1808 referred to in an earlier entry on this blog.
Mr Metcalfe - carpenter
Mr Bannister - victualler
Mr Simpson
Mr Eyre - lodging-keeper
Mr Mulhall
Mr Chamberlayn - carpenter
Mr Gordon - cooper
Mr Baker, contractor
Mr Carroll - merchant
Mr McRitchie - shopkeeper
Mr Torbett - shopkeeper; owned the land on which Napoleon was buried.
Mr Blunden - clerk
Mr Greenland - shopkeeper
Mr Green - shopkeeper
Mr Dring - auctioneer
Mr Julio - no fixed employment
Mr Tracy - butcher
Reverend Boys and Illegitimacy on St. Helena
One of the most colourful people on the island at this time was the Reverend Richard Boys, whose forthright opinions sometimes brought him into conflict with the powers on the island, most notably in his condemnation of Admiral Plampin's cohabitation with a lady not his wife.
On occasions when Boys was asked to record the births of children of slave women fathered by people of rank on the island, he insisted on writing the names and positions of the fathers in bold letters in the register. Apparently these names were virtually impossible to erase. Boys' efforts appear to have had some effect, as the decline in the number of illegitimate children registered suggests:
1813 :- 198; 1814 :- 101; 1815 :- 58 1816:- 46; 1817:- 53; 1818:- 39; 1819 :- 50; 1820 :- 17; 1821 :- 16; 1822 :- 6.
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Notes
1, G.L. De St. M. WatsonA Polish Exile with Napoleon(London and New York) 1912. I can find little about this author, who happened to live in nearby Wigan long before it was discovered and made famous by George Orwell. It seems to me to be a curious place find a Napoleonic scholar! on the occasion of his publication of a volume on Napoleon's death mask, Watson was described by the New York Times (August 15th 1915) as a leading Napoleonic iconographer. Watson was apparently a friend of Arnold Chaplin, whose A St. Helena Who's Who (London 1919) is an invaluable source for information on St. Helena during the captivity.
2. Chaplin gives the breakdown of the population as follows: 3534 whites; 1156 slaves; 481 Chinese; 613 Free Blacks; 33 Lascars (Asian sailors). He gives the total military population as 2181. Arnold p. 15
3.The background to this incident is as follows: In 1819 Mr Ripley, the captain of the Regent was apparently approached on St. Helena and offered some money to take some correspondence from Longwood to Europe. He informed Col. Reade, who informed Sir Hudson Lowe. Lowe sent a letter to Lord Bathurst listing possible suspects about whom Ripley should be questioned. Quite what Lord Bathurst made of this one can only imagine.
