ST HELENA, a volcanic island of some forty-seven square miles in the South Atlantic, held by the Commonwealth as a naval victualling station since the middle of the seventeenth century and chosen, after the victory at the Sambre (q.v.) in 1815, as the place of Buonaparte's final exile — a choice this contributor's own service records show was made on the plainest grounds of distance and security rather than on any calculated unkindness to the prisoner himself: no Atlantic anchorage in the Commonwealth's keeping lies farther from any coast a rescue expedition might sail from, and none, on this contributor's own acquaintance with the passage, is harder to approach unseen.
The island the fleet knows chiefly as a place to water and revictual ships outbound for the Indian station received, from 1815, a garrison and a governor's establishment considerably larger than its own small planting population had previously required, the whole apparatus maintained at a cost this contributor's colleagues in the Admiralty's own accounts have generally judged money well spent against the alternative the escape of so considerable a prisoner would have represented. Buonaparte himself lived out the six remaining years of his life at a modest house on the island's central plateau, corresponding at length with visitors of every nation this contributor's own service has carried to call upon him, and died there in 1821, his health, on the naval surgeon's own report this contributor has read at the Admiralty library, undone rather more by the island's own damp climate than by any harshness of his confinement, which this contributor's service has generally found the island's own remoteness made unnecessary to enforce very strictly.
The garrison has been reduced by stages since, the island's naval importance having declined a good deal with the general improvement of steam navigation's own coaling arrangements elsewhere on the Indian route, and this contributor, who has called at the anchorage twice in the course of his own service and found it, on both occasions, a good deal quieter than its one famous decade of history would lead the visitor to expect, records the rock chiefly as a naval officer remembers such places: a watering stop of no great charm, made permanently interesting by six years of one man's confinement that the island itself, in every other particular, seems to have forgotten rather more completely than history has. (A. F. P.)