Napoleon's Last Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

of rock. Set on an island in the mid-Atlantic where all possibilities of wind existed, this town went for most of the year without more than an occasional breeze. Its main street was of white stucco but there was a serious fortification on a terrace above the port called the Castle. My father’s warehouse was here at the beginning of the town, but we did not have to live in this pocket, amongst immutable rocks, looking up at terraces where the fortresses and artillery stood. We would live in open space beyond. Meanwhile, the British cannon above us considered that strangulated town and the sleeping Negro giant worth keeping!
    The slaves of the island were mostly the children of people brought from Madagascar, East Africa or India by the ships of the East India Company. Even as we landed at St Helena, in London slavery as a trade was about to be enacted out of existence, but it would long continue on the island. We, who had never had slaves before, would have the use of them. The town major, a tall, dutiful sort of man from the East India Company infantry, named Hodson, had gathered the five that were our lot. Our house servants were Sarah, a sweet-faced African woman of perhaps my mother’s age, and two half-Malay, half-African twin boys of about ten, Roger and Robert. They were bare-footed and wore canvas trousers and a jacket but white gloves. If there was an assumption by folk other than myself that Sarah was the boys’ mother, she claimed to be their aunt, and they the children ofher dead sister. A Cape Malay male, an older and scrawny man named Toby, was our gardener, and Ernest, perhaps thirty, limpid-eyed and with an air of caution about him, a second gardener and our groom.
    We were escorted by these slaves, and the clerks of the East India Company agency named Fowler, Cole and Balcombe, through the town. A horse waited for my father, and there was a narrow-axled carriage for my mother, Jane and me. I did not want to mount the carriage – I had already developed an unexplained fear of the things. The conveyance looked incapable of negotiating the long terraces of the track that led up the cliffs of rock to the broader place my mother had promised, where we hoped to breathe and spread our elbows more freely than the citizens of the port could. One of the clerks drove the trap and behind it walked our servants, free of baggage. But there was a string of perhaps thirty other Cape Malays following with burdens on their head and shoulders, supplies and items for our house.
    Jouncing along, I was carried by a talkative slave, a tall energetic one, in a basket on his shoulder. As I jolted my way up the heights he declared, ‘Oh, lady, I carry washing, I carry flour, I carry salt beef, I carry linseed. But you, my miss, are the finest load I carry. No one bake you, no one wear you, no one pour you out on the ground.’
    I think of slavery now and I wonder what gave this man the goodwill to say such soothing things to the child of his enslavers. The basket was hard-edged and the sky bounced above me and home did not present itself for more than an hour. I was heaved up into a notch in an escarpment and I saw behind me the caravan of people hauling bags and panniers. We walked in pleasant open country now but there were inland hills, a diaphanous forest to the right and a large white house visible beyond it. A waterfall fell into a heart-shaped bowl of rock to our right, and to our left was a wooded hill, and notable peaks lay ahead. But there was open space for gardens and orchards, pastures and slave huts, and for our house, on the level ground ahead. A nearby small stream was named Briars Gut.
    The carriageway running from the road into The Briars was made by canopies of huge banyan trees which imposed a sudden dusk on us, and then from the gate of the garden, a walk of pomegranate trees took us towards a long, low house with wide verandahs. I saw over the basket’s rim to the side of the house a