I begin with things past.. this is a series about old out-of-print books, and my fascination for them.
I am a collector of antiquarian books about India, Tibet and China. I came to this hobby because of the internet and the digital revolution 1.0 of the late nineteen-nineties. Ebay was my introduction to the world of old books, not the auction space of the big names in the business. My books are mainly eBay purchases, bought from the most obscure places, from booksellers in the prairie and the tundra, from rural Maine and the small mid-west towns, or even the Hebrides and little Lake District hamlets.
This passion with ‘collecting’ old books has played itself out against the backdrop of so many other things that have pre-occupied me, mainly my professional pursuits as a diplomat, so that I have had little more than tiny coffee-spoons of time in which to browse through the books thus collected, and savor their style, their content, and the ‘picturesque’ East that they depict. Lástima, as the Spaniards say! Time is such an impatient minder, it waits for no one. And, it is so fickle and finite. I have now reached the stage in my existence where I want to be stingy, penny-pinching with my time, holding on to it, taming it (brave thought), as the sand in the hour glass drops. And so, I open these books, weathered by time, both them and me too, as we shine a light on journeys made, and the crossings of many seas.
As I browse through these books, many of them at least two hundred years old, there are little nuggets that glimmer as I speed-scan through their contents. Things that seem unfamiliar or forgotten today, or offer screenshots of personalities, of customs, of the ways of men and women, high mountains and seascapes, the list goes on. I have curated them through the perspective of my own eye and personal preference or fancy: so the reader must forgive this indulgence. After all, what’s a heaven for?
One begins with Bonaparte, or Buonaparte - yes, he, him, Napoleon.
Buonaparte, as he is referred to in the book I am reading, appears almost as an afterthought at the end of an account by Captain Basil Hall of his voyage to the Eastern Seas, bordering south China and Japan, in the year 1816. The book is called “Voyage to Loo-Choo and Other Places in the Eastern Seas, in the year 1816: An account of Captain Maxwell’s Attack on the Batteries at Canton: and Notes of an Interview with Buonaparte at St. Helena in August 1817” - more than a mouthful of a title, I’m afraid. Loo-Choo refers to the Ryukyu islands or Okinawa, all a part of Japan so that you can place it on today’s maps. The Lyra, the ship captained by Hall accompanied the Alceste, the vessel in which Lord William Amherst sailed through the Straits of Sunda to the Eastern Seas as the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of his country, Britain to China in 1816. Today, we would call the journeys of the Alceste and the Lyra, ventures into the Indo-Pacific. These were long voyages, skirting the Cape of Good Hope, across the cold and wintry seas of the southern ocean, then crossing the Equator into much warmer, tropical climes as they headed east to China and Japan.
On their return from China (the Embassy visited Canton - Guangzhou- but not Peking - Beijing - because, as the story goes, they refused to kowtow to the Chinese Emperor, a practice regarded by the Chinese as de rigeur), Lord Amherst and the leading members of his team with Captain Hall, stopped over at St. Helena where Napoleon was incarcerated after his defeat by the British at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Bonaparte/Buonaparte remained on the island until his death in 1821.
But it is the interview of Captain Basil Hall with Napoleon that is the subject of this piece. It is an unusual account, where the French leader comes ‘alive’, where we are treated at a first-hand-coming-face-to-face with the vanquished conqueror whose feats had shaken the foundations of European geo-politics in the early nineteenth century, with ramifications that were felt far beyond, including in Peninsular India.
Hall refers to Napoleon as that “wonderful inhabitant” of the island of St. Helena, and is candid in admitting that whatever “prejudices or opinions we might previously have entertained respecting his character, every former sentiment was not overwhelmed by the intense anxiety to see a man who had exercised such an astonishing influence over the destinies of mankind.” Was this an objectification of this star prisoner, a celebrity held hostage to fate? Perhaps. But Captain Hall can be forgiven his excitement, by his own admission, he had “caught the fever of the moment”. Even in defeat, Napoleon was no ordinary mortal.
The interview did not come forth easily, to the point that Hall seemed to lose hope that it would materialize at all, until he let mention to Napoleon’s close aide and confidante, the General Henri Bertrand who had been similarly exiled to St. Helena, that his father, Sir James Hall, had been at Brienne in the Champagne region of France, when Buonaparte, was a young student at the Military College there. This input then finally, opened doors.
Hall approached the interview with more than a little trepidation, not knowing how Napoleon would react to him. The latter’s first question was to ask Hall what his name was. He then surprised Hall by saying that he remembered his father perfectly as one who “was fond of mathematics”. When Hall expressed natural surprise that Napoleon should remember his father, a private individual, after such a long passage of time overtaken by so many important historical events, the French Emperor’s answer was, “it is not in the least surprising; your father was the first Englishman I ever saw, and I have recollected him all my life on that account.” He then went on to ask whether Hall’s father remembered him as well, which of course was answered in the affirmative (although Hall was to later admit that his father did not remember Napoleon at Brienne). He then plied Hall with a barrage of questions about his father, what he did, and when told that he presided over the Royal Society of Edinburgh, asked about the constitution of the Society, how it conducted its operations and how scientific papers were brought before it. He wanted to know about how many children Hall’s father had, their ages and occupations, down to the last detail. No trivia seemed to escape Napoleon even down to the fact that he actually remembered the age of Sir James Hall. It was only after this conversation about the Hall family had exhausted itself, that questions were asked about the Captain’s voyage to the Eastern Seas, a topic that “proved a new and fertile source of interest”, in which Napoleon engaged with “the most astonishing degree of eagerness” and “a severity of investigation” which he had never encountered from anyone else, and which also revealed the Frenchman’s incisive knowledge of these areas. Hall writes that he was surprised to discover Napoleon’s “ideas about the relative situation about the countries in the China and Japan seas to be very distinct and precise”, outstripping the Captain’s narrative at many points, seeing the conclusion he was coming to “before I spoke of it, and fairly robbed me of my story.” When told that the people of the Ryukyu islands - Loo-Choo- did not carry arms and lived in peace, Napoleon reacted vehemently saying “No wars!” with a scornful and incredulous expression, “as if the existence of any people under the sun without wars was a monstrous anomaly”. But he was deeply curious about every aspect of the life of the people on Loo-Choo, with no detail escaping his curiosity, even down to the “formation of their straw sandals and tobacco pouches”.
In appearance, Napoleon it seemed, differed considerably from pictures and busts of him, with a face and figure that looked “much broader and more square, larger”. He was in no way “remarkably” corpulent as he was often represented to be, with a “firm and muscular” flesh tone, with skin that was “more like marble than ordinary flesh”, with not “the smallest trace of a wrinkle” discernible on his brow, with his health appearing excellent, contrary to reports in circulation in England that he “was fast sinking under a complication of diseases”. The “brilliant and sometimes dazzling expression in his eye could not be overlooked” and it was “impossible to imagine an expression of more entire mildness, I may almost call it of benignity and kindliness” and a “mind at ease”.
Basil Hall’s handwritten account of this meeting is in the collection of the National Army Museum of the United Kingdom, in London.
Reading Hall’s description of Napoleon’s mild expression, one cannot help recall a similar description of Josef Stalin by Winston Churchill: “Premier Stalin left upon me an impression of deep, cool wisdom and the absence of illusions.. a man direct, even blunt, in speech..with that saving sense of humor which is of high import...” K.P.S Menon, then India’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, had a different impression, noting after a meeting with Stalin in February 1953 that three qualities about the Soviet leader impressed him, most : his simplicity, shrewdness and ruthlessness. Perhaps, those are the qualities that could have been attributed to Napoleon, too, although my intention is not to compare him to Stalin. Perhaps also, his exile in St. Helena showed a much diminished man, struggling with the steep descent into the finality of life’s end. Basil Hall was encountering a general in his labyrinth, alone on a rocky island in the middle of a deep ocean, with the water rising, figuratively speaking. Or, differently put, Napoleon, inwardly raging against the dying of the light. Yet, two hundred years later, who can dispute that we are not drawn to his story, and do not seek to delve into his world - as if we are voyeurs, all. Seeing Napoleon through the eyes of Basil Hall, consumed by the same curiosity with which one of history’s most famous prisoners asked questions of the British mariner in St. Helena. The histories of humans before us become a metaphor for existence, of choices made, master strokes and miscalculations- soaring ascent and steep decline.
As Salman Rushdie says, we are all handcuffed to history.