10th—13th. On approaching the Line, we met with what are called the
trade winds, that is to say, winds blowing constantly from the east.
Science explains this phenomenon in a way sufficiently satisfactory.
When a vessel sailing from Europe first encounters these winds, they
blow from the north-east; in proportion as the ship approaches the Line,
the winds become more easterly. Calms are generally to be apprehended
under the Line. When the Line is crossed, the winds gradually change to
the south, until they blow in the direction of the south-east. At
length, after passing the tropics, the trade-winds are lost, and
variable winds are met with, as in our European regions. A ship sailing
from Europe to St. Helena is always driven in a westerly direction by
these constant easterly winds. It would be very difficult to gain that
island by a direct course; and, indeed, this is never attempted. The
ship stands away to the variable winds in the southern latitude, and
then shapes her course towards the Cape of Good Hope, so as to fall in
with the trade-winds from the south-east, which bring her, with the wind
astern, to St. Helena.
Two different courses are taken to gain the variable winds of the
southern latitudes; the one is to cross the Line about the 20th or 24th
degree of longitude, reckoning from the meridian of London: those who
prefer this course affirm that it is less exposed to the equatorial
calms, and that, though it frequently has the disadvantage of carrying
the vessel within sight of Brazil, yet it enables her to make that part
of her voyage in a short time. Admiral Cockburn, who was inclined to
regard this course as a prejudice and a routine, determined in favour of
the second method, which consisted in steering more to the east; and,
following particular examples with which he was acquainted, he
endeavoured to cross the Line about the 2nd or 3rd degrees of longitude.
He doubted not that, standing towards the variable winds, he should pass
sufficiently near St. Helena to shorten his passage considerably, even
if he should not succeed in reaching the island by tacking without
leaving the trade-winds.
The winds, to our great astonishment, veered to the west, (a
circumstance which the Admiral informed us was more common than we
supposed) and this tended to favour his opinion. He abandoned the bad
sailers of his squadron, in proportion as they lagged behind: and he
determined on gaining the place of his destination with all possible
speed.
A STORM.—EXAMINATION OF CERTAIN LIBELS UPON
THE EMPEROR.—GENERAL REFLECTIONS.
14th-18th. After a few slight gales and several calms, we had on the
16th a considerable fall of rain, to the great joy of the crew. The heat
was very moderate; it may, indeed, be said that, with the exception of
the storm at Madeira, we had uniformly enjoyed mild weather. But water
was very scarce on board the ship; and, for the sake of economy, the
crew took advantage of the opportunity of collecting the rain water, of
which each sailor laid by a little store for his own use. The rain fell
heavily just as the Emperor had got upon deck to take his afternoon
walk. But this did not disappoint him of his usual exercise; he merely
called for his famous grey great coat, which the English regarded with
deep interest. The Grand Marshal and I attended the Emperor in his walk.
The rain descended heavily for upwards of an hour; when the Emperor left
the deck, I had great difficulty in stripping off my wet clothes; almost
every thing I wore was soaked through.
For several succeeding days the weather continued very rainy; this
somewhat impeded my labours, for the damp penetrated into our wretched
little cabin; and on the other hand, it was not very agreeable to walk
on deck. This was the first time during our passage that we had had any
thing like a continuance of wet weather; and it quite disconcerted us. I
filled up the intervals, between my hours of occupation, in conversing
with the officers of the ship. I was not on intimate terms with any of
them; but I kept up a daily intercourse of civility and politeness to
them all. They loved to talk with us on French affairs, and their
ignorance of all that concerned France and the French people was almost
incredible. We excited mutual astonishment in each other: they surprised
us by their degenerate political principles, and we astonished them by
our new ideas and manners, of which they had previously formed no
conception. They certainly knew infinitely less of France than of China.
One of the principal officers of the ship, in a familiar conversation,
happened to say—“I suppose you would be very much alarmed if we were to
land you on the coast of France?”—“Why so?” I enquired.—“Because,”
replied he, “the King would perhaps make you pay dearly for having left
your country to follow another Sovereign; and also because you wear a
cockade which he has prohibited.”—“And is this language becoming an
Englishman?” observed I. “You must be degenerate indeed! You are, it is
true, far removed from the period of your revolution, to which you so
justly apply the epithet _glorious_. But we, who are nearer to ours, by
which we have gained so much, may tell you that every word you say is
heresy. In the first place, our punishment depends not on the King’s
pleasure; we are subject only to the law. Now, there exists no law
against us; and if any law were to be violated for the purpose of
applying to our case, it would be your duty to protect us. Your general
has pledged himself to do so by the capitulation of Paris; and it would
be an eternal disgrace to the English Ministry were they to permit the
sacrifice of lives which their public faith had solemnly guaranteed.
“In the next place, we are not following another sovereign. That the
Emperor Napoleon was our sovereign is an undeniable fact; but he has
abdicated, and his reign is at an end. You are confounding private
actions with party measures; love and devotedness, with political
opinions. Finally, with regard to our colours, which seem to have
dazzled you so much, they are but a remnant of our old costume. We wear
them to-day, only because we wore them yesterday. One cannot with
indifference lay aside things to which one is attached; that can only be
done from constraint or necessity. Why did you not deprive us of our
colours when you deprived us of our arms?—the one act would have been as
reasonable as the other. We are here only as private men; we do not
preach sedition. We cannot deny that these colours are dear to us: we
are attached to them because they have seen us victorious over all our
enemies; because we have paraded them in triumph through every capital
in Europe; and because we wore them while we were the first nation in
the world.”
On another occasion, one of the officers, after glancing at the
extraordinary vicissitude of recent events, said—“Who knows whether we
may not yet be destined to repair the misfortunes which we have
occasioned to you? What would be your astonishment if Wellington should
one day conduct Napoleon back to Paris?”—“I should be astonished
indeed,” I replied: “but I should certainly decline the honour of being
one of the party: at such a price, I would not hesitate to abandon
Napoleon himself! But I may rest easy on that score; for I can swear
Napoleon will never put me to such a trial. It is from him I imbibe
these sentiments: it was he who cured me of the contrary doctrine, which
I call the error of my youth.”
The English were very fond of asking us questions concerning the
Emperor, whose character and disposition, as they afterwards avowed, had
been represented to them in the falsest colours. It was not their fault,
they observed, if they formed an erroneous estimate of his character:
they knew him only through the works published in England, which were
all greatly exaggerated, and much to his prejudice: they had several of
these publications on board the ship.—One day I happened to cast my eyes
on one of a most malignant character: on another occasion, when I was
about to look at a book which one of the officers was reading, he
suddenly closed it, observing it was so violent against the Emperor that
he could not prevail on himself to let me see it. Another time, the
Admiral questioned me respecting certain imputations contained in
different works in his library, some of which he said enjoyed a degree
of credit, while all had produced a great sensation, in England. This
circumstance suggested to me the idea of successively examining all the
works of this kind that were on board the ship, in order to note down my
opinion of them in my journal—conceiving that so favourable an
opportunity might never again occur of obtaining, if I chose,
information on those points which it might be worth while to enquire
into.
Before I commence my review of these works, I must beg to offer a few
general remarks: they will suffice to answer by anticipation many of the
numberless accusations that will fall in my way. Calumny and falsehood
are the arms of the civil or political, the foreign or domestic enemy.
They are the resource of the vanquished and the feeble, of those who are
governed by hatred or fear.—They are the food of the drawing-room, and
the garbage of the public place: they rage with the greater fury in
proportion as their object is exalted: there is nothing which they will
not venture to promulgate. The more absurd, ridiculous, and incredible
calumnies and falsehoods may be, the more eagerly are they received and
repeated from mouth to mouth. Triumph and success are but fresh causes
of irritation: a moral storm will invariably gather; and, bursting in
the moment of adversity, it will precipitate and complete the fall, and
become the immense lever of public opinion.
No man was ever so much assailed and abused as Napoleon. No individual
was ever the subject of so many pamphlets, libels, atrocious and absurd
stories and false assertions. Nor could it be otherwise. Napoleon, risen
from the common rank of life to supreme distinction; advancing at the
head of a revolution which he himself had civilized; plunged by these
two circumstances into a deadly contest with the rest of Europe—a
contest in which he was subdued only because he wished to terminate it
too speedily—Napoleon uniting in himself the genius, the force, the
destiny of his own power, the conqueror of his neighbours, and, in some
measure, a universal Monarch—a _Marius_ in the eyes of the aristocrats
of Europe, a _Sylla_ for the demagogues, a _Cæsar_ for the
republicans—could not but raise against himself a hurricane of passions
both at home and abroad.
Despair, policy, and fury, in every country, painted him as an object of
detestation and alarm. Thus, all that has been said against him can
excite no astonishment: it is only surprising that more calumny has not
been uttered, and that it has not produced a much greater effect. When
in the enjoyment of his power, he never would permit any one to reply to
the attacks that were made upon him. “The pains bestowed on such
answers,” said he, “would only have given additional weight to the
accusations they were intended to refute. It would have been said that
all that was written in my defence was ordered and paid for. The
ill-managed praise of those by whom I was surrounded had already, in
some instances, been more prejudicial to me than all the abuse of which
I was the object. Facts were the most convincing answers. A fine
monument, another good law, or a new triumph, were sufficient to defeat
thousands of such falsehoods. Declamation passes away, but deeds
remain!”
This is unquestionably true with regard to posterity. The great men of
former times are handed down to us free from the ephemeral accusations
of their contemporaries. But it is not thus during the lifetime of the
individual; and, in 1814, Napoleon was convinced by cruel experience
that even deeds may vanish before the fury of declamation. At the moment
of his fall, he was absolutely overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse. But it
was reserved for him, whose life had been so fertile in prodigies, to
surmount this adverse stroke of fate, and almost immediately to arise
resplendent from amidst his own ruins. His miraculous return is
certainly unparalleled both in its execution and its results. The
transports which it called forth penetrated into neighbouring countries,
where prayers for his success were offered up either publicly or in
secret; and he who, in 1814, was defeated and pursued as the scourge of
human nature, suddenly re-appeared in 1815 as the hope of his
fellow-creatures.
Calumny and falsehood in this instance lost their prey by having
overshot their mark. The good sense of mankind in a great measure
rendered justice to Napoleon, and the abuse that had been heaped upon
him would not be believed now. “Poison lost its effect on Mithridates,”
said the Emperor, as he was the other day glancing over some new libels
upon himself, “and, since 1814, calumny cannot injure me.”
In the universal clamour which was directed against him when in the
enjoyment of his power, England bore the most conspicuous part.
In England two great machines were maintained in full activity; the one
conducted by the emigrants, for whom nothing was too bad; and the other
under the control of the English ministers, who had established a system
of defamation, and who had regularly organized its action and effects.
They maintained in their pay pamphleteers and libelists in every corner
of Europe; their tasks were marked out to them: and their plans of
attack were regularly laid and combined.
The English ministry multiplied the employment of these potent engines
in England more than elsewhere. The English, who were more free and
enlightened than other nations, stood the more in need of excitement.
From this system the English ministers derived the two-fold advantage of
rousing public opinion against the common enemy, and withdrawing
attention from their own conduct by directing popular clamour and
indignation to the character and conduct of others: by this means their
own character and conduct were screened from that investigation and
recrimination which they might not have found very agreeable. Thus the
assassination of Paul at St. Petersburgh, and of our envoys in Persia;
the seizure of Napper-Tandy in the free city of Hamburgh; the capture,
in time of peace, of two rich Spanish frigates; the acquisition of the
whole of India; the retaining of Malta and the Cape of Good Hope,
against the faith of treaties: the Machiavelian rupture of the treaty of
Amiens; the unjust seizure of our ships previously to a new declaration
of war: the Danish fleet seized with such cold and ironical perfidy, &c.
&c.; all these aggressions were overlooked in the general agitation
which had been artfully stirred up against a foreign power.
In order to take a just view of the accusations which have been heaped
upon Napoleon, by the numerous publications written against him, it is
necessary to make allowance for passions and circumstances; to reject
with contempt all that is apocryphal, anonymous, and purely declamatory;
and to adhere solely to the facts and proofs which would doubtless have
been produced by those who, after the overthrow of their enemy, became
possessed of the authentic documents, the archives of the public
departments and courts of law, in short, of all the sources of truth
which are usually to be found in society. But nothing has been
published; nothing has been brought forward; and, therefore, how much of
this monstrous scaffolding falls to the ground. And to be still more
rigidly equitable, if we wish to judge Napoleon by the example of his
peers, or great men in analogous circumstances; that is to say, by
comparing him with the founders of dynasties, or those who have ascended
thrones by dint of popular commotions, it may then confidently be said
that he is unequalled, and that he shines purely from amidst all that is
opposed to him. It would be a loss of time to cite the numberless
examples furnished by ancient and modern history: they are accessible to
every one. It is only necessary to refer to the two countries which are
here under consideration.
Did Napoleon, like Hugues Capet, fight against his sovereign? Did he
cause him to perish in captivity?
Did Napoleon act like the princes of the present house of Brunswick,
who, in 1715 and 1745, crowded the scaffold with victims—victims to whom
the present English ministers, through their inconsequential policy and
the principles they now profess, leave no other title than that of
faithful subjects dying for their lawful sovereign?
The course by which Napoleon advanced to supreme power is perfectly
simple and natural; it is single in history; the very circumstances of
his elevation render it unparalleled. “I did not usurp the crown,” said
he one day to the Council of State, “I took it up out of the mire; the
people placed it on my head: let their acts be respected!”
And by thus taking up the crown, Napoleon restored France to her rank in
European society, terminated her horrors, and revived her character. He
freed us of all the evils of our fatal crisis, and reserved to us all
the advantages arising out of it. “I ascended the throne unsullied by
any of the crimes of my situation,” said he, on one occasion. “How few
founders of dynasties can say as much!”
Never, during any period of our history, were favours distributed with
so much impartiality; never was merit so indiscriminately sought out and
rewarded; public money so usefully employed; the arts and sciences
better encouraged, or the glory and lustre of the country raised to so
high a pitch. “It is my wish,” said he one day to the Council of State,
“that the title of Frenchman should be the best and most desirable on
earth; that a Frenchman travelling through any part of Europe may think
and find himself at home.”
If liberty seemed occasionally to suffer encroachments, if authority
seemed sometimes to overstep its limits, circumstances rendered those
measures necessary and inevitable. Our present misfortunes have, though
too late, made us sensible of this truth; we now render justice, though
also too late, to the courage, judgment, and foresight which then
dictated those steps. It is certain that in this respect the political
fall of Napoleon has considerably increased his influence. Who can now
doubt that his glory and the lustre of his character have been
infinitely augmented by his misfortunes?
If the works which have fallen in my way should present any
circumstances connected with these general considerations, they will be
the object of my particular attention. I do not intend to enter upon a
political controversy; I shall not address myself to party men, whose
opinions are founded on their interests and passions; I speak only to
the cool friend of truth, or to the unprejudiced writer, who in future
times may impartially seek for materials: to them alone I address
myself; in their eyes my testimony will be superior to anonymous
evidence, and will rank with that which bears a credible character.
The first work that I looked into was the _Anti-Gallican_, of which I
shall speak hereafter.