On June 22, 1815, Napoleon, defeated at Waterloo, had to abdicate and put himself in the hands of the anti-French coalition.
But what to do with Napoleon?
Eventually, the anti-French coalition accepted the British offer and handed Napoleon over to the British to house arrest on the island of St. Helena, which he took to the Atlantic.
St. Helena is far from the European continent, in the Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa, 1,950 kilometers from the nearest West African coast and 3,400 kilometers from the east coast of South America. As for Europe, France's closest coast is 10,000 kilometers away.
The British chose to place Napoleon under house arrest on St. Helena because the island is a boulder jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded on all sides by cliffs that are difficult to climb, and is truly a natural prison.
Napoleon was placed at the Villa Langwood on the island of St. Helena, and although Napoleon had all the people at the villa chosen, and he was able to meet visitors at the villa, visitors were not allowed to stay overnight, and Napoleon was not allowed to leave the villa at will.
In order to prevent Napoleon from fleeing St. Helena, the British army stationed an army force of up to 2,800 men on the island, equipped the island with numerous artillery pieces, and blocked the various beaches where landing could be made and the roads deep into the island. Britain also has a permanent maritime patrol of 11 ships on the island, which cruises around St. Helena day and night.
In this way, Britain was still not at ease, and sent garrisons on the islands of Ascension and Tristan da Cunha in the north and south of St. Helena, in case they became bases for the rescue of Napoleon. Both would send messengers to St. Helena on time so that the garrisons on the island could keep track of the situation in both places.
There is also a reason why Britain is so laborious.
Because France supported Latin America to get rid of Spanish colonial rule, many new countries in Latin America were very grateful to Napoleon, and if Napoleon could reach Latin America, many local people would support him to ascend to the throne on the spot. The United States and Britain in North America were in a state of hostility at that time, and Napoleon's brother Joseph Bonaparte went into exile in the United States after Napoleon's abdication. The U.S. armed fleet attempted to rescue Napoleon when the British fleet escorted Napoleon to St. Helena, forcing the British fleet to make an additional detour of several hundred nautical miles along the coast of Africa.
Therefore, in order to prevent Napoleon from escaping from the exile of Elba or being rescued, the British really went to great lengths. Robert Banks Jenkinson, the second Earl of Liverpool, the British Prime Minister at the time, boasted proudlyAt such a distance, in such a place, it is difficult to fly out with wings
Jenkinson was really right, there really was a plan to rescue Napoleon at that time to fly out - in a hot air balloon! However, since the British troops had troops on the islands of Ascension and Tristan da Cunha in the north and south of St. Helena, the rescue plan could not be tested in the direction of the wind, so the plan had to be abandoned.
But the rescuers did not give up trying other methods, and the reason why they were so active in rescuing Napoleon at that time was that in addition to the worship of Napoleon, a large bounty was also an important factor. When the aforementioned Napoleon's brother Joseph fled to the United States, he took with him 20 million francs worth at the time (20 francs at that time was equivalent to 6.).45 grams**), which is already enough to build a nation's wealth!
In this series of rescue plans, the most brain-opening is the submarine rescue plan!
At the heart of this project was Tom Johnson, an English-born Irishman born in 1772, whose life story is legendary. Published in 1834, "The Stories and Experiences of a Debtor Preacher" chronicles Johnson's life, the author of which claims that he met Johnson in prison, and that Johnson revealed all the accounts in the book to him.
According to Johnson's account, he joined the smuggling team at the age of 12 to support himself. In his risky career, Johnson has escaped from prison several times, at least twice. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out, his crimes were forgiven, but in exchange he became the navigator of the British Navy's expeditionary fleet.
Since the account of Johnson's legendary experiences in the book coincides with the legends that have been handed down, there is a high probability that Johnson himself said it.
The most striking aspect of the book is Johnson's statement that in 1820 he was commissioned to build a submarine to rescue Napoleon, and promised to give him £40,000 (£7 in 1821).32,238 grams of pure gold) as a reward!
It may sound like a fantasy, but the memoirs of General Gurgo, who accompanied Napoleon to St. Helena, do mention that a group of French officers raised thousands of louis (more than $1 million today) to build a submarine in order to rescue Napoleon.
In 1833, a year before the publication of The Anecdotes and Experiences of a Debtor Priest, the official British Naval Chronicle also recorded that an engineer named Johnson had been involved in a submarine construction program, and that Johnson was paid as much as £40,000, and that the funder would pay this reward after the successful sea trials of the submarine.
This record is basically consistent with the rhetoric of "The Anecdotes and Experiences of a Debtor Priest", but it cannot be ruled out that the author of the book wrote it imaginatively after seeing the record of "Navy Chronicle".
After all, how could Johnson, a smuggler who barely went to school, build a submarine with a complex structure?
But according to the 1823 book Portraits of Criminals, an Englishman named Johnson once worked as an assistant to Robert Fulton, the progenitor of steam-turbine-powered ships, in England. And Fulton went to England at that time to sell the submarine he designed!
As early as 1776, in order to counter the powerful British fleet, the American engineer Bushnell built a submarine in the form of a duck's egg, the "Turtle", to attack British ships anchored in American ports from underwater. Although the Turtle's infiltration operation was not successful, it succeeded in releasing the powder keg it carried to scare off the British patrol ships that found it, and confirmed to the world the combat value of the submarine.
However, due to the superstition of the giant ship cannon theory at that time, submarines were not valued by the old maritime powers such as Britain and France, but among the rising stars such as the United States, some people have been studying and improving the design of submarines. Fulton was one of them, obsessed with the study of submarines, and because he could not be sponsored by the United States, he traveled to France during the Napoleonic Wars to seek funding.
In 1800, Fulton successfully built a small test boat Nautilus in France, but because it was too small to have actual combat value, the French Navy Minister thought that Fulton was a ** after testing the Nautilus, so he drove Fulton out of France. Unconvinced, Fulton went to Britain, France's sworn enemy, to continue selling his submarine designs, and thanks to the admiration of British Prime Minister William Pitt, Fulton was able to continue his submarine-building journey in Britain.
Fulton built the much larger Nautilus II by 1806 and successfully mined the decommissioned brig Dorothy in a demonstration. However, with the death of William Pitt on January 23, 1806, Fulton's ambition to build a submarine was completely extinguished.
Disheartened by the British refusal to fund submarine construction after Pitt's death, Fulton returned to his native United States and built the steamship "Claremont" in 1807, for which he became famous.
A genius is a genius, and if you can't be the father of submarines, you can change careers to be the father of steamboats!
It is worth mentioning that although Fulton's submarine dream was shattered, his submarine was not forgotten by the world. French writer Jules Verne gave the Nautilus a new life in his "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", which he wrote in the second half of the 19th century. So far, the Nautilus has continued to appear in various film and television works, and Fulton can also be blind if he knows what to do.
According to the Naval Chronicle, Johnson was not a fraudster, he really learned to build submarines from Fulton. During the Anglo-American War in 1812, there were rumors that Fulton was building a super ** for the United States, and the British thought it was a submarine. The Nautilus in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is likely based on the British Admiralty's hypothetical supersubmarine built for the United States by the British Admiralty in 1812.
Since Fulton's previous Nautilus II had been dismantled, the British thought of Johnson, who had studied under Fulton, and assigned him to build a new submarine.
Johnson also lived up to his mission, and soon built a submarine that looked like a porpoise, for which Johnson opened his mouth and demanded a reward of 100,000 pounds from the British Admiralty. But this submarine of his is most likely a replica of the Nautilus, built by Fulton in France, and is only 8 years long2 meters, the internal space is only a meagre 18 square meters, barely enough to fit two people.
So when Sir George Coburn, known for burning the White House, led an evaluation committee to test Johnson's submarine on the River Thames, it was natural that it came to the same conclusion as Fulton's Nautilus in France. As a result, including the cost of work, the British Admiralty only paid Johnson 4,735 pounds.
British attempts to create submarines were put on hold.
One thing to note about Johnson is that there is no conclusive evidence that he is the same person as the smuggler Johnson, because there is a lack of more records of the submarine builder Johnson in this Navy Chronicle.
Finally, let's take a look at Johnson's plan to rescue Napoleon with submarines, recorded in "The Anecdotes and Experiences of a Priest in Debt".
Johnson planned to build two submarines, the large 'Eagle' with a displacement of 114 tons and a length of 255 meters, width 55 meters, equipped with two 40-horsepower steam engines; The small 'Etna' (suspected to be Johnson's wife's wife's name) has a displacement of 23 tons, is 12 meters long and 3 meters wide.
Johnson plans to equip the two submarines with a crew of 34 and equip them with 20 mines. Since the 'Etna' will be discarded in the end as planned, with Johnson and Napoleon, it is not difficult to speculate that the 'Eagle' should have a crew of 36 people or more!
Johnson's rescue plan was simple: he sailed the Etna on a dive voyage, evaded a British patrol ship and sneaked under the cliffs of St. Helena's house next to Langwood's villa. Arriving at the cliff, Johnson would choose a secluded spot to climb the cliff, secure a mechanically powered chair lift to the cliff, and then try to sneak into Langwood's villa to meet Napoleon.
If all goes well, he and Napoleon can dive together to the cliffs by night and use the chair lift to descend to the 'Etna' and leave St. Helena. Johnson then planned to move to the waiting Eagle and withdraw from it, abandoning the Etna. Once the British patrol ship was in pursuit, the Eagle dived and, if unable to get rid of the British patrol ship, destroyed it with the mines it was equipped with.
Johnson's plan was not implemented in the end, and although the historical sources do not disclose the reason, it is not difficult to speculate on the reason.
It was 1820 when the magistrate approached Johnson, and Napoleon had only been a year before his death. The French couldn't afford to wait, otherwise they wouldn't have thought of using such a strange means as a submarine to rescue Napoleon, which was obviously in a hurry, and they must have received the news that Napoleon was already in bad health. The submarine 'Eagle' that Johnson planned to build was definitely an epoch-making product at the time, which was destined to be very time-consuming to build.
And there is a glaring loophole in Johnson's plan, how can he deliver two submarines to the waters of St. Helena? It is obviously unrealistic to expect these two dinghys to cross the Atlantic on their own, and if they were to convert a special transport ship for this purpose, it would undoubtedly delay the rescue plan considerably, right?
When a cold meets a slow man, it is destined that the two will not be able to reach a consensus.