In our St. Helena Records (No. 4) are reports as to two of them.  Forwarded by the Spanish Ambassador at Washington, the first reached Madrid on May 9th, 1816, and stated that a man named Carpenter had offered to Joseph Bonaparte (then in the States) to rescue Napoleon, and had set sail on a ship for that purpose.  This was at once made known to Lord Bathurst, our Minister for War and the Plantations, who forwarded it to Lowe.  In August of that year our Foreign Office also received news that four schooners and other smaller vessels had set sail from Baltimore on June 14th with 300 men under an old French naval officer, named Fournier, ostensibly to help Bolivar, but really to rescue Bonaparte.  These fast-sailing craft were to lie out of sight of the island by day, creep up at night to different points, and send boats to shore; from each of these a man, in English uniform, was to land and proceed to Longwood, warning Napoleon of the points where the boats would be ready to receive him.  The report concludes:  “Considerable sums in gold and diamonds will be put at his disposal to bribe those who may be necessary to him.  They seem to flatter themselves of a certain co-operation on the part of certain individuals domiciled or employed at St. Helena."[574]

Bathurst sent on to Lowe a copy of this intelligence.  Forsyth does not name the affair, though he refers to other warnings, received at various times by Bathurst and forwarded to the Governor, that there were traitors in the island who had been won over by Napoleon’s gold to aid his escape.[575] I cannot find out that the plans described above were put to the test, though suspicious vessels sometimes appeared and were chased away by our cruisers.  But when we are considering the question whether Bathurst and Lowe were needlessly strict or not, the point at issue is whether plans of escape or rescue existed, and if so, whether they knew of them.  As to this there cannot be the shadow of doubt; and it is practically certain that they were the cause of the new regulations of October 9th, 1816.

We have now traced the course of events during the first critical twelvemonth; we have seen how friction burst into a flame, how the chafing of that masterful spirit against all restraint served but to tighten the inclosing grasp, and how the attempts of his misguided friends in America and Europe changed a fairly lax detention into actual custody.  It is a vain thing to toy with the “might-have-beens” of history; but we can fancy a man less untamable than Napoleon frankly recognizing that he had done with active life by assuming a feigned name (e.g., that of Colonel Muiron, which he once thought of) and settling down in that equable retreat to the congenial task of compiling his personal and military Memoirs.  If he ever intended to live as a country squire in England, there were equal facilities for such a life in St. Helena, with no temptations to stray back into