The secret plot to rescue Napoleon by submarine

Tom Johnson, the famous smuggler, adventurer, and inventor of submarines, sketched in 1834 for the publication of Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt.

Napoleon Bonaparte caused so much damage – and roused so much fear – during his extraordinary career that only the most extreme of measures were considered sufficient when he was finally captured. Exile to St Helena, in the South Atlantic–in those days the remotest inhabited island in the world–was intended to put an end to the threat he posed to Europe’s ruling elites. Yet even the emperor’s incarceration at Longwood House was not quite the end of his remarkable story, for a whole series of more or less fantastical plots were hatched by Bonapartist loyalists to rescue his from his island fastness.

These madcap schemes, which included efforts to obtain Napoleon’s liberty by fast yacht, new-fangled steamboat, and even by balloon, never amounted to much, but among them is a still more bizarre story that turns out to have its foundations in remarkable fact. in 1820, Tom Johnson, one of the most famous and romantic criminals of his day – a notorious smuggler and prison-breaker who had earned a richly-deserved reputation for extreme daring – claimed to have been offered £40,000 (about $3 million now) to rescue the emperor from St Helena. And he came up with a scheme to do it… one that involved the use of submarines eight decades before the invention of the first practical underwater boats.

The story has lodged firmly in the margins of history, dismissed by the few who heard of it as nothing but a fantasy. This week’s Smithsonian essay explores it – and finds archival evidence to suggest that Johnson’s elaborate plot was a good deal more real than has ever been acknowledged.

History heroes: Marc Bloch

Marc Bloch: Historian. French Resistance leader. Hero.

At eight on the evening of June 16, 1944—not long before dusk on the tenth day after the Allied invasion of France–the Gestapo dragged 28 French resistance fighters from the cells where they had been incarcerated, tortured and interrogated at Montluc prison, Lyon. Handcuffed in pairs, the men were thrust onto an open truck and driven to an empty field outside a little village known as Saint-Didier-de-Formans. Along the way, a German officer bragged to them that the war would still be won, and that London was about to be destroyed by V1 flying bombs.

London would, of course, survive, and the war would not be won by Nazi Germany, but that was scant consolation to the resistance men as they were taken four by four into the field for execution. The accounts of two men among the prisoners who miraculously survived being shot in the back at close range allow us to know something of their final moments. There were no pleas for mercy. Some of the men shouted out last words as they were led into the field—”Adieu ma femme!” one of them called—but most remarkable was the brief scene that played out between the oldest and the youngest of the prisoners.

The younger man was really a boy, 16 years old and terrified of what was about to happen. The older was small, balding but distinguished-looking, and, at 58, he wore round glasses and the haggard look of a prisoner who had survived repeated torture. As the execution party cocked its guns, the boy groaned, “This is going to hurt.” “No, my boy, it doesn’t hurt,” the older man assured him. He reached out to enclose the child’s hands in his own and held them, shouting “Vive la France!” as the first volley of machine-gun fire rang out.

Amazons: inside the King of Dahomey’s all-woman army

One of Dahomeys' amazons, with a musket, club, dagger—and her enemy's severed head. From Forbes, Dahomy and the Dahomans (1851).

It is noon on a humid Saturday in the fall of 1861, and a missionary by the name of Francesco Borghero has been summoned to a parade ground in Abomey, the capital of the small West African state of Dahomey. He is seated on one side of a huge, open square right in the center of the town–Dahomey is renowned as a “Black Sparta,” a fiercely militaristic society bent on conquest, whose soldiers strike fear into their enemies all along what is still known as the Slave Coast. The maneuvers begin in the face of a looming downpour, but King Glele is eager to show off the finest unit in his army to his European guest.

As Father Borghero fans himself, 3,000 heavily armed soldiers march into the square and begin a mock assault on a series of defenses designed to represent an enemy capital. The Dahomean troops are a fearsome sight, barefoot and bristling with clubs and knives. A few, known as Reapers, are armed with gleaming three-foot-long straight razors, each wielded two-handed and capable, the priest is told, of slicing a man clean in two.

Some experiments with severed heads

Antoine Joseph Wiertz: Guillotined Head (1855). Musée Antoine Wiertz, Brussels.

Early on the morning of 18 February 1848, two men and a woman walked into the square in front of the Porte de Hal, in Brussels, where a public execution was due to take place shortly after dawn. They were there to conduct a ground-breaking scientific study, and, by prior arrangement with the Belgian penal authorities, were permitted to climb onto the scaffold and wait next to the guillotine at the spot where the severed heads of two condemned criminals were scheduled to drop into a blood red sack.

One of the men was Antoine Joseph Wiertz, a well known Belgian painter and also a fine hypnotic subject. With him were his friend, Monsieur D_____, a noted hypnotist, and a witness. Wiertz’s purpose on that winter’s day was to carry out a unique and extraordinary experiment. Long haunted by the desire to know whether a severed head remained conscious after a guillotining, the painter had agreed to be hypnotised and instructed to identify himself with a man who was about to be executed for murder.