At eight-thirty that evening Admirals Cockburn and Keith come aboard to read to Napoleon their instructions from the cabinet and work out the details of his transfer to Northumberland next morning; Andrew retires out of sight down to the orlop deck, where he had completed the “Washington” letter, and spends the evening drafting this one.
Rather (as I have done here on the first-class deck of the Statendam, where it is not to be supposed I have deciphered, transcribed, and summarized all these pages at one sitting, simultaneously wooing your future stepmother!), he extends toward completion the chronicle he has been drafting in fits and starts since Rochefort, as I have drafted this over the three weeks past. And as I expect any moment now this loving labor to be set aside for one equally loving but more pressing (Jane is in our stateroom, preparing for bed and wondering why I linger here on deck), so my namesake’s is interrupted, near midnight, by good news from the Count de Las Cases. Not only has the emperor agreed at last, under formal protest, to be shifted with his party to Northumberland after breakfast next morning; he has made long speeches to History, to both the admirals and, separately, to Commander Maitland, from whom also he has exacted a letter attesting that his removal from Bellerophon is contrary to his own wishes. Moreover, he has prevailed (over Maitland’s objections) in his insistence that Las Cases be added to the number of his party, to serve as his personal secretary; and he has clapped the count himself on the shoulder and said, “Cheer up, my friend! The world has not heard the last from us; we shall write our memoirs!”
Even as I, Andrew concludes, am writing mine, in these encipher’d pages, my hope once more renew’d. Tomorrow Admiral Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” will weigh anchor for St. Helena with the Scourge of Mankind: a voyage of two months, during which I shall make my own way back from England to New Orleans, hoping against hope, my darling Andrée, to find you there. Where, if all goes well, you & I & Jean Lafitte will devise a plan to spirit Napoleon from under George Cockburn’s nose before he has unpackt his writing-tools!
And even as I, dear Henry, hope against hope that upon my return to “Barataria” next week I shall find you there: the present point of my pen overtaken, the future ours to harvest together!
I go now to Mrs. Mack, to fertilize and cultivate that future. A fellow passenger remarks, in nervous jest, upon the “secret of the Bermuda Triangle”: the hijacking of cruising yachts by narcotics smugglers to run their merchandise into U.S. harbors. I pretend to know nothing of that scandal. Small wonder, my companion replies: the Coast Guard and the tourist industry are keeping it quiet, inasmuch as they cannot possibly search every pleasure boat entering every creek and cove from Key West to Maine. Very interesting, I agree, thinking of the gift from Jane that awaits me in Annapolis.
A word to the wise, my son? From
Your loving father
R: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fourth posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: plans for the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena.
Yacht Baratarian
St. Helena Island, Little Round Bay
Severn River, Md.
August 13, 1969
Dear Henry,
Round Bay is a handsome widening of the Severn five nautical miles above Annapolis, itself some 125 up the Chesapeake from the Virginia Capes. Off Round Bay, on the river’s southwest shore, is Little Round Bay, in the center whereof lies a small high wooded pleasant island named after Napoleon’s exile place in the South Atlantic, some 7,000 sea miles hence.
This local St. Helena Jane Mack is of a mind to buy for our weekend exiles, as more comfortable and convenient than my Bloodsworth Island, and more private and spacious than my cottage on Chautaugua Road, not far away. Imagine an island of some dozen acres within twenty miles of both Washington and Baltimore! It is presently owned by acquaintances of Jane’s, with whom she is negotiating purchase, and who have kindly permitted me to tie up at their dock for the night. As a honeymoon house and vacation retreat it will quite do, though it is too much in view of the mainland (half a mile off all around, and thickly peopled) to serve your and my other purposes. We shall hold onto our marshy, inconvenient “Barataria.”
From a week of dolce far niente aboard the Statendam—a sort of final trial honeymoon itself, altogether successful — we flew home yesterday, Jane to return to her métier and truest passion, Mack Enterprises; I to take delivery in Annapolis of her birthday gift to me: the sturdy diesel yacht from whose air-conditioned main cabin I write this. All day the builders and I put Baratarian through its sea trials, as successful as Jane’s and mine; tomorrow or next day I shall return it to the boatyard for certain adjustments and modifications (I feign a sudden addiction to deep-sea fishing) to be made while I check out our human Baratarians. On the ides of August, Napoleon’s birthday, I shall fly briefly north to see how things go at Lily Dale and Fort Erie. I had considered a side trip to Chautauqua as well, to confer with my quondam collaborator there; but I now believe he knows nothing of you and is without interest in the Second Revolution. On or about St. Helena’s Day (the 18th) I shall go up to Castines Hundred (our ancient caretakers have retired; I have engaged new ones through the post), whence I shall return, ere the sun enters Virgo, for a more considerable trial run: the first real test of our operations for the coming academic year. Will I find you there, Henry, poring through our library like your ancestors, determining for yourself what I have been at such futile pains to learn, to teach?
Andrew IV never did return there, except in dreams and letters. The next to last of his lettres posthumes was written aboard Lafitte’s schooner Jean Blanque in “Galvez-Town, or New Barataria,” on August 13, 1820—five years and a week since its predecessor. Like yours truly, he is about to commence on the ides of August another journey: one by his own admission “more considerable but less significant” than the one he ought to make instead, to Castines Hundred. Still curst by what I had thot long exorcised, he confesses to Andrée, I shall sail 9,500 miles in the wrong direction, from Cancer down to Capricorn, to “rescue” against his will a man the world had better not seen in the 1st place, rather than fly north to the seat & bosom of my family, beg your pardon for my errancy, put by for good & all my vain dream of 2nd Revolution & Western Empire, and spend content in your arms what years remain to me.
He refers, of course, to Jean Lafitte’s expedition to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena — the expedition which, in his last, he had hoped to expedite before the island’s defense could be organized. What has he been at for half a decade?
Rushing to Plymouth from Tor Bay [so he begins this letter, with a 4)?(, a HSUR, a rush, as if no more than a page-turn separated Bellerophon from Jean Blanque, 1815 from 1820], I found a fast brig just departing for Bermuda, where I took a yet faster packet to New Orleans. By mid-September, a full month ere Cockburn reacht St. Helena with his prisoner, I was back in Conti Street with Jean Lafitte, asking for news of you & the twins.
There is, we know, none. I could only conclude my letters & entreaties were unwelcome at Castines Hundred; else the Mississippi, whose navigation from Great Lakes to Gulf of Mexico was secured now to the U. States, had borne you long since hither.
And why does he not straightway bear himself thither, to make certain those “letters & entreaties” ever reached their address? ’Twas not the current of the Father of Waters I shy’d from breasting, he declares, not quite convincingly, but the current of your disfavor, both of my long absence [three years by then, eight by “now”!] and of what I had accomplisht. Where was our free nation of Indians, Habitants, & liberated slaves? Even New Orleans I found more “American” than I had left it, and with the Union at last secured & at peace — tho set fast forever, as wise men had fear’d, with a standing Army & Navy — I could feel the country catching its breath, as ’twere, before plunging to the western ocean. There was no time to lose, or all would be lost.