Napoleon’s Resting Place 🪦

One of the most remote islands in the world, St. Helena, held Napoleon during the last few years of his life. He’s still there—and St. Helena just got an airport.

Hey all! This is the second to last issue of Lesser Tedium, with the final one hitting tomorrow. With tomorrow’s issue, I will explain what’s coming for this list, which will inevitably be more Tedium. Anyway, enjoy a weird story.

(David Stanley/Flickr)

Napoleon is the forthcoming subject of a forthcoming Ridley Scott biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix, one that paints him as a bold but monstrous historic figure.

Much is said about his conquests, but little comes up in the trailer regarding the exile that ended his life. That exile is fascinating, because, even today, it is hard to reach the part of the world where he was exiled.

That would be St. Helena, a British territory so distant that it recently built a commercial airport, essentially because it needed a second way for people to reach the island. The island, located in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere, is 800 miles away from the next-closest inhabited area, the similarly remote Ascension Island, and roughly 1,648 miles from the closest mainland country, Namibia.

That airport, which cost £285 million ($374 million) to build, was only completed in 2017 after 13 years of construction, and only takes on a handful of flights each month, primarily to South Africa. Despite this, the airport was seen as a strategic benefit to the British government, because it gave the country another air-based option to use in case they needed additional access to a British territory that has been the target of some historic land disputes—the Falkland Islands.

The Falkland Islands are nearly 4,000 miles away, sure, but that’s still way less than the roughly 5,000 miles away that St. Helena is from the United Kingdom.

Napoleon’s resting place. (David Stanley/Flickr)

Of course, airports don’t exist in theoreticals, and this airport is built to bring in tourists—but you are committing if you go to St. Helena, as you likely will be on the island for a full week before the next flight goes out. Your next best option for leaving, a cruise, would probably be even slower.

All of the above is to say: If you end up there, it is on purpose.

Which explains why Napoleon ended up—and died—there.

» Wanna learn more? Check out our 2019 piece on the St. Helena airport, “The Remote Part.”

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misstated the distance from the Falkland Islands to the United Kingdom; it was intended to refer to the distance between St. Helena and the United Kingdom. We regret the error.