Surrender aboard the Bellerophon

After the second abdication of 22 June 1815 and a few days at Malmaison, Napoleon reached Rochefort on 3 July. Two frigates awaited him, with passports the provisional government would never obtain from the British.

Off the Île d'Aix cruised the Bellerophon, a seventy-four-gun ship commanded by Captain Maitland. Schemes followed one another: force the blockade, board an American merchantman, hide in a cask. All were set aside — through prudence, through weariness, and because a fugitive emperor is no longer an emperor.

On 13 July he wrote to the Prince Regent of England a short and carefully worked letter: 'I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people. I place myself under the protection of their laws, which I claim from Your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies.'

On the morning of 15 July he went aboard the Bellerophon. Maitland received him with honours, but had promised no status: he had only agreed to carry him to England.

The ship anchored at Torbay and then off Plymouth. Thousands of sightseers hired boats to glimpse him on deck; he would never set foot ashore. London decided at the end of July: he would be neither guest nor prisoner of war, but prisoner of state — the declaration of 13 March, which had placed him outside civil relations, served as the foundation.

On 7 August he was transferred to the Northumberland, which sailed for the South Atlantic. He reached Saint Helena on 15 October 1815 and would not leave it alive.