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🗓️ 2 April 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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0:00.0 | Somewhere between Africa and South America in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass. |
0:11.7 | There's an island that's 47 square miles, just about the size of Disney World. |
0:17.3 | The island's name is St. Helena. |
0:20.2 | And St. Helena has a population of just around 4,000 people, which, for the record, is less than a tenth of the average daily visitors to Disney World. |
0:30.8 | And on this remote island with not very many people is a place called the Longwood House. |
0:37.6 | And for six years, this beautiful house was also the prison of Napoleon Bonaparte. |
0:45.0 | Napoleon Bonaparte, the guy who invaded Spain, Portugal, Russia. |
0:49.3 | Yeah, you know, Napoleon. |
0:52.5 | And this prison was also this beautiful, one-story farmhouse, |
0:58.9 | complete with a pool table, dining room, and a well-groomed garden, |
1:04.3 | sitting around its front door. |
1:06.7 | And after Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, |
1:09.8 | the British decided they needed to remove this former French emperor |
1:14.5 | from society in a big way. |
1:18.2 | So they brought him to St. Helena. |
1:22.2 | And when Napoleon was forced to be there, |
1:24.7 | this flashy, war-loving former emperor found some peace of his own. |
1:33.9 | I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. |
1:41.3 | Today, we go to the Longwood House, on the island of St. Helena, to hear how one of the world's most grandiose leaders spent the last years of his life on an island the size of Disney World, out in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic Ocean. More after this. |
2:27.8 | The year was 1815, and the powers of Europe, the countries of England and Prussia and Russia and Austria, they had a problem. |
2:32.8 | They needed to figure out what to do with Napoleon. |
2:35.7 | He had famously lost the battle at Waterloo. |
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