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eastern Cape market after the arrival of the 1820 Settlers and the establishment of Port

Elizabeth harbour. And after the departure of the military personnel and their families
after 1821 the absolute scale of the St. Helena trade contracted. By this time, too, the days

of the EIC were numbered as the British Parliament abolished John Company’s
monopoly control of the tea and China trades in 1833, and its administration of British

India was terminated in 1834. In turn, the justification for its control of St. Helena fell
away, and the Island was effectively transferred to the Crown on 24 February 1836 with

the arrival of the new Governor Major-General Middlemore.

According to Chaplin (1919) the principal families on St. Helena at the time of the

captivity were the Dovetons, Hodsons and Pritchards. Others were: Leech, Seale, De

Fountain, Bennett, Brooke, Shortiss, Kinnaird, Bagley, Knipe, Torbett, Mason, Legge,
Robinson, Broadway, Solomon, Alexander, Kay, Firmin, Balcombe, Wright, Lamb,

Young, Carol, O’Connor, Smith, Haynes, Janish, Porteous, Beale, Hunter, Blenkens, Den
Taafe, Kennedy, Cole, Harrington and Fowler. These did not include slave families many

of whom had taken names of classical Greco – Roman heroes: Augustus, Caesar,
Constantine, Hercules, Leo, Plato, and Scipio. (Teale, pers. comm.) In 1825 a complete

list of all the inhabitants appeared for the first time in the “East India Register”.

The final curtain was brought down on the period of captivity when, on 15 October 1840,

exactly 25 years after Napoleon’s arrival at the Island, his body was exhumed by a party
of French sailors under the command of the Prince of Joinville and removed to a French

warship in the Roads, for transport to France. His remains were interred in 1861 in their

final resting place, a magnificent tomb of red porphyry, in Les Invalides, Paris.

The Cape as a destination for Island emigrants

The passage of the Island to Crown rule was, according to Gosse (1938: 301) a “heavy

blow from which this happy, peaceful, flourishing British settlement has never
recovered.” The EIC had ruled generously and paternally, paying their officials well and

maintaining a garrison of three companies of artillery and a regiment of four companies