Saint Helena Proverbs (18)

“He doesn't have a bone in his tongue.”

Said of someone who speaks whatever comes to mind, bluntly and without regard for tact or consequence.

“Put the goat in charge of the vegetable patch.”

A warning against entrusting responsibility to someone who cannot be trusted with it, the local equivalent of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

“Going right round the ridges to get to The Castle.”

Describes taking a long, roundabout way to reach a simple goal, doing something the hard way when a direct path was available — named for the steep ridges surrounding Jamestown's Castle, the seat of Saint Helena's government.

“Loyal and unshakeable.”

The official motto of Saint Helena, reflecting the steadfastness and resilience the island's people are known for.

Qu'est-ce donc que l'histoire en général? Une fable convenue.

“What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.”

Reflecting in exile, Napoleon suggested that official histories are shaped by consensus and interpretation as much as by fact.

“I may have had many projects, but I was never truly my own master — I was always ruled by circumstances.”

Looking back from his island exile, Napoleon admitted that even at the height of his power, events controlled him as much as his own will did.

“I have fought sixty battles, and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning.”

A rueful admission from exile that experience and victory taught him less about war than he once believed.

La carrière ouverte aux talents.

“My maxim was: the career open to talents, without distinction of birth or fortune.”

Napoleon described the guiding principle of his rule — that ability and merit, not noble birth, should open the path to advancement.

“I ought to have died at Waterloo.”

From his final exile, Napoleon reflected that defeat without death on the battlefield left him to face a slower, harder ending.

“I give my decided opposition to all legislation tending to introduce distinctions either of class, colour, or creed.”

Saul Solomon's lifelong political pledge, made as a young candidate and honoured throughout his career in the Cape Parliament, opposing laws that discriminated by race or class.

“I am guilty only of being Cetshwayo's son.”

Testifying at his 1908 high treason trial in Natal, the Saint Helena-exiled Zulu king said his only true offence was his royal bloodline — a line still remembered as a statement of defiance against colonial persecution.

“I meant that you were a nation of merchants, and that all your great riches and your grand resources arose from commerce. No man of sense ought to be ashamed of being called a shopkeeper.”

Pressed by his St Helena physician about his famous jibe that England was "a nation of shopkeepers," Napoleon clarified he meant it as recognition of British commercial strength, not simple insult.

“He is hideous; he has a most villainous countenance.”

Napoleon's private verdict on Governor Hudson Lowe after their first meeting at Longwood House on 16 April 1816, the opening note of a bitter five-year relationship between captive and jailer.

“You never commanded any men but Corsican deserters.”

A dismissive jab at Hudson Lowe's earlier command of the Royal Corsican Rangers, part of the long personal feud between the exiled emperor and his island governor.

“Soon you will be sailing away towards England, leaving me to die on this miserable rock.”

Said to his young friend Betsy Balcombe of The Briars, capturing Napoleon's bleak view of Saint Helena as a bare, isolated prison rather than a home.

“Josephine was grace personified; everything she did was marked with it. She never acted inelegantly during the whole time we lived together.”

A rare tender recollection of his first wife, Empress Josephine, shared during quiet conversation with the Balcombe family at The Briars on Saint Helena.

“That cow wished to save the English government the expense and trouble of keeping me.”

Napoleon's dry joke after being charged by an angry cow near The Briars, poking fun at the costly British military effort devoted to guarding a single prisoner.

“An angel from heaven could not have pleased us, had he been governor of Saint Helena.”

Montholon's bitterly ironic verdict on Governor Hudson Lowe, expressing the exiled French household's conviction that no governor could ever have satisfied men who resented their captivity itself.