The Ghost of Waterloo (41 page)

The men in the sewer given up to police by Sudden Solomon Blackstone were punished unevenly by life and the law. Apparently, John Creighton did die in Cockle Bay, in most strange circumstances. His ultimate fate is unclear. There was only a note to the 1828 census documents referring to his disappearance, seemingly drowned from an overturned boat. No body was found; no newspaper record and no coroner’s hearing followed. Yet his ‘widow’ soon married James Dingle.

The cases against Dingle and Farrell were clouded by doubts about Blackstone’s legal competence as a witness. In the wash-up, both men went to dreaded Norfolk Island, whence Dingle escaped in a stolen boat and was never heard of again. Farrell, in and out of trouble, appears to be last recorded as a paroled felon in 1859.

Blackstone told police Thomas Turner was innocent, but many Sydneysiders, men and women, were collateral damage, being convicted, rightly or wrongly, as receivers. The disloyal blacksmith received his pardon, his ticket ‘home’ and 100 pounds – but he blew his chance by committing another, petty crime before he could leave. He remained a habitual criminal, dying destitute in 1850, murdered, some said, as pay-back for being a ‘snout’, or ‘dog’.

And Valentine Rourke, the other robber? Ah, thereby hangs a particular tale, retailed later, below.

The bank never fully recovered from the scandal, despite a land boom soon after. It crashed in 1843 and, in 1849, there was a controversial public lottery of its remaining assets. The curse continued, when a prominent winner, a Scottish settler, rode happily home with the news of his prize – and fell from his horse and died. I found the definitive study of the crime to be Carol Baxter’s
Breaking the Bank
. Any fiddles with the facts in the foregoing friction are mine.

The glittering dreams of Grenville Newton (and, of course, the real Balcombes had no such ward) were always fool’s gold. A copy of surveyor McBrien’s notes and directions turned up years later in an office drawer, but they led only to a failed digging. Nuggets and dust eluded a rush of Australian picks and pans until 1851.

The incident of the ‘executed’ soldier mirrors the sentence actually carried out (but with no happy ending for the prisoner) on a Private Thomas Brennan, of the 39th Regiment.

Another key scene is a faithful recreation. The original
Three Bees
existed, a convict ship emptied of its cargo of 210 sick men, and it did blow up in Sydney Cove, much as I describe, though on 20 May 1814 and seemingly by accident. I have given the 1814
Gazette
account to our 1828 reporter. There are still questions today as to why it had so many loaded cannons; there was talk of it having been armed to repel a French attack!

Napoleon Bonaparte, now as ever, takes centrestage…

There are as many conspiracy theories about his death as there are about JFK’s. And, for years, there were more ‘sightings’ than there are of Elvis today. Mine could well have happened.

Anyone who thinks that Napoleon would not have experimented with and sacrificed a street urchin is mistaken. He showed his ruthless disregard for life (at least that of others) from the start of his rise to military prominence. During Paris riots in 1795 he turned cannons onto civilians: his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’ that killed 1400. Another prime example of his savagery was against the Ottomans at Jaffa in 1799, when, after Nelson had cut off the French Army of the Orient, Bonaparte had 3000 prisoners shot. And, of course, he abandoned his own lost armies both in Egypt and in Russia.

He certainly did receive a poison phial from a doctor and always carried it. I say it dated from 1798, although another version has him receiving the poison just before the Russian campaign in 1812. But…he
is
known to have taken the deadly draught on 12 April 1814, when he was consigned to his first exile, on Elba. It made him very ill, but didn’t kill him; its potency had weakened, suggesting it
was
sixteen years old, not just two. Why then, might he not have replenished his sachet with fresh contents – and put them to use fourteen years later, in 1828 Sydney town?

The body of the man buried as Bonaparte on St Helena in May 1821, was exhumed in 1840 for removal to Paris. It was not that of a person wasted by disease, and although it had not been fully embalmed, it was remarkably well preserved, a strong suggestion to many at the time that the appearance, and the death, were the result of arsenical poisoning.

In recent years, various samples of Bonaparte’s hair have been analysed. These hairs have been taken from authenticated mementoes of those later years of captivity, including a sample held by Dame Mabel Brookes, of Melbourne, a Balcombe descendant. These analyses showed traces of arsenic up to eighteen times the normal concentration. And FBI tests disproved theories that poisonous wallpaper had accidentally leached toxins into his drinking water (which all there drank, anyway). An aside to this reference to the FBI: a descendant of the Emperor, Charles Bonaparte (1851–1921), was an Attorney-General of the USA and a founder of the famous investigative unit.

Prosper Mendoza’s Sydney grave is long gone, lost somewhere during the vast redevelopment that swamped the Sandhills cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century, for the building of the sprawling Central Railway Station complex.

So, 170-odd years later, any remaining secrets of the body from St Helena are held fast beneath thirty-five tons of porphyry, in the Hôtel des Invalides, in Paris.

Horace Vernet’s tongue-in-cheek addition of Dr Owens’ face to his painting of Napoleon is credible. It would have become part of a long tradition in artistic trickery. Da Vinci did make such a threat, and a famous modern forger, Hans van Meegeren, even included in some of his Vermeer fakes the visages of Rudolf Valentino and Greta Garbo!

Among early Sydney’s colourful street vendors, there was always one called ‘Garden Honey’. Our rogue was a ring-in.

Britain did lose those September days in 1752, to bring it in line with the Gregorian calendar. What a fuss it caused – many rioted violently, sensing a papist plot.

As well as accusations of incest, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was widely blamed for the knifing murder of a valet. At odds with the evidence, the death was officially dismissed as suicide.

Whatever happened to those other lights of our tale?