22. In 1820, a former pirate planned to rescue the ex-Emperor Napoleon from his prison on St Helena using a submarine!
By 1815, Napoleon’s glory days were over. After his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the British exiled him to St. Helena, a rocky island in the South Atlantic 1200 miles from land. Escape looked impossible. However, Tom Johnson, an Irish-born pirate claimed that in 1820 Napoleonic sympathizers in America offered him £40,000 to rescue the former Emperor. Johnson’s plan was to lower a disguised Napoleon down the sheer cliffs of St. Helena in a boson’s chair before spiriting him away in one of two submarines. However, the rescue came to nothing- mainly because Napoleon insisted on being gloriously rescued by an army rather than skulking away like a criminal.