Napoleon Bonaparte was brought to the St Helena in October 1815. In his first two months here he lived in a pavilion on the Briars estate, just up the valley from Jamestown, and moved to Longwood House in December 1815.
It appears Napoleon took a little while to adjust to his new circumstances. The “History of the Island of St. Helena”, by T. H. Brooke, Esq., published in 1824 records that:
“Upon an island of twenty-eight miles in circumference, which did not feed a population of hardly four thousand souls, and four hundred leagues distant from the nearest continent, it could not be expected that, upon so short a notice for the reception of its new visitants, they could obtain the kind of accommodation to which they had been accustomed; and, in a place where fresh beef was so precious as to have occasioned restrictions upon its consumption, it may well be conceived that sensations of no ordinary nature were excited at a demand from the maître-d’hotel of the Ex-Emperor, a few days after his arrival, for four bullocks, in order to make a dish of brains: of this demand, however, Buonaparte himself knew nothing, until Sir George Cockburn explained the objections to its being complied with, and the refusal is understood to have been received with perfect good humour.”