Бывший контрабандист Джонстон предложил спасти Наполеона с помощью подводных лодок

St Helena’s cliffs rose from the South Atlantic like a natural prison built to hold Napoleon Bonaparte, but in 1820 a plot aimed to snatch him from under the Royal Navy’s nose for £40,000. The man chosen to carry out the near-impossible heist was no general or aristocrat but a Hampshire fisherman turned notorious rogue. Captain Thomas Johnstone, usually recorded as John or as Tom, lived twelve lives in one. Born in Lymington in 1772, he had already served his apprenticeship on the Solent and acquired a mastery of the Channel's treacherous tides before he was full-grown. The result was that by the time he was fifteen he had become the "Hampshire Smuggler", undertaking trips of contraband to its places of destination through our south coasts' hidden creeks, with all the responsible ability of a sailor... and none of his wage! He was big-boned in every sense. Giant in stature and in reputation, he straddled the fine line between bandit and folk hero. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out, Johnstone's knowledge of the coast made him a valuable asset. Having spent his boyhood dodging the law, he then worked on behalf of it, becoming an Admiralty saboteur and privateer, a British double agent who led divers in planting explosives on enemy ships. His exploits get him arrested again and again, but no cell can hold him for long. From London's New Prison at Clerkenwell to the Fleet debtors' prison, and on to lockups in France and Holland, Johnstone repeatedly slipped away. Read more: - The time the mayor shook hands with lots of naked people - The Hampshire man who won the World Cup - Pictures of the former Southampton school that ran its own community farm His gift for escaping, and his mechanical aptitude, got him the position of commander of the Nautilus, an early working submarine from designs by the American inventor Robert Fulton. In 1820, some French agents approached him with a huge offer thanks to his underwater knowledge. For £40,000, Johnstone was to build two experimental steam-powered submarines, the Eagle and the Etna, to rescue the exiled Emperor. The idea was that, in the dead of night, the Lymington smuggler would surface off St Helena so that an aide could transport it to land, climb back the cliffs to Napoleon and lower the deposed emperor to the waiting submersibles – and onwards to the United States – via a mechanical bosuns chair and 2,500 feet of line. The entire plan relied on Johnstone's sailing skills and courage. The rescue died with him: Bonaparte was dead, by May 1821, before the vessels could sail. Despite a life of espionage, dirty money and underwater sabotage, he avoided the hangman's noose that took so many others. The smuggler who outmanoeuvred revenue men, embarrassed foreign navies and came close to rewriting history went to his grave in 1839 without giving up his secrets. The seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were the golden age of smuggling in the Lymington area and the dense woodland and remote tracks made it easier to transport contraband around the New Forest and onto the coast. The subsequent accounts relate that Johnstone was later to command both HMC Fox and the first practical submarine Nautilus.