It is a long way from Scotland and France to Campbell Island - an island cold, dreary and remote.
Located about 700km southeast of New Zealand, the island is newsworthy these days only for its unusual flora and its value as a breeding ground for marine mammals, such as sea lions and for a massive penguin population.
However, Campbell Island, which is administered by the New Zealand Government, has a curious legend that links it with Jacobite Scotland and the monarchy of post-revolutionary France.
This is the legend of the "exiled princess".
In fact, there are several legends, but they all have several common themes.
The legends are about a young woman of European origin who lived a life of exile on Campbell Island.
They all include vague details of political manoeuvring responsible for her exile and also and equally vaguely, relate to the Jacobite Scots and France.
One legend says the exile was a "Jacobite princess" and that she was the natural daughter of Charles Edward Stuart, known to romantics down the years as "Bonnie Prince Charlie".
The lady in question was said to have been involved in political intrigue in France and that she was exiled to Campbell Island to save embarrassing the Jacobite cause that was still flourishing, but based in France Another version says the exiled lady was the highborn fiancée of an unidentified Scottish noble who claimed the thrones of England, France and Scotland.
It is interesting to note that several members of the widespread Stuart clan have made this claim at various times.
This particular legend also states she was sent to Campbell Island for having done something that was politically unfortunate.
There are other variations of these legends but they are all more or less the same - a titled lady; a royal connection; an exile to Campbell Island for life.
Just how much truth is there in the legend?Discovered in 1810 and named after a Sydney whaling company, Campbell Island today is off-limits to everyone except those authorised by the island's administrator, the Department of Conservation.
Since the New Zealand Government closed its weather station on the island some years ago, its rare human visitors are mostly marine scientists of various disciplines.
However, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Campbell Island was frequently visited by ships engaged in sealing and whaling out of Sydney, and indeed from the New England whalers from Nantucket.
The subantarctic islands were also well known to mariners sailing to and from Europe to Australia.
It was well known that by sailing south in the "roaring Forties", ships could make swift passage because of the strong and continuous winds in those latitudes.
It was often foggy and many ships were wrecked because of this on the subantarctic islands administered by the New Zealand Government.
Indeed, until as recently as the late 1920s, the Government maintained depots for shipwrecked mariners, which it regularly visited.
The New Zealand Government established and maintained a weather forecasting station on the island in 1941.
This was also used as a lookout for enemy ships during World War 2 and while this finished at the end of the war, the meteorological station was manned until quite recently.
Most of the meteorological staff and the wartime watchers spent a 12-month sojourn on Campbell and there are many interesting stories of how these people warded off depression and boredom on this remote island.
The legend of the exiled princess is the only matter of interest to New Zealanders of today, apart from those with a strong interest in marine animals and subantarctic plants.
This legend, of which there are several highly romantic versions, is closely associated with heather plants that grow on the island, in all probability introduced by an early whaler or sealer.
These have been cited as being evidence of human habitation on Campbell Island. (Cuttings were apparently taken to New Zealand and planted outside the old entrance of the Otago Museum in Dunedin.)
According to the legend, a stone fireplace, a shell-paved pathway to the nearby water's edge, a ragged stand of flax bushes - at one time evidently a neatly planted windbreak - and some straggling heather plants identified the remains of the lonely home of an exiled lady of noble birth who is described usually as "the French princess" or the "Jacobite princess".
About 10 years after the Napoleonic Wars had ended, this "princess" is said to have been involved in a plot that threatened to overthrow the then French monarchy.
One version says she was a daughter of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but this account is perhaps the least credible, because that daughter died in France.
Another version is that the exiled princess was betrothed to a Scottish nobleman who laid claim to the thrones of England, Scotland, and France.
For some reason, this nobleman's supporters decided the princess was some sort of embarrassment to the cause.
They arranged for her to be sent overseas in the care of a sea captain who eventually put her ashore at Campbell Island.
A small sod hut was built for her at Camp Cove and there, it is said, she was found dead of starvation a year later.
Near the hut was found a patch of Scottish heather, which, according to the legend, was planted by the princess to remind her of her man far away.
There are other variations, but they all agree that a highborn woman was exiled to Campbell Island early in the 19th century.
Finding any solid evidence on which this curious story could have been based is extremely difficult.
Just as many family stories handed down the generations may grow in the telling, so do public legends.
While evidently the legend of Campbell Island was well known to seafarers, they were mostly illiterate men.
No record can be found that substantiates apocryphal stories that seamen and whalers had seen the exiled princess wearing a Royal Stuart tartan shawl and a Glengarry bonnet.
However, on his journey to the Antarctic in 1840, Sir James Clark Ross recorded in his journal that on landing at Campbell Island his party had found "the remains of some huts" and several graves.
Ross describes these as being those of sealers and "also that of a French woman who had been accidentally drowned by the upsetting of a boat in the harbour".
Unfortunately, the usually meticulous Ross gives no indication of the source of this information.
Some commentators say Ross was misinformed and the grave was that of a French naval midshipman accidentally killed while a French naval squadron was in Perseverance Harbour.
Indeed, such a person was buried on Campbell Island - but not until 1874, well after the time the "exiled princess" was alleged to have been living and died on the island.
Another intriguing element in the legend is that the princess had been forcibly handed over to a Dundee whaler at Le Havre, who in turn handed her over in Hobart to one Captain Stewart (after whom Stewart Island is named).
Stewart was a liar and a villain, but he was a brilliant navigator and very proud of his connection with the royal house of Stewart and always boasted of his friendship with Bonnie Prince Charlie.
There is also other anecdotal commentary that the princess was originally brought by Stewart to Stewart Island but was taken further south to Campbell Island after Stewart considered an exile on Stewart Island was too close to the British government in New South Wales.
In a story very short on facts, it is interesting to read the comments of Malcolm Fraser, a New Zealand Government civil servant and later in life, New Zealand Government statistician.
He was a passenger on government steamer Hinemoa, which regularly visited relief depots for shipwrecked mariners on several southern islands administered by New Zealand.
It was on one of these visits by Hinemoa - which also doubled as a training ship for boys learning to be seamen - that Malcolm Fraser went to Campbell Island.
Writing in the Union Steam Ship Company's Red Funnel magazine of May 1906, Fraser found the remains of the walls of a peat-sod hut, the remains of a fireplace and a pebble path.
He and one Duncan, another passenger on Hinemoa, also found an open space they thought was a grave.
It was covered with Scottish heather.
These days there is nothing there and the grave (if that was what it was) has been obliterated by the sea mammals that have taken to rolling in that area.
However, the late Sir Thomas McDonald visited Campbell Island in the 1950s when he was a member of the Holland National government.
He found a straggly piece of heather, which he nurtured back to New Zealand and it is believed to be the rootstock of the heather planted at the old entrance to the Otago Museum.
There have been various works of romantic fiction based on the legend and these further confuse the issue.
However, in the introduction to Australian writer Will Lawson's Lady of the Heather (published in 1945), there is some interesting information.
John O'Brien, (still well known for his Around the Borree Log), writing of the subject matter of the book, says: "Although it is all mostly legend now, it seems that something of the kind did happen.
Old sailors testify when examined about the hut in which she lived, to have seen her walking out in the moonlight wearing a Glengarry bonnet and a shawl of Stuart tartan."
The matter is further complicated by the fact that at least one woman was buried on Campbell Island, as well as the French midshipman.
This was the daughter of Captain Hasselbourgh of Perseverance.
There may have been others.
It was a common practice for sealers and whalers to take women to sea with them and often ungallantly sell them or maroon them.
Perhaps the "princess" was one of these?When the basis of his book was challenged in the 1950s, Will Lawson quoted from the Pall Mall Gazette published in London in 1828.
This journal recorded that when the grave by the hut on Campbell Island was opened in 1828, "silver jewellery including a crucifix was found".
Who was buried there? Who was the exiled princess?
While much of the legend appears to be just that and the word of people such as Captain Stewart cannot be relied upon for anything, there still lingers the thought of a lady exiled to a faraway hostile island for being involved voluntarily or involuntarily in the muddled politics of a very lost cause.
We will probably never know.
Peter Owens is a South Otago writer.
