A deluded Napoleon Bonaparte was still making plans to invade Britain after he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo, according to a previously unseen diary found in New Zealand.
The diary of British army officer Denzil Ibbetson, who was escorting the vanquished French emperor to his exile on St Helena in 1815, records: "Napoleon talks of invading England with 200,000 infantry and 6000 cavalry," The Mirror newspaper in Britain reported.
Ibbetson said Napoleon hoped the people of Britain would welcome his invasion, adding: "He was induced to believe a great number would join him."
Important relics of Napoleon Bonaparte's last years, including a lock of hair believed to have been taken from his deathbed, emerged from a New Zealand antique "roadshow".
Napoleonic scholars have been analysing the finds, which also included a lithograph taken from a drawing of the former French emperor made the morning after his death in 1821, at a conference in Malta in July.
International Napoleonic Society president and prolific author David Markham said it was a fascinating collection and contains a lot of stuff that has great historical importance.
Items from the collection were shown to representatives of Auckland auction house Art+Object at a charity roadshow event held in February to raise funds for Rotorua's museum.
Managing director Hamish Coney said then that collection was handed down through descendants of Denzil Ibbetson, a talented artist and chief commissary officer on the Atlantic island of St Helena, where Napoleon remained under British detention from 1815 until his death in 1821 aged 51.
He said the collection was brought to New Zealand by Captain Ibbetson's first son, Frederick, in 1864 and passed through three subsequent generations until the last member of its male line died several years ago.
The man kept it in a suitcase and his widow and children, who did not want to be identified, had decided the time had come to offer it for auction.
As well as the hair, held in a tightly-bound 2.4cm diameter circle, the collection included about 25 watercolour or pen depictions of Napoleon and key structures on St Helena, including the buildings where he was kept under virtual house arrest.
The diary contained observations of Napoleon by Captain Ibbetson during a six-week voyage to St Helena.
More than 40 items from the Ibbetson archive go up for auction in Auckland on June 29.
