Green Killed Napoleon

*This article is written in combination with a series of photographs for a project in which we had to find color in unexpected places. See those photographs here.*

Green is everywhere in nature- in the trees, in the leaves, in the grass. So much of our campus is green, which is what made this assignment difficult. It was difficult to find green in places you would not expect because it is expected throughout nature.

Because it is found so often in nature, it is considered a symbol of harmony and health. The Amazon Rainforest, which extends over 2.5 million miles, is home to some of the greatest biodiversity on the planet. It alone houses at least 10% of the world’s known biodiversity, and it is estimated that there could be nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon. In Ancient Egypt, the color green symbolized regeneration and rebirth.

Despite its typical positive connotation, green has some negative connotations as well. Although green is a symbol of regeneration and rebirth in Ancient Egypt, it was also associated with the ideas of death. Osiris, the Egyptian god of fertility, death and the afterlife, was often portrayed as having green skin. It is also connected to jealousy: we say someone is “green with envy” when they are jealous. Also, in medieval literature, green was also used to depict the devil. This is because green was perceived as a pleasant color that attracted animals.

So, how did green kill Napoleon Bonaparte?

In 1815, after the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to the British Isle of Saint Helena. Saint Helena is located in the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean, making it one of the most isolated places on Earth. Just six years later, in 1821, Napoleon began to get sick and eventually died in Saint Helena, and historians have debated how he died. Francesco

Antommarchi, Napoleon’s physicist, claimed it was stomach cancer, but a toxicologist in the1960s claimed that he had been poisoned with arsenic. Many other historians debated between either cancer or arsenic poisoning. However, nothing of concern arises from what we currently know about his death. His room was painted green. At the time, green paint was made using a chemical that is poisonous to humans.

In 1775, a Swedish chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele developed a new way of creating green pigment, which used arsenite, a chemical compound that includes arsenic. Although arsenic created a vibrant shade of green, it is deadly. For decades, the chemical was used in everything from clothes and curtains to children’s toys, causing sickness due to long-term exposure. This is widely considered to have been what killed Napoleon Bonaparte, since the room that he was exiled in was painted green.

To try and find green in unexpected places, I eventually made my way downtown to Broadway. Broadway is colorful. Even though green probably is not very expected downtown in a city, Broadway is so many different colors that there would certainly be green somewhere. The lights, the street signs, some bar signs and some cars/taxis are all green. I spent around 20 minutes in front of Jimmy Buffet’s bar, Margaritaville. The “Margaritaville” signs around the bar are green, which is fitting because in some cultures, green represents paradise. This representation of the color green lines up with both Jimmy Buffet’s personality and the lyrics to Margaritaville: “Wasted away in Margaritaville / Searching for my lost shaker and salt / Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame, but I know / it’s nobody’s fault.”