The first few chapters of this volume appear to promise a fast-moving, multifacted adventure story, combining Napoleonic history with that of Spanish American independence and thus having potential appeal to two different sets of specialists. For Latin American studies it has the merit of doing justice to the contributions of a large contingent of French military veterans and adventurers who took part in the independence struggle even if, as sometimes happened, it was for them a sideshow or stepping-stone in (they hoped) a larger project to rescue Napoleon from his imprisonment on St. Helena. Some of these men are familiar names, but as a group they tend to be overlooked amid the attention devoted to Simón Bolívar’s “British Legion,” which of course was far from strictly British. Unfortunately, the story soon bogs down in an almost excruciating mass of detail, much of it repetitious, concerning ambitious plans and conspiracies, most of which never came to fruition and in fact may have been quite imaginary in the first place — as the author himself occasionally, but perhaps not often enough, frankly recognizes.Emilio Ocampo is an Argentine “financial adviser” and professor of banking, not of history, and he takes a very traditional narrative approach to his topic. Year by year up to Napoleon’s death in 1821, and jumping back and forth from continent to continent or island to island, he chronicles the life of Napoleon and his jailers and the involvement of his sympathizers (of whom a surprising number turn out to be British) in plans to spring him loose from his prison and/or to work for the independence of Spanish America. It was naturally assumed that Napoleon himself, if released, would somehow aid the latter struggle. Naturally, any reader will lose the thread from time to time. But Ocampo must be given credit for a truly impressive amount of research, combing archives on both sides of the Atlantic and reading widely in often obscure secondary sources. To be sure, there is no bibliography of books and articles, only 80 pages of endnotes giving both published and manuscript sources. For a “detailed bibliography” one is referred to the Spanish version published in Buenos Aires in 2007, which is described as “expanded,” though it has an only slightly greater page count (I confess I have not actually seen it).Anyone who has studied the independence period will probably conclude that the author tends, understandably, to exaggerate the role of the Napoleonic veterans. For example, in his treatment of the abortive República de las Floridas of 1817 he greatly overplays Napoleonic at the expense of Bolivarian connections (not that Bolívar himself accepted responsibility for the project). The treatment is also Plata-centric, as might be expected from an Argentine author: thus the greatest patriot success during the first five years of revolution is not Bolívar’s Campaña Admirable in 1813 but the taking of Mon-tevideo by Buenos Aires forces in 1815. Ocampo’s grasp of northern South American geography is shaky too, for he places Cartagena and Ríohacha in Venezuela rather than Colombia. Yet he portrays the Argentine Liberator José de San Martín in quite unfavor able light: too much of an Anglophile, his relations with the Napoleonic diaspora and its creole collaborators were cool at best. Ocampo decidedly prefers Martín’s rivals Carlos de Alvear and José Miguel Carrera. For the Latin Americanist the concurrent story of goings-on at St. Helena and the constant stream of real or alleged projects to rescue or release the famous prisoner has the particular attraction of sheer novelty: most of us surely have given little thought to anything that may have happened to the ex-emperor after Waterloo. And apparently not much that was substantial did happen, despite the obsessive fears of his principal British keeper. But St. Helena was an ideal breeding ground for paranoia all around, and most readers will surely end up sharing some of Ocampo’s sympathy for the great man.Of course not many readers can be expected to plow through the entire book, but a sense of what was going on can easily be gained by browsing, and in the long run Ocampo has provided all students of the period with an invaluable reference tool. Most index entries consist simply of page numbers, without topical subheadings, but still all the Napoleonic veterans are there, as are scores of participants not just in the St. Helena story but in Spanish American independence, including quite a few whose involvement, however marginal, in schemes of the Napoleonists will come as a surprise. Or at least it was a surprise to me.