Short answers, pulled from the story.
Saint Helena is best known as the site of Napoleon Bonaparte's second and final exile, from his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 until his death on the 5th of May 1821. The island was chosen by the British government for its extreme remoteness, roughly 1,950 kilometres from the nearest major landmass.
Long-standing tradition credits João da Nova, a Galician navigator in Portuguese service, with sighting the island on the 21st of May 1502, naming it Santa Helena after Saint Helena of Constantinople. A 2022 paper challenged this account, noting that contemporary maps and eyewitness records suggest da Nova found Ascension Island instead, and that Estevao da Gama's scrivener Thomé Lopes treated Saint Helena as an unknown island when he landed there on the 30th of July 1503.
The 2021 census recorded a population of 4,439 people on Saint Helena. The population had been declining since the late 1980s, falling from 5,157 in 1998 to 4,257 in 2008, before stabilising and slightly recovering.
Saint Helena Airport opened for commercial traffic on the 14th of October 2017. The decision to build the airport was taken in 2011, construction was completed in 2016, but dangerous wind conditions delayed the first flight by over a year. Only a specially stripped-down Embraer 190 aircraft can reliably land there.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 ended Saint Helena's role as a critical waystation. Ships no longer needed to sail around Africa, removing the need for the island's resupply services. The number of ships calling fell from 1,100 in 1855 to only 288 in 1889.
Jonathan is a Seychelles giant tortoise hatched around 1832 and brought to Saint Helena in 1882. He is confirmed by the Guinness World Records to be the oldest-known living land animal on earth. He celebrated his 190th birthday in 2022 and was visited by Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, during a royal trip to the island in January 2024.