Jamestown, Saint Helena

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Main Street in Jamestown has been called "one of the best examples of unspoilt Georgian architecture anywhere in the world." That street runs through a city of 629 people. Jamestown sits on the north-western coast of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. The city is squeezed into a narrow valley between cliff walls steep enough to require netting to control rockfalls. The small stream called the Run trickles through the valley floor. A single harbour at the valley's foot was, for most of the city's history, the only way in or out of the island. The questions that follow are: what grew up in this corridor of rock, and why history kept finding its way there.

  91148

• 2. A Valley Named for Kings

  ›

  The English East India Company established the settlement in 1659. It was named after James, Duke of York, the future King James II of England. A fort rose almost immediately, first called the Castle of St John. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, that fort was renamed James Fort. The town became Jamestown and the valley took the name James Valley. The fort and its gun batteries looked out over James Bay and were improved in stages over the years. Many of the 18th-century buildings the Company constructed still stand today. In January 1673, the Dutch East India Company arrived and seized control of the island. The English recaptured it in May. Since that brief Dutch interlude, the settlement has been continuously occupied under English and then British rule. The same bay the Dutch had briefly controlled would, 142 years later, anchor a warship carrying Napoleon Bonaparte.

  431112

• 3. Napoleon at the Briars

  ›

  Napoleon surrendered to the British after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 and the subsequent fall of Paris. He was exiled to Saint Helena. He arrived aboard a 74-gun ship and spent his first months on the island at the Briars, a property inside Jamestown. In December, he was moved to Longwood House in a more remote part of the island. The same anchorage that witnessed his arrival would, within years, become central to the Royal Navy's campaign against the slave trade.

  543

• 4. The Rescue Station

  ›

  Jamestown was chosen to host a vice admiralty court and a naval base tasked with halting the slave trade between Africa and the Americas. Captured slave ships were brought into the harbour and sold. Their human cargoes were off-loaded in Rupert's Valley, the next valley north. An estimated 25,000 enslaved people were rescued during the station's years of operation. About 5,000 of those rescued died shortly after arriving and were buried in Rupert's Valley. Their graves remained lost for more than a century. In 2006, preliminary excavations for the island's airport brought them to light. A team of archaeologists arrived in mid-2008 to carry out a full excavation of the site. Some of the finds are now on display at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England. The naval station closed in the 1870s. The First World War would pass the island by entirely, but the second would not.

  61074

• 5. The Darkdale

  ›

  On the 22nd of October 1941, the oil tanker RFA Darkdale was sunk in James Bay. Only nine of the fifty-man crew survived. The ship had been stationed at Saint Helena a few months earlier to refuel vessels operating in the South Atlantic. After the sinking, the wreck sat on the bay floor and slowly leaked oil for decades. The leaking did not stop until June 2015. The Ministry of Defence then sent a team of divers to pump out all the remaining oil. Rupert's Valley added a one-ship wharf in June 2016, the latest change to the infrastructure of a settlement that has been adapting to new purposes since 1659.

  7104

• 6. Cliffs, Churches, and Steps

  ›

  Jacob's Ladder is a staircase of 699 steps, built in 1829 to connect Jamestown to the former fort on Ladder Hill. The Ladder is lit at night and hosts an annual timed race that draws competitors from around the world. The city is built on igneous rock, and many of its structures are constructed from local volcanic stone. St James' Church, first built in 1772, is the oldest Anglican church in the Southern Hemisphere. Its parish includes three daughter congregations: St John's in Upper Jamestown, St Mary's at the Briars, and St Michael's in Rupert's Valley. The sole Catholic church in Saint Helena, Sacred Heart Church, is also located in Jamestown, along with a Baptist congregation. The Castle, a main government building today, stands in a city that Queen Victoria formally named the City of James Town in 1859.

  1326232425

• 7. A City That Shrank

  ›

  Three other settlements on Saint Helena, Half Tree Hollow, Saint Paul's, and Longwood, have each surpassed Jamestown in population. Jamestown is now the smallest city under British sovereignty on Earth. In 2008 its population stood at 714, and it has continued to fall since then. Jamestown is one of eight administrative districts on the island. It serves as the capital of both Saint Helena and the wider territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. The Museum of Saint Helena is situated in the city. The island's only other museum is Longwood House, located in the more remote interior of the island. Pilling Primary School, serving children aged four to eleven, was formed in September 2007 from the amalgamation of two earlier schools. The James Valley sits some 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the rest of the island because of its lower altitude. The surrounding ocean and its cold currents prevent temperatures from climbing very high, even at a deep tropical latitude.

  1819202221