Saint Helena

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint Helena is a volcanic island sitting roughly 1,950 kilometres west of Angola in the South Atlantic Ocean, one of the most remote inhabited places on earth. For the first few decades after its European discovery in 1502, it existed in near-total secrecy, known only to Portuguese navigators sworn to silence. Yet within a century it had become one of the most strategically valuable specks of land on the planet. And then, in 1869, a canal thousands of kilometres away rendered it almost irrelevant overnight.

  The questions this story raises are worth sitting with. How does an uninhabited volcanic rock become a crossroads of global trade? How does the same island serve as both a rest stop for empire-building and a prison for empire's most famous prisoner? And what happens to a place when the trade routes move on and leave it behind? The island today has a population of 4,439, a tortoise confirmed to be over 190 years old, and an airport whose runway required 800 million pounds of dirt and rock just to create flat enough ground to land on.

• 2. A Disputed Discovery

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  The 21st of May 1502 is the date long given for Saint Helena's discovery, when four ships of the 3rd Portuguese Armada, commanded by João da Nova, a Galician navigator sailing for Portugal, were said to have sighted the island on their return voyage to Lisbon. Da Nova reportedly named it Santa Helena after Saint Helena of Constantinople. That tidy origin story began to unravel under scrutiny.

  A 2022 paper examined the primary sources and found that the Portuguese chronicles recording this discovery were written at least fifty years after the fact and are contradictory. More pointedly, the Cantino planisphere, a detailed map completed by November 1502, shows Ascension Island but not Saint Helena, even though da Nova would have had to pass it. When Estevao da Gama sighted and landed on Saint Helena on the 30th of July 1503, his scrivener Thomé Lopes treated it as an entirely unknown island, yet named Ascension as a reference point. If da Nova had found Saint Helena the previous year, Lopes would have known.

  A third story, recorded by 16th-century historian Gaspar Correia, credits Portuguese nobleman Dom Garcia de Noronha with sighting the island in late 1511 or early 1512. His pilots charted it, and from that date the island became a regular stopover for ships heading from India to Europe. The debate about the exact date of discovery remains open, but the island's practical history began in earnest once it appeared reliably on navigational charts.

• 3. Stopover for Empires

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  The Portuguese found the island uninhabited and covered with trees, fresh water, and no dangerous wildlife. They imported livestock, fruit trees, and vegetables, built a chapel, and left the island as an unoccupied waystation, checking in periodically to rest sick sailors and replenish supplies. Occasionally, mariners too ill to continue were simply left there to recover until the next ship arrived.

  British privateers learned of the island's location and began waiting nearby to attack Portuguese India carracks laden with Mughal goods. The Dutch also started frequenting the island, and their aggression eventually drove the Portuguese and Spanish away. The Dutch Republic formally claimed Saint Helena in 1633, though no evidence suggests they ever established a physical presence there. They lost interest after founding their colony at the Cape of Good Hope.

  In 1657, Oliver Cromwell granted the East India Company a charter to govern the island, and the following year the company decided to fortify and settle it. The first governor, Captain John Dutton, arrived in 1659. A fort and houses went up, and a town took shape in a narrow valley between steep cliffs. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, the East India Company received a royal charter giving it sole rights to fortify and colonise the island. The fort was renamed James Fort, and the town became Jamestown, in honour of the Duke of York, later King James II.

  At its peak, the island saw roughly 1,000 ships per year call at its harbour. East Indiamen stopped there on the return leg of their voyages to British India and China, taking on water, provisions, and during wartime forming convoys under Royal Navy escort. James Cook resupplied there in May 1771 on his return from the first European documentation of Australia's east coast, and again in 1775 on the final leg of his second circumnavigation. Edmond Halley arrived in 1676 straight from the University of Oxford and set up an astronomical observatory with a 7.3-metre aerial telescope to study the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. The 680-metre hill near his telescope site is still called Halley's Mount.

• 4. Slavery and Its Aftermath

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  The British brought an estimated 25,000 enslaved people from west Africa to Saint Helena, alongside the roughly 3,000,000 they transported to the New World. A census in 1723 recorded 1,110 inhabitants, of whom 610 were slaves. The importation of enslaved people was made illegal in 1792, but slavery itself on the island was not abolished until the 27th of May 1839, when the Ordinance for the Abolition of Slavery in the Island of St Helena was enacted.

  The scale of the trade left a mark that only became visible in 2008, when construction of the road to the new airport uncovered a mass burial area in Rupert's Valley containing over 9,000 skeletal remains of enslaved people. They were reburied en masse in 2022 without ceremony of any kind.

  Saint Helena's first known permanent inhabitant was himself a victim of brutal punishment. Fernao Lopes, a Portuguese soldier, defected to the Sultanate of Bijapur and converted to Islam in India around 1516. Captured by Portuguese forces, he was mutilated: his nose, ears, and right hand were removed. Rather than return to Portugal disfigured, he chose to be marooned on the then-uninhabited island, where he lived as a voluntary hermit for more than 20 years. He eventually returned to Portugal around 1526, then travelled to Rome, where Pope Clement VII absolved him in 1530. He returned to Saint Helena, where he died in 1545.

  From 1840, Saint Helena served as a provisioning station for the British West Africa Squadron, which worked to suppress the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1840 and 1849, over 15,000 freed enslaved people, known as Liberated Africans, were landed there. Around 500 remained on the island while others were sent to the West Indies, Cape Town, and eventually Sierra Leone. Governor Robert Patton, serving from 1802 to 1807, had recommended importing workers from China to supplement the rural workforce. By 1818 there were 650 Chinese labourers on the island.

• 5. Napoleon's Island Prison

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  Following his defeat at Waterloo and subsequent abdication, Napoleon Bonaparte was taken to Saint Helena in October 1815. He was 46 years old and had recently ruled much of Europe. The British government chose the island precisely because of its remoteness. He stayed initially at the Briars pavilion, on the grounds of the Balcombe family's estate, until his permanent residence at Longwood House was completed in December 1815.

  He died there five and a half years later, on the 5th of May 1821. In 1858, French emperor Napoleon III purchased Longwood House and the surrounding lands in the name of the French government. The building remains French property to this day, administered by a French representative under the authority of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a curious enclave of France on a British territory in the South Atlantic.

  Napoleon's presence on the island brought a temporary surge of soldiers and administrators. After his death they were withdrawn and the East India Company resumed full control. The tourist industry today still leans heavily on the Napoleon connection, and a 2019 report specifically recommended visiting Longwood House as one of the island's primary attractions.

• 6. The Canal That Changed Everything

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  For roughly four centuries, Saint Helena occupied a chokepoint of global trade. Ships carrying goods between Europe and Asia had no choice but to sail around the African continent, and the island sat along that route like a service station on a motorway. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made that motorway obsolete.

  A 2020 report stated plainly that the island's prosperity ended after 1869 when the Suez Canal shifted trade routes north. The number of ships calling fell from 1,100 in 1855 to only 288 in 1889. The shift to steamships, which did not depend on trade winds, combined with the new route via the Red Sea, drained the strategic value from Saint Helena almost entirely.

  What followed was a long, slow population decline. Those who could afford to leave did. The arrival of over 6,000 Boer prisoners during the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1900 and 1901 produced a brief, artificial population peak of 9,850 in 1901, the all-time high, but by 1911 the number had fallen to 3,520. The garrison was withdrawn in 1906, removing another source of spending from the island's fragile economy. A flax industry, manufacturing fibre from New Zealand flax for rope and string, was re-established in 1907 and provided revenue through the First World War, but declined after 1951 due to transport costs and competition from synthetic fibres. The British Post Office's 1965 decision to use synthetic fibres for its mailbags contributed directly to the closure of the island's flax mills that same year.

• 7. The Airport That Took Decades

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  The decision to build an airport on Saint Helena, to reverse the island's long economic decline through tourism, was taken in 2011 by the governments of Saint Helena and the United Kingdom. Construction was completed by 2016, but the first commercial flight did not arrive until October 2017. The reason for the delay was wind: conditions at the site were deemed dangerous for large aircraft to land.

  The solution was to use smaller aircraft for the five- or six-hour flight from South Africa. Even then, only a specially stripped-down Embraer 190 jet was deemed capable of landing reliably. The runway itself required filling in a valley with some 800 million pounds of dirt and rock to create flat terrain.

  In the year the airport finally opened, 894 visitors arrived by air. Before air service began, the only scheduled connection to the island was the Royal Mail Ship, which made the voyage from Cape Town in five days each way. The existing tourism base consisted largely of dedicated hikers and retirees willing to spend the extra travel time. By October 2017, when scheduled air service began, an average of 432 passengers arrived per month compared to 307 by sea in the years before air access. Passenger service on the Royal Mail Ship was then discontinued.

  In January 2024, Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, ceremonially opened the island's airport during a royal visit, the first royal trip to Saint Helena since Princess Anne visited in 2002.

• 8. Life on the Rock Today

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  Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise hatched around 1832 and brought to Saint Helena in 1882, is confirmed by the Guinness World Records to be the oldest-known living land animal on earth. He celebrated his 190th birthday in 2022. Prince Edward visited him during the January 2024 royal visit.

  Saint Helena's economy remains almost entirely sustained by aid from the British government, with the public sector accounting for about 50% of gross domestic product. The estimated average annual salary in 2019 was only around 8,000 Saint Helena pounds, roughly equivalent to US$10,000. In 2019 the island received its first-ever investment grade credit rating, a BBB-minus stable rating from Standard and Poors.

  The island's biodiversity is extraordinary and largely under-studied. The highland areas contain most of the 400 endemic species recognised to date. The Saint Helena plover, known locally as the wirebird on account of its wire-like legs, appears on the island's coat of arms and flag. The last wild Saint Helena olive tree died in 1994; the last cultivated specimen followed in December 2003. A reforestation project known as the Millennium Forest has been under way since 2000 in the north-eastern corner of the island, aiming to restore the Great Wood that existed before colonisation.

  In 2023, the Google Equiano submarine cable was activated, connecting the island to high-bandwidth international internet for the first time and ending a long era of extremely limited satellite connectivity through a single 7.6-metre dish installed in 1989. As of 2024, a new target of 80% renewable electricity production by 2027 has been announced, depending on renewed wind and solar facilities.