Ascension Island

Ascension was an uninhabited, waterless rock when the Portuguese navigator João da Nova sighted it in 1501; Afonso de Albuquerque is said to have renamed it Ascension in 1503, on Ascension Day. For three centuries ships used it only for turtles and the odd marooned sailor. The Royal Navy garrisoned it in 1815 to help guard Napoleon on Saint Helena and stayed, running the island as a stone frigate, HMS Ascension, until 1922. Charles Darwin called in 1836, and the botanist Joseph Hooker later devised a scheme to "green" the barren summit by planting species from around the world, creating the unique man-made cloud forest of Green Mountain.

The Eastern Telegraph Company, later Cable & Wireless, landed the island's first submarine telegraph cable in 1899. In 1942 the United States built Wideawake airfield, which was used again as a staging post for the 1982 Falklands War and remains active; its worn runway was closed to most traffic in 2016 and the repairs were finished in 2023. The BBC World Service opened its Atlantic Relay Station here in 1966 for short-wave broadcasts to Africa and South America, and a European Space Agency tracking station, a British-American signals-intelligence site, and one of the four ground antennas of the GPS system followed. Ascension has its own Administrator, representing the Governor of Saint Helena, and an elected Island Council; it was a dependency of Saint Helena from 1922 until the territory was reorganised in 2009. There is no permanent population and no right of abode — everyone is present on a contract for the airfield, the American facilities, the government, or the communications operators.

About 800 people live on Ascension, most of them Saint Helenians on work contracts, alongside British and American service and civilian staff. English is the only language. Life revolves around the employers, the two civilian settlements of Georgetown and Two Boats, the social club, fishing, and the beach. There is no indigenous culture, and nobody is "from" Ascension.

A strong conservation ethos has grown up around the turtles and seabirds, and the turtle-nesting season and the club's sports-and-social calendar shape the year. Contracts end and families move on, so the community turns over steadily.

The population rises and falls with the contracts. Georgetown, the tiny capital, sits by the pierhead; Two Boats village lies inland at the foot of Green Mountain. The economy is entirely the bases and government services, and since 2019 all of Ascension's waters have been a marine protected area closed to large-scale commercial fishing. Housing comes with the job, as there is no right to buy property. There is a school at Two Boats, a hospital and a small supermarket in Georgetown, and little else, while Wideawake airfield and the bases dominate the flat lava plain. Broadband is limited and costly.

Food is whatever comes in on the ship or the plane. There is a shop, a couple of small eateries, and the club bars. Fresh fish is the local bounty — the yellowfin tuna and wahoo fishing off Ascension is exceptional — and Saint Helenian home cooking (plo, fishcakes, curry) is common in that community. Otherwise the diet is largely self-catered from imported and frozen goods.

Green Mountain National Park, opened in 2005, is the surprise: an artificially created cloud forest of bamboo, Norfolk pine, eucalyptus, and banana, planted from the 1850s on a barren summit that rises to 859 metres, with paths through it. The green turtles that nest on Long Beach and other sands from November to May — the most important nesting ground in the South Atlantic — are watched on guided night walks.

Boatswain Bird Island, an islet a few hundred metres off the northeast coast, holds the bulk of the endemic Ascension frigatebird's breeding population, and since feral cats were eradicated between 2002 and 2004 the frigatebirds have started nesting on the main island again and other seabirds have recolonised it. The lava fields and their walking routes, the sandy coves of the leeward coast, Cross Hill with its old gun battery, Fort Bedford, and the Royal Marines barracks in Georgetown, and the shore and boat fishing round out a short but distinctive list. The wartime and space-tracking installations are visible landmarks, though the sites themselves are closed.