Saint Helena

Saint Helena was uninhabited when Portuguese ships found it in 1502 — by long tradition the navigator João da Nova, on 21 May of that year, though historians dispute it — and it became a resupply stop on the route to and from India. The English East India Company settled and fortified the island from 1659, founding Jamestown, and it became a vital watering and provisioning station for ships on the long haul between Europe and Asia. Enslaved people were brought to work it; the phased emancipation of the island's 800 or so slaves began in 1827, six years before Parliament abolished slavery across the colonies. Between 1840 and 1849 the Royal Navy landed over 15,000 "Liberated Africans" — people freed from intercepted slave ships — in Rupert's Valley, where many died and were buried; over 9,000 skeletons were uncovered there during the airport road works in 2008.

Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled here in 1815 and died at Longwood House in 1821; the island was also used to hold the Zulu king Dinuzulu (1890–1897), over 6,000 Boer prisoners of war in 1900–1901, and, in 1957, three Bahraini princes held until 1960. It became a Crown colony in 1834.

The opening of the Suez Canal and the shift to steamships took away the passing trade, and Saint Helena declined into poverty and aid dependence. Islanders — the "Saints" — emigrated for work to Ascension, the Falklands, and Britain, and full British citizenship was only restored to them in 2002. A long-debated airport finally opened in 2016, after a well-publicised wind-shear problem delayed scheduled flights until 14 October 2017; the mail ship RMS St Helena made her last sailing from the island in February 2018.

The roughly 4,400 "Saints" are of mixed English, African (both enslaved and Liberated African), Chinese, Malagasy, and Indian descent, and speak English with an accent and dialect found nowhere else. The Anglican Church is the largest denomination, and life is small-scale, church- and family-centred, and famously friendly — drivers wave to everyone, and visitors are quickly known.

Flax growing and rope-making were the twentieth-century industry until the market collapsed in the 1960s; fishing and, more recently, the island's rare coffee are the traditional products. Community events — sport, including the annual timed run up Jacob's Ladder, and Saint Helena Day — hold the small society together, and the pace is slow, on an island where single-digit car number plates are still seen.

About 4,400 people live on Saint Helena, most within reach of Jamestown, a narrow Georgian town squeezed into a steep valley. The economy is dominated by the public sector, much of it funded by the United Kingdom, with a young tourism industry since the airport, tuna fishing, and the coffee. The road network is paved and reaches every inhabited part of the island, but it is mostly single-lane, steep and full of hairpins.

Proper broadband arrived only in 2023, with the Equiano submarine cable. Young people still leave for work overseas, and the island continues to rely on British budgetary support. Daily life runs on the plane from Johannesburg, the cargo ship, and the weather over the highlands.

Saint Helenian cooking is British home food with local touches. "Plo", a spiced pilau, is the island's signature dish; fishcakes bound with egg and spiced with chilli, tuna in every form, and curry are staples, alongside the Sunday roast. A lot of the larder arrives frozen on the cargo ship. Saint Helena coffee — a green-tipped bourbon arabica grown since 1733 — is exported in tiny, expensive quantities, and Tungi, a spirit distilled from prickly pear, is the local drink.

The Napoleonic sites are the headline: Longwood House, where the emperor died, restored and owned by France; the Briars Pavilion, his first lodging; and the empty original tomb in Sane Valley, known as the Valley of the Tomb, his body having been exhumed and returned to Paris in 1840. Jamestown itself has Jacob's Ladder, a straight 699-step stair up the valley wall, built in 1829 as part of a cable railway, the Castle, St James' Church of 1774 — the oldest Anglican church in the Southern Hemisphere — and the island museum.

Nature is the other draw. Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise resident at Plantation House since 1882 and reckoned the world's oldest known living land animal, grazes the governor's lawn. The central peaks, including Diana's Peak at 818 metres, the island's highest point and a national park since 1996, carry remnant cloud forest and the endemic wirebird, the national bird. Offshore, whale sharks and dolphins appear seasonally, and there is diving on wrecks and reefs. The "Post Box" walks lead to viewpoints and features such as Lot's Wife's Ponds, and the volcanic south coast around Sandy Bay is starkly scenic.