History of Saint Helena
Claiming to be Britain's second oldest colony, after Bermuda, this is one of the most remote settlements in the world and was for several centuries of vital strategic importance to ships sailing to Europe from Asia and South Africa.
On 12 July 1502, nearly three weeks before reaching St Helena, Lopes described how Estêvão da Gama’s ships met up with a section of the Fifth Armada led by Afonso de Albuquerque off the Cape of Good Hope.
Quite apart from the fact that the discoverers were Catholics, Linschoten failed to realise the impossibility that the island was named after a Protestant feast-day, it being found more than a decade before the Reformation and start of Protestantism.
They imported livestock (mainly goats), fruit trees, and vegetables, built a chapel and one or two houses, and left their sick, suffering from scurvy and other ailments, to be taken home, if they recovered, by the next ship, but they formed no permanent settlement.
One of their first visits was in 1598 when an expedition of two vessels piloted by John Davis (English explorer) attacked a large Spanish Caravel, only to be beaten off and forced to retreat to Ascension Island for repairs.
Having been granted a charter to govern the island by the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell in 1657,[38] the following year the Company decided to fortify and colonise St Helena with planters.
On leaving the University of Oxford, in 1676, Edmond Halley visited Saint Helena and set up an observatory with a 24-foot-long (7.3 m) aerial telescope and observed the positions of 341 stars in the Southern hemisphere.
The formation of the Grand Alliance and outbreak of war against France in 1689 meant that for several years ships from Asia avoided the island for fear of being attacked by French men-of-war.
Despite the clear connection between deforestation and the increasing number of floods (in 1732, 1734, 1736, 1747, 1756 and 1787) the East India Company's Court of Directors gave little support to efforts by governors to eradicate the goat problem.
William Dampier called into St Helena in 1691 at the end of his first of three circumnavigations of the world and stated Jamestown comprised 20–30 small houses built with rough stones furnished with mean furniture.
The next governor, Isaac Pyke (1731–1738), had a tyrannical reputation but successfully extended tree plantations, improved fortifications and transformed the garrison and militia into a reliable force for the first time.
In the peak era, a thousands ships per year stopped there leaving the governor to try to police the numerous visitors and to limit the consumption of arrack, made from potatoes.
[41] Attempts by governor John Skottowe (1764–1782) to regularise the sale of arrack and punch led to some hostility and desertions by a number of troops who stole boats and were probably mostly lost at sea — however, at least one group of seven soldiers and a slave succeeded in escaping to Brazil in 1770.
Sir Hudson Lowe (1816–1821), was duly appointed reporting to Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies through the East India Company’s Secret Committee in London.
The East India Company resumed full control of Saint Helena and life returned to the pre-1815 standards, the fall in population causing a sharp change in the economy.
In addition to reorganising the hospital, Barry highlighted the heavy incidence of venereal diseases in the civilian population, blaming the government for the removal of the St Helena Regiment, which resulted in destitute females resorting to prostitution.
Following the conquest of Aden in January 1839 and the establishment of a coal station there, the journey time to the Far East (via the Mediterranean, the Alexandria to Cairo overland crossing and the Red Sea) was roughly halved compared with the traditional South Atlantic route.
Surviving freed slaves lived at Lemon Valley – originally the quarantine area, later for women and children, Rupert's and High Knoll, and only when numbers became too great were they sent to Cape Town and the British West Indies as labourers.
Cinchona plants were introduced in 1868 by Charles Elliot (1863–1870) with a view to exporting quinine but the experiment was abandoned by his successor Governor C. G. E. Patey (1870–1873),[48] who also embarked on a programme of reducing the civil establishment.
A submarine cable en route to Britain from Cape Town was landed in November 1899 and extended to Ascension by December and was operated by the Eastern Telegraph Company.
S.S. Papanui, en route from Britain to Australia with emigrants, arrived in James Bay in 1911 on fire, possibly due to spontaneous combustion of coal stored in a thermally-insulated hold.
Some 46 islanders volunteered to fight abroad, the war memorials on the wharf and at St Paul's Church (which differ in detail) showing some eight men lost their lives during the conflict.
The German battle cruiser Admiral Graf Spee was observed passing the island in 1939 and the British oil tanker RFA Darkdale was torpedoed off Jamestown bay in October 1941.
Based from Avonmouth, Curnow Shipping replaced the Union-Castle Line mailship service in 1977, using the RMS St Helena, a coastal passenger and cargo vessel that had been used between Vancouver and Alaska.
In 1997, the acute employment problem at St Helena was brought to the attention of the British public following reports in the tabloid press of a "riot" following an article in the Financial Times describing how the Governor, David Smallman (1995–1999), was jostled by a small crowd who believed he and the Foreign Office had rejected plans to build an airport on the island.
[59] In a parliamentary debate[60] in which DfID were accused of delaying tactics, the ministry accepted the conclusion in their 2005 Access document[61] but argued good fiscal management required this to be re-reviewed.
[67] One news report in August 2020 stated that the costs imposed by the pandemic led to the "collapse of the island’s tourism sector, which was meant to drive its economic development".
[66] One commentator has observed that, notwithstanding the high unemployment resulting from the loss of full passports during 1981–2002, the level of loyalty to the British monarchy by the St Helena population is probably not exceeded in any other part of the world.
The station currently broadcasts news, features and music across the island, Ascension, the Falklands and worldwide over the internet in collaboration with its sister newspaper, the St Helena Independent (published since November 2005).
Richard Grove, Author of Green Imperialism, among other works, explains how imperialist deforestation of Saint Helena made apparent for the first time the devastating effects humans can have on the world around them.
