Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Island of Saint Helena

Episode Date: September 12, 2021

Located 1,500 miles south of the nation of Cote d’Ivoire and about 2,500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, lies one of the most remote human settlements on Earth: The island of St Helena. Given its remote location, St. Helena has had a history unlike most other islands, and people who live there are unlike any others in the world.  Learn more about the island of Saint Helena, its history, and life on the island, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Located 1,500 miles south of the nation of Cote d'Ivoix, and about 2,500 miles east of Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean lies one of the most remote human settlements on Earth, the island of St. Helena. Given its remote location, St. Helena has a history unlike most other islands, and the people who live there are unlike any others in the world. Learn more about the island of St. Helena, its history, and life on the island, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed, ready to sleep, only to have your mind

start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day, or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've

been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by the Travel Photography Academy. If you've listened to enough episodes of this podcast, you'll notice that I often interject places that I've visited. That's because I spent over 10 years of my life traveling around the world almost nonstop. During that time, I went to the time. I went to from being a complete novice in photography to winning almost every major travel photography prize in North America. When I learned how to do travel photography, I had to do it the hard way.

It took years of time and lots of travel. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy, so you can learn from me in much less time, spending much less money. It's an online video course which I shot on location in France, Spain, and the United States, and I cover everything you need to improve your travel photography. So, if you want to take your photography, to the next level and get better photos on your next trip, visit travel photography academy.com or click on the link in the show notes. The island of St. Helena does not get a lot of visitors. It's one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world located in the middle of the

South Atlantic Ocean. The closest bit of dry land to St. Helena is Ascension Island, which is of itself an extremely remote island. The island is approximately 5 miles by 10 miles. The current population on the island is about 4,500 people, and it's a territory of the United Kingdom. The closest landmass is Angola, 1,200 miles away on the west coast of Africa. The people on the island are known as Saints. How did these people get to such a remote island, and why do they live there?

Well, it's a long story. The first person to discover St. Helena was Portuguese navigator Zhao de Nova. He reportedly spotted the island on May 21st, 1502, and named it after St. Helena. St. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. Other sailors spotted the island on their trips around Africa, but there were no recorded landings on the island for decades. That's not to say there were no landings, however. In 1589, a Dutch navigator named Jan Heugen von Lindschtaen landed on the island and recorded seeing carvings on some of the trees from sailors, which dated back to 1510. There were no native people who lived on St. Helena, and there has been nothing found to

indicate that the island was ever visited by humans until Europeans showed up. The island turned out to be an extremely strategic location for ships that were going around Africa. It was the only place where ships could stop in the middle of the Atlantic to get fresh food and water. The Portuguese and Spanish eventually lost interest in the island as they had ports along the coast of Africa. The Dutch formerly annexed the island, but then did nothing with it. It was the English who finally set up an actual settlement. In 1657, Oliver Cromwell, then the leader of England because they had executed their king, Charles I, granted the East India Company the rights to the island.

They set up a fortified settlement in a valley on the island that they called Jamestown. James Town is still the capital, and really the only town on the island today. It's located at the bottom of a very steep valley. The town is extremely long and narrow because that's the only place you can build anything. It was the first English colony outside of North America and the Caribbean. It was difficult to attract colonists to come and live there, even though the land was given out for free. By 1723, the island had a population of only 1,110 settlers with 610 slaves. At its peak, St. Helena had 1,000 ships visiting every year.

Taverns and brothels did a brisk business, but most of the settlers were involved in growing fresh meat and produce for ships. The island wasn't a profitable venture in and of itself for the East India Company, but it was important for supplying ships traveling to Indies. India and China. It was for this reason that the East India Company invested in the island for several centuries. St. Helena was at the forefront of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. In 1792, the importation of slaves was banned, and in 1818, all children born to slaves were freed. Finally, in 1827, the remaining 800 resident slaves were emancipated. Abolition arrived in St. Helena six years before it did in the rest of the empire. After the abolition of slavery, St. Helena became used as a base for British vessels hunting down Portuguese slave ships. An estimated 26,000 freed

African slaves came through St. Helena at some point. There were also several hundred Chinese workers who were brought to the island in the early 19th century, reaching a peak of 618 on the island in 1818. There were also a few Indians brought to the island as well. While many people did leave the island eventually, some Chinese workers and freed slaves stayed on the island along with the British who lived there. Because the island was so small, there was no space for everyone to live in separate communities, so over time everyone simply intermarried and mixed together. Today, almost the entire population of St. Helena is of mixed race. The next biggest event in the history of the island occurred in 1815, when Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to St. Helena. As he escaped from the island

of Elba, the British wanted to send him somewhere so far away that they knew he could never leave. During his stay on the island, it was controlled by the British government. There was a contingent of troops on the island, and there were always two ships sailing around the island in opposite directions. And no ship could leave the island until there was a confirmation that Napoleon was at home. Napoleon died there in 1821 and was buried there until his body was moved to Paris in 1840. In 1835, the island left control of the British East India Company and became a crown colony, which was administered by an appointed governor. From this point, the island slowly started to decline.

Steam ships became popular in the 19th century, and they didn't need to stop. The big thing, however, which truly rendered the island irrelevant to the strategic plans of Britain, was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. With the canal, ships no longer needed to go around Africa to get to Asia, and St. Helena lost its importance. It was briefly used as a POW camp during the Boer War, which saw the population reach its all-time high of over 9,000 people in 1901. After the war, however, the population dropped again to only 3,500 people in 1911. One of the things that made living on the island economically viable was the introduction of flax.

Flax is used for things like rope or twine which can use coarse fibers. In one of the biggest cases of unintended economic consequence in history, in 1965, the British Post Office made what seemed to be a very minor decisive. decision to switch from flax twine to synthetic twine for bundling its letters. That decision devastated the St. Helena economy, which was heavily dependent on flax. All of the flax mills on the island closed that same year. In 1981, the British Nationality Act took away the rights of everyone on the island to live and work in the UK. They could now only get jobs legally on the island of Ascension, which had a military base, or the Falkland Islands. This was eventually, thankfully,

reversed in 2002. For decades, the only ship which visited the island outside of an occasional repositioning cruise ship was the Royal Mail Ship, St. Helena, which would travel from Cape Town to to St. Helena to Ascension and back. The ship was the only way on or off the island and the only way to get supplies. Getting to St. Helena required a five-day voyage from Cape Town and a five-day trip back. I know this because I did it back in 2014. As we pulled away from Cape Town, I realized didn't have anything on my Kindle, so I ran up to the top deck to get a 3G signal, and I downloaded all of the Game of Thrones books to pass the time on the voyage. The biggest change to the island in the last few decades has been the construction of the airport.

Since the island was discovered in 1502, no ship had ever actually docked at St. Helena, because there was no dock, and no plane had ever landed either. One big problem is that the island is extremely rugged, and there is literally nowhere flat to put runway. In 2005, the British government announced plans to build a runway on St. Helena. The runway, which was still under construction when I was there, was one of the greatest engineering projects of the last decade. The logistics of getting construction equipment to the island, getting it onto the island, and then actually building the runway, were massive. There were a few delays in getting the airport open, but there are now regular flights to the

island, and the mail ship has been retired. The runway is actually bigger than necessary. The for commercial flights, and many people think that this was done to support the Falkland Islands in the event of a future military conflict. Television was only introduced to the island in 1995, and cell phone service only came in 2015. St. Helena will finally be entering the internet age soon. On October 29, 2021, the first fiber optic cable landed on the island. It's a segment of a cable that is going from Brisbane to Cape Town, connecting several countries in West Africa along the way. Bringing broadband to the island should radically change the economic opportunities of the people who live there. Getting around the island isn't hard, but the extreme changes in elevation can be challenging if you're not used to it.

I was told that some people who work in Jamestown can travel as far vertically to get to work every day as they do horizontally. One of the top attractions on the island is the former home of Napoleon, called Longwood. The home and the site of his former grave are actually owned by the French government, and they have a permanent representative from France who lives on the island, and he's lived there now for over 30 years. There are also several species of plants and birds which are found nowhere else in the world. I remember going on a hike, and my guide showed me a species of tiny fern on the side of the hill. He noted that all of the species of that fern in the world were on the hill we were standing on.

There are a few products that are manufactured on the island. There is a very small coffee plantation that produces some of the rarest and hard-to-find coffee in the world. There's also a small distillery on the island, which produces, among other things, a drink called Tungi, which is a spirit based on the fruit of the prickly pear. As far as I know, and I have researched it, St. Helena is the only place in the world that produces it. St. Helena also issues its own currency, the St. Helena Pound, as well as its own stamps and has its own top-level domain name. S.H. St. Helena is a really interesting place with very interesting people.

It doesn't get a lot of visitors, but you can actually visit yourself. Now that the island is connected via air, you can get on a flight and just go. There are accommodations on the island, and it's one of the few places on Earth, where you can truly go to get away from it all. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. Today's review comes from listener Tuttle over at Podcast Republic. They write, fantastic bite-sized nuggets of esoteric info. Well, thank you very much, Tuttle.

Doing this show gives me an excuse to indulge in reading about all the odd things that I'm interested in. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a question, you too can have it read on the show.