Jamestown

Saint Helena had no people when Portuguese navigators found it in 1502, and by tradition they named it for the saint whose feast fell around the date. The island was a useful stop: a fixed point with fresh water and fruit in an ocean with almost nothing else. The Portuguese kept it quiet, released goats and planted trees for passing crews, and did not settle it. The Dutch claimed it in the early seventeenth century and left, and in 1659 the English East India Company built a fort and a settlement in the valley that became Jamestown. The town is named for James, Duke of York, later King James II.

For nearly two centuries the Company ran the island as a supply station for its ships returning from India and China. Settlers, soldiers and enslaved people from Africa and Madagascar arrived over the years, and the population that grew here was a mix of English, African, Asian and other origins that shaped the modern community. The Crown took over from the Company in 1834. Through the nineteenth century the island served as a naval and garrison post, and after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 the sailing routes shifted and the island lost much of its purpose as a stop.

In the twentieth century Saint Helena lived on flax, a small fishery and government spending. Boer prisoners of war were held on the island after 1900, and later exiles included a Zulu king. The link to the world was a Royal Mail Ship from Cape Town, with a voyage that took days, and the island's small population moved to the UK, Ascension and the Falklands for work. That link shifted in the twenty-first century with the airport that opened in 2016 and the first scheduled flights in 2017; the last Royal Mail Ship voyage came in 2018. The island now has a fixed way in, but also a small, wind-sensitive airport, so travellers still plan around a single air link.

Saint Helena is best known for one prisoner. After the battle of Waterloo in 1815 the British government needed a place to hold Napoleon Bonaparte that was too remote to escape from, and this island, more than a thousand miles from any mainland, fit. He arrived on HMS Northumberland in October 1815 and landed at Jamestown. His first weeks were spent in a small pavilion at a house called The Briars, and in December he moved to Longwood House on the high plateau east of the town, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Longwood was damp, windy and often cloudy, and Napoleon complained about the climate, the guards and the governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, whom he clashed with over his rank and his movements. A small household of French companions and servants lived with him, and he dictated his memoirs, gardened, read and rode within limits set by British guards. He died in May 1821 and was buried in a quiet valley on the island, in a tomb with no name on it because British and French officials could not agree on what to write. In 1840 his remains were taken to France with great ceremony and now lie in Les Invalides in Paris.

Today the French government owns Longwood House, the Briars pavilion and the tomb valley, and runs them as historic sites with a small staff, a consul on the island and fixed opening hours. That matters to a visitor, because these sites are not part of the town and are not open every day: they need a driver, a car and a plan. Jamestown itself has fewer Napoleon traces than people expect, since he spent so little time in the town. The place to start is the museum, which sets the exile in the wider history of the island, and then a morning by car up to the plateau.

The island's story includes a chapter that is far less known than Napoleon's. From the early nineteenth century the British Royal Navy patrolled the Atlantic to intercept ships carrying enslaved people, after Britain banned the slave trade in 1807. Saint Helena became a base for this work because of its position, and a place to hold and land the people freed from captured ships. Between 1840 and 1872 tens of thousands of Africans, some historians say more than 25,000, were brought to the island from these ships, most from West Central Africa.

Conditions were harsh. The freed people were landed at Jamestown and taken to a depot in nearby Rupert's Valley, where many died of disease and exhaustion from the voyage, and thousands were buried in mass graves. The survivors were sent on to the Caribbean as apprentices or stayed on the island as labourers, and their descendants are part of the Saint Helena community today. Archaeologists working in Rupert's Valley in the 2000s, when the airport road was planned, found the remains of the burial ground, and the finds gave new evidence of the scale and the human cost.

For a visitor, this history sits alongside the East India Company buildings and the Georgian street. The museum in Jamestown covers the story, and the Wharf where the ships' captives were landed is a short walk from the museum door. Standing on the steps, it is easy to picture how narrow the landing was and how many people came ashore there. It is worth reading the panels before you go to the sea front, and worth approaching the story with care, because it is history that residents also hold as their own. Later chapters of the island's past, from Boer prisoners to a Zulu king in exile, echo the same theme: a small place used as a holding point for people the empire wanted to keep far from home.

Jamestown sits in a narrow valley with steep walls on both sides, and the shape of the valley explains the shape of the town. Everything runs in a line from the sea inward: the Wharf and landing steps, the seafront and the museum, the old Castle and its gardens, the Grand Parade, Main Street, and then the upper town and the foot of the ladder. The valley is so narrow that there is scarcely room for a second street, and the town had to build up, with tall thin houses and steps.

Many of the buildings are Georgian, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the East India Company and then the Crown were the main builders. The Castle, at the seaward end, was the seat of government from the seventeenth century and still houses offices. St James' Church, completed in its present form in 1774, is often described as the oldest Anglican church in the southern hemisphere. Jacob's Ladder, built in 1829, has 699 steps and was built to carry goods up the hillside to the fort at the top, and in modern times it has become a test of nerve for visitors and a race for locals.

The town is also fragile. Rockfalls, floods and rain have hit the valley over the years, and the Ladder and the cliff paths are closed after bad weather. The buildings are protected and, since the airport opened, there has been an effort to restore the facades and public spaces. A short walk shows how the town works as a whole: a working quay, a museum, a church, a garden, a shopping street and a hill. For a visitor the sense of scale is the point, because everything of interest is close together and most of it can be reached in a morning on foot.

Saint Helena's food is shaped by what the sea and the island's few farms can supply and by its mixed heritage. Fish is the centre of the table: tuna, wahoo and other pelagic fish are landed by local boats, and fishcakes, made from tuna and potato and fried, are the classic pub lunch. Plo, a rice dish with meat, onion and spices, comes from the same family of dishes as the pilau of the Indian Ocean and shows how Asian and African cooks who arrived on Company ships influenced the island. Vegetables such as pumpkin, beans and potatoes come from small farms and gardens in the uplands.

The island also grows coffee. Yemen coffee plants were introduced in the 1730s, and the Green Tipped Bourbon Arabica grown on the high ground is now a small-batch export, sold in London shops at a high price and available to visitors in Jamestown cafés and shops. Tea and cake, in the British style, mark the afternoon, and there are a few local spirits, including one distilled from prickly pear, that are sold in small quantities. Because so much is imported by air and sea, groceries cost more than a visitor might expect, and shops stock what has arrived on the last flight or ship.

The habits of the island are as much social as culinary. Greeting people you pass is expected, shops close for lunch, Sundays are quiet, and a guesthouse dinner may be the only sit-down option. This is a community of a few thousand who know each other, and hospitality means being told when the pub opens and being invited to a dinner. A short stay is easiest if you follow the local pace: book dinner ahead, buy what you need the day before a Sunday, and ask your host what is fresh.

Saint Helena is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world, about 1,900 kilometres from the African coast and more than 2,000 from South America. The island is the peak of a volcano rising from the sea floor, with steep coasts, a dry east and a green, cloudy interior that reaches 823 metres at Diana's Peak. That isolation produced a distinct flora and fauna. The island has many endemic plants, including the gumwood, the national tree, and a cloud forest of tree ferns on the high ridge, and it has a small shore bird called the wirebird that is found nowhere else.

Human arrival changed it quickly. Goats, cattle and the felling of trees for fuel and building stripped much of the native forest in the first centuries of settlement, and some species were lost. In recent decades conservation projects have restored patches of forest and protected the wirebird, and the trails through the cloud forest are a highlight for walkers. The sea has rich life too: whale sharks visit from about December to April, and diving and snorkelling are available with local operators.

The airport, opened in 2016, is the largest change in centuries. Before it, a ship sailed from Cape Town, and the trip took days. Today a few flights a week connect the island with Johannesburg, but the runway sits on a high plateau exposed to wind shear, and flights can be delayed or diverted. For a visitor the practical lesson is to keep spare days, tell your host your flight number, and bring what you need: medicines, cash, a charged phone and a book. The reward for accepting the pace is a community of a few thousand people and a landscape that has changed little in a lifetime. Bring patience for the weather, allow a spare day at each end, and treat every delay as part of the island's character rather than a problem to be solved.