For a time it looked as if we would be unable to land. The tender, one of our
cruise ship’s lifeboats, had reached the jetty but was now riding a good
12ft on the swell, brimming up to the quayside and then plunging down its
dripping face like a demented lift.
The engine whined as the coxswain juggled with the throttle to bring us
alongside; men on the shore struggled to make fast a line to our bow.
Suddenly, the boat was no longer grazing the pier head but being slammed
against the stone with a series of fracturing cracks. The gallows humour
ceased: no more jokes about a lifeboat being the best place to be, or hummed
snatches of “For those in peril on the sea”.
We had sailed 1,800 miles to one of the remotest inhabited islands on earth.
It would be ironic if this was as close as we were going to get.
St Helena was only living up to its history. It is part of the island’s job
description to be inaccessible. Not for nothing was it famously selected as
the one place in the British empire from which Napoleon was least likely to
escape when he was exiled after the battle of Waterloo. Nor did he. Eighty
years later, it served as a prison again, for thousands of Boers in the
South African war. The Portuguese stumbled on it in 1502 but never let on.
It says everything about the island’s isolation that they managed to keep it
secret for 86 years, while using it as a supply station. The English only
discovered St Helena after they captured a Portuguese pilot, who gave the
game away.
Even now, few people can tell you with any certainty where it is, or what. The
answer: a tiny British dependency at the centre of the South Atlantic, 1,200
miles from the coast of Angola and 1,800 miles from Brazil. St Helena is, as
near as dammit, in the middle of nowhere.
The island thrusts out of the ocean on thousand-foot cliffs, an immense rock
stump with a knobbly cap of lush green peaks, rugged basalt ridges and steep
ravines known locally as “guts”. It is spectacularly beautiful, part
tropical forest, part Yorkshire Dales, plus some coppery desert too. Nature
had to make the landscape vertical: it was the only way to fit so much
scenery into 47 square miles.
St Helena is 10½ miles from end to end; six and a bit at its widest. To this
day it can only be reached by ship.
But not tomorrow. In March, it was announced that St Helena is to have an
airport. They have been talking about it since 1943; in five years it should
be operational. It will change the island irretrievably. When the St
Helena Herald broke the airport news, its second story was that the
Bamboo Hedge Piggery had produced its first litter by artificial
insemination. Such guileless days may well be numbered.
The plan, published by the British government, which will meet the entire and
as yet undisclosed cost, is for an airport big enough to take the long-haul
versions of the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320. That entails a runway well over
a mile long being laid in a landscape where the most extensive level surface
is currently a golf tee.
OUR BOAT was finally berthed and we walked up the jetty to where a motley
group of minibuses was waiting. I was directed to the largest. It was a
yellow shed of a vehicle with plastic upholstered seats, rust around the
door and a sign advertising the morning and afternoon “bus runs”, the St
Helena equivalent of a timetable. The driver introduced himself as Max,
settled himself at the wheel and lunged at first gear. The bus groaned and
we set off beneath an old stone arch into the island’s only town, Jamestown.
It is a little English provincial town, settled on the floor of a deep valley.
There’s a castle on the left and HM Prison on the right, pounds and pence in
the tills, union flags everywhere and British bobbies on the beat. Jacob’s
Ladder, a near perpendicular stone staircase, ascends the valley wall in 699
steps to an old gun emplacement on the top of Ladder Hill. Main Street,
lined by dignified 18th- and 19th-century colonial buildings, leads out of
town past a large sign painted on a rock, saying “Welcome Prince Andrew”.
The prince’s visit was in 1984.
People came to their windows and paused at the supermarket doors to watch our
little convoy go by. The 4,000 or more islanders are a racial herbaceous
border. Some trace their ancestry from employees of the East India Company,
which ran the place for more than 170 years; others are descendants of
slaves from the Far East and Africa. All call themselves Saints. They prize
contact with outsiders much as birdwatchers react to the sight of a rare
migrant. Not only does the Herald publish details of ships due to call at St
Helena, it also names vessels that might be spotted passing.
That fascination with strangers reached its apogee on October 15, 1815, when
Napoleon Bonaparte was escorted ashore, exactly where we landed. So much was
he an object of curiosity that he is supposed to have had his garden paths
sunk so that he could take his constitutionals unobserved by gawpers.
We followed the wooden finger posts up a skinny little mountain road, first
into scenery that looked like an agitated Devon and then on to an open moor.
It was here that Napoleon ended his days. He hated it. “This horrible rock,”
he called it. “The most detestable spot in the universe.”
He had expected to be put up in Plantation House, a fine Georgian mansion,
then and now the residence of the island’s governor, but the British did
little to make him comfortable. Longwood House, where he spent almost all of
his five and a half year exile, was converted from a barn.
He was studiously referred to as General Bonaparte, never emperor, and he and
the governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, shared an instant mutual distaste.
They met only six times. Any contact with the islanders was prohibited. On the
other hand, Napoleon was granted the shooting rights for his small estate.
He could charge £5 a partridge, £20 a pheasant.
Today, Longwood House, a low whitewashed building with green shutters, looks
like a West Country retirement bungalow, except for the French tricolour in
the garden. Since 1858 the house has been owned by the French, one of three
sites on the island administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in
Paris. The others are the cottage where Napoleon stayed until Longwood House
was ready, and the tomb where he was buried before his remains were returned
to France in 1840. It was hardly hyped by Max. “It’s a 15-minute walk and
can be very slippery,” he said. “And when you get there, there’s no name,
just a slab of concrete behind some iron railings.” Nobody on our bus opted
to stop.
Longwood is immaculately maintained and crammed with Napoleana, some of which
is original — the campaign cot (in which he died) from the battle of
Austerlitz, a lock of his hair, his death mask, a copper bathtub, and the
billiard table on which he spread his maps and where his autopsy was
performed. As I arrived, a guide was ending an erudite expla- nation putting
paid to the theory that he was poisoned.
The death of Napoleon hit the island’s economy. The reduction of the garrison
and departure of the imperial “court” resulted in the population being
halved. It was not the only blow that history dealt. There was the departure
of the East India Company, the opening of the Suez Canal, the supplanting of
flax — an important island crop — by man-made fibres and the demise of the
Union Castle Line, whose ships called regularly. The new airport promises a
crucial reversal to years of decline.
In the meantime, the RMS St Helena remains the only way to get there,
apart from the occasional cruise ship like mine. If I’d taken the St
Helena, the last of the Royal Mail ships, I’d have had seven nights
here. And there would have been plenty to do, from walking and birdwatching
— the plover-like wirebird is endemic — to golf, diving, whale-watching and
deep-sea fishing.
But second to Napoleon among the island’s attractions is undoubtedly the
isolation. For collectors of out-of-the-way places, St Helena is a trophy to
treasure — and one worth bagging before a mile of tarmac makes a world of
difference.
Travel details: the last Royal Mail ship, RMS St Helena,
is due to retire in 2012. Until then, her monthly voyage to St Helena from
Cape Town takes nine days (mid-priced two-berth cabins from £1,360pp
return), and between four and six days from Walvis Bay in Namibia (from
£1,020pp return). For sailings and fares, call 020 7575 6480, or visit www.rms-st-helena.com
Alternatively, seats on regular RAF flights from Brize Norton direct to
Ascension are from £950, through Andrew Weir Shipping (020 7575 6480, www.aws.co.uk).
RMS St Helena sails between Ascension and St Helena about twice a month; the
trip takes two days, with prices starting at £1,024 return, also through
Andrew Weir Shipping or RMS St Helena direct.
The five-room Farm Lodge Country House Hotel (00 290 4040, www.sthelenatourism.com)
is a 17th-century planter’s house outside Jamestown, with doubles from £70pp
per night, full-board; or try the Consulate Hotel (00 290 2962), with
doubles from £70, B&B.
