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One of the remotest islands on earth is getting an airport - and that could change everything
Bamboo Hedge, Sandy Bay
The oldest and most famous resident of St Helena is called Jonathan. His home is in the grounds of Plantation House, the 35-room Georgian mansion long occupied by the island’s governors.
He moves sluggishly; he has little idea what’s going on; he has been much put upon yet remains placid; his welfare has long been a concern. Jonathan has witnessed the comings and goings of 26 governors sent out by London to take charge of his own and St Helena’s welfare, and treated them all with what looks like good-natured contempt. In all of this, Jonathan might be not just a tourist attraction but the island’s motif.
Well, perhaps not in the matter of size. This is a minuscule island and Jonathan is a Seychelles giant tortoise. He may be the world’s oldest creature: no one knows exactly how old he was in 1882 when he first arrived. The scientists think he was at least 50; his life might even have overlapped with that of St Helena’s most famous former resident, one Napoleon Bonaparte, who died in 1821 having spent the last six years of his life confined here, an experience he endured less phlegmatically than Jonathan.
St Helena was chosen to house the former emperor after his defeat at Waterloo because it was (a) a British possession and (b) a byword for remoteness. Both these facts are still true. Indeed, if anything the island has become more isolated. In the days of sail, up to three ships a day called at St Helena. The vessels would be serviced and victualled, taking on fresh water and fruit and vegetables to stave off scurvy: everything grew in this benign climate, just inside the tropics but cooled by the constant southern trade winds. An earthly paradise, said the first Briton to arrive, Captain Thomas Cavendish, in 1588{8}.
The occasional cruise ship and adventurous yachtie still stop by. But in general the only way on and off the island for everyone and everything is by a single ship, the RMS St Helena, which normally calls every 18 days. But not for much longer.
On the far side of the island from the capital, Jamestown (i.e. about 20 minutes’ drive away), St Helena’s international airport is nearing completion, 70 years after the idea was first mooted, 14 years after the islanders said ‘yes’ in a referendum and six years after the British government finally agreed. Now it is happening, some Saint Helenians are enduring a fit of buyers’ remorse. The government insists it will be transformational. What is certain is that a unique, magical, beautiful, troubled place is about to change forever.
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St Helena, a microdot of volcanic leftovers in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, is not quite the most remote island on earth: that honour belongs to another of Britain’s South Atlantic islets, Tristan da Cunha. But Tristan only has about 300 people. St Helena has some 4,500, enough to support the world’s most isolated hospital, police station, prison, distillery, cathedral and cricket ground.
The islanders are known as Saints, and they do have some saintly qualities. This could be the friendliest place on earth - passers-by say hello, motorists wave - and the most trusting. It is an isle of unlocked doors and of car keys left in the ignition. The lack of petty crime is partly due to the Saints’ nature. Also, as Napoleon realised, escape is almost impossible.
The journey here from Cape Town currently takes five days on what everyone calls the RMS, which then makes a side trip to St Helena’s nearest neighbour, a mere 800 miles away: the British-owned, US Air Force-dominated island of Ascension. (London-bound travellers can, with luck, get there in three or four days via Ascension rather than six via Cape Town.) RMS stands for Royal Mail Ship, a designation that has otherwise all but disappeared, and is increasingly irrelevant. When I started in 1980 there would be 180 sacks of mail, recalls the ship’s captain, Rodney Young, a burly Saint who worked his way up from swabbing the decks. Now there are two or three.
But the RMS still carries all the island’s needs from the outside world somewhere in its hold, from cars to fresh veg to urgent medicine. The islanders order stuff online like the rest of us; the difference is that here express delivery means waiting about two months. The ship’s progress is always a major item on Saint FM’s morning news, sometimes the major item, unless an islander has died - that always takes precedence.
World’s oldest creature. His life may even have overlapped with that of Napoleon{1}, who spent the last six years of his life confined here, an experience he endured less phlegmatically
The RMS is intimate - just 7,000 tonnes, a quarter of the size of a cross-Channel ferry, as midget as St Helena itself when seen next to a modern cruise ship. The journey is old-fashioned, sociable. The food is terrific, something rarely said about the island itself. Officers and crew, mostly Saints, either grew up with their passengers or get to know them soon enough. The ship is part of the island, says one expat. When Saints board it, they are already home. It has the same effect on a newcomer: walking up Main Street in Jamestown, after disembarking, I already feel a sense of belonging.
But the voyage is not a cruise, it is a journey. And the journeys are often linked with sadness: people heading to work overseas because there is nothing for them on the island; exiles coming back to visit sick parents and often failing to make it in time; or residents travelling to Cape Town for urgent operations that St Helena cannot perform, and sometimes failing to make those too - death at sea is not exactly normal but not that rare either. A UK-based Saint or a St Helena-based expat has to take four weeks’ holiday to get two weeks at home.
These are the last drops of an era, says Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, France’s honorary consul on the island, wearily making his (approx) 120th voyage. It is not rational for the ship to exist. Dancoisne-Martineau is the doyen of St Helena’s diplomatic corps (the only member, actually) and the guardian of its Napoleonic heritage. He has been making four journeys a year on the RMS for the past 30 years so, not surprisingly, the joys of deck quoits and shuffleboard have faded. He is not alone. I’m absolutely sick of it all, says one worldly young Saint. I can’t wait for the airport. Sad though it is to imagine this dear old ship in a breakers’ yard, it seems like a no-brainer. There are, however, other considerations
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When the Portuguese first discovered the island on May 21 1502, and named it after the saint of the day, there was no one there. They kept it secret for nearly a century but when the British finally found the place, they became very interested indeed and had the maritime power and tenacity to see off rival claims. In particular, the East India Company saw it as the perfect way station for trading ships sailing home from the Orient. It was granted a charter by London to run the place and, in 1659, installed its own governor.
Napoleon on St Helena, c.1820
Gradually, over the centuries, a people emerged, an extraordinary race with what seem like almost random characteristics, as a variety of humanity turned up and bred: slaves and slave owners; soldiers and sailors; Madagascans and Malays; Indians and Chinese. It would be impossible to pick out a Saint away from home because they really do come in all shades, shapes and sizes. Even the accent has a protean quality, as so many of them spend decades working abroad before coming home to retire.
Emigration came with the territory because St Helena has never been able to pay its way. It was a necessary cost centre for the East India Company, and intended as such. The British government, which took over direct responsibility in 1834, has always been less relaxed on this subject. The island is said to have made a profit only once in its history, in 1951, when the flax industry was at its peak. Flax is the nearest St Helena has ever come to finding a reliable living. Though there has never been a shortage of ideas - whaling, tuna, mackerel-canning, silkworms, lilies, quinine, aloe vera, cochineal, lace-making, wine - they all failed.
Now, the theory goes, tourism will come to the rescue. Not the annual thousand-odd visitors a year who until now have come to enjoy the languid 1951-style charms of both the island and the RMS, but up to 30,000 (according to one often-quoted wild surmise) or at least 4,000 (a more realistic St Helena government guesstimate). The British taxpayer has invested at least £250m in the airport since 2010 and Whitehall wants results.
The island has an annual budget of around £30m, of which nearly £20m is subsidy from the Department for International Development in London, including up to £4m to cover the RMS’s losses. It is one of 14 British Overseas Territories, too small and/or complicated to become independent, including such entities as the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos, which make profits in ways British civil servants might prefer not to know about. Only three require annual grants from the Bank of Mother England: Montserrat, which was devastated by a volcanic eruption in 1995, Pitcairn (population 56), riven by accusations of paedophilia, and St Helena.
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The whole purpose of the airport is to set us on the way to prosperity, so we can wash our faces, says Roy Burke, the island’s British chief secretary. St Helena has been drip-fed for so long. We were in profit in the flax era but not since. There has been limited entrepreneurial ambition for a long time.
The RMS at anchor in Jamestown Bay, off the Half Tree Hollow suburb and controversial site for the planned new prison
For the St Helena government, the airport has become an article of faith, a new religion, a god that must not fail: London’s wrath would be too terrible. It has been a grand project for a petite island: eight million metres³ of rock have been shifted to turn a lonely hillside into a plateau in an area called Prosperous Bay, which must have felt like a good omen. The terminal building looks remarkably high-spec. All this for what, at least in the initial stages, is likely to be a service of one weekly flight to and from Johannesburg (a 737-800 that, because of the short runway, will only be allowed to carry 120 passengers rather than the full payload of 162) and an occasional service from London.
Arguments that better value would have been achieved by an updated RMS, fast enough to cut the journey by a third, or a new breakwater in the port are no longer heard. In some ways, however, the airport is likely to make life worse for the Saints: the freighter that will replace the RMS as the source of bulk supplies is expected to arrive every five or six weeks instead of every 18 days; there is some confusion about the Ascension service. Whispered doubts persist: the crosswinds will make for unhappy landings; the Barn, the overhanging rock that dominates the approach path, will be a nightmare for pilots; as will the mist and fog for which St Helena’s highlands are infamous.
This last seems the most convincing. As the RMS approached the island, I was standing by the portside rail next to a well-informed local. Where’s the airport? I asked. Up there. So where’s the Barn? You can’t see it because of the mist. Could you land in this? You wouldn’t even leave Joburg. Is the weather usually like this? Often. I’m not saying any more. The only alternative landing strip is Ascension, a 90-minute diversion each way.
There is also an existential argument against the airport: for visitors, the voyage and the island’s remoteness are part of the appeal; the kind of rushed rich who might be attracted by a novel addition to the global air map seem unlikely to be enchanted by St Helena’s subtle charms. Tourist infrastructure is close to zero: there is a shortage of almost everything - hotel beds, restaurants, taxis, hire cars, buses, even souvenirs. There are no beaches worth mentioning. Mobiles only arrived in 2015, and there is no roaming facility. The internet is slow, patchy and pricy. When Chris Pickard, an expert in Latin American travel, was interviewed last year for the job of head of tourism, he was asked to name St Helena’s chief attraction to visitors. Isolation, he replied. You’ve just lost it.
Picnicking at Castle Gardens, Jamestown, left; On the 699-step Jacob’s Ladder
Even so, Pickard got the job and is very upbeat. You mustn’t make the mistake of thinking this is a mainstream destination, he says. Some of the places people build in the Amazon nowadays are amazing and that’s the sort of thing we have to look at. This is primarily about nature and walking; for people who read Wanderlust magazine. And don’t forget the deep-sea fishing and diving markets, he adds, warming to his subject. If there isn’t great fishing off this island, where is there? And the Napoleon market is underestimated. Air schedules will allow for a little more flexibility. But we’ll still be remote in the middle of the Atlantic.
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Yet this paradise is not a pristine one. In many ways humanity’s discovery of St Helena gave it the worst of both worlds. Man ravaged the indigenous flora and fauna, much of it found nowhere else, without providing a lasting base of either industry or agriculture. While, in theory, this is an island where you can grow almost anything, fresh vegetables are hard to find and fresh fruit even harder.
My grandfather was a ship’s chandler, says Capt Young. All his contacts would deliver fresh produce and any type of vegetable the ships wanted.
Whispered doubts persist: the overhanging rock that dominates the approach path will be a nightmare for pilots, as will the mist and fog for which St Helena’s highlands are infamous
And now you’ve got a hold full of South African potatoes and onions heading to St Helena, I say. That’s mad, isn’t it? It is mad.
One of the island’s loveliest corners is called Lemon Tree Valley but it no longer has any lemon trees. You can still grow anything here but it costs too much,explains Rebecca Cairns-Wicks, an English biologist married to a Saint and operations director of the St Helena National Trust. The place is plagued by wilts, blight, fruit fly and soil erosion. We’ve got a legacy of environmental mismanagement. Before man there were no mammals, no reptiles, no amphibians. Now we even have an invasive liverwort which feeds on native mosses.
The ecology of a small island is especially challenging because its species have such a small range, and then St Helena is full of microclimates and micro-ecologies. The St Helena olive tree went extinct in 2003, says Cairns-Wicks. I watched the last one die and I couldn’t save it. It was so horrid. I said at the time I wanted it not to have died in vain, and that it would never happen again.
While two other native trees, the bastard gumwood and the St Helena ebony, are now being nursed back after going down to the last two, 300 of the island’s 400 unique invertebrates are under threat of extinction.
Flax, the imported plant that sustained St Helena’s balance sheet until rope-makers found cheaper artificial alternatives, now runs rampant across the countryside, strangling competitors. For older islanders it does not bring back happy memories. Basil George, just turned 80, had a barefoot childhood before becoming a labourer in South Africa, then returned home to become a policeman, teacher, headmaster, chief education officer, poet, potter and tour guide. We were poor because the flax industry was paying a pittance. We never actually went without food and we did have shoes, but only for Sundays. Most of us were brought up in a good British tradition. You had to be resourceful, you had to have manners.
Though a Thatcher-era law (repealed in 2002) deprived the Saints of full British citizenship, the poverty eased in the 1980s. The Falklands war created job opportunities working for the garrisons in both the Falklands and Ascension. It remains potentially more lucrative to clean latrines in Port Stanley than aspire to middle management in Jamestown.
From left: the first test flight lands at Prosperous Bay in 2015; the airport fire service; and, the new airport terminal and control tower
Some exiles do very well. Remittances from abroad have supported the economy and brought hundreds of new homes, largely self-built with neighbour-labour. We run a very informal economy in a global free market,says George. But 80 per cent of us have our own family homes. That’s an indicator of how far we’ve come. And we have 80 different charitable organisations. That’s a strong civil society.
Nonetheless, the island endures other problems. There are more deaths than births. And, though there is a labour shortage, partly due to the boom created by the airport construction, wages remain terrible: expats on short-term contracts earn two, three, four times more than their local equivalents, depending how you do the calculations.
The tradition of emigration helps explain the lack of entrepreneurs that so frustrates the chief secretary. This also bothers Mandy Peters, now 51, who left school at 15 but has risen to become chief executive of Solomon’s, the livestock to retail conglomerate that dominates much of the island’s business. We have a very strong senior management team (unusually, almost all home-grown - eight Saints and one Nigerian). But we sometimes struggle to get people to step up. There’s a lack of taking responsibility, of wanting to take responsibility. Or, as one incomer puts it more bluntly, The ones with get up and go have got up and gone.
This manifests itself even more starkly in St Helena’s appalling politics. The most-used word on the island is they: they are doing this; they want that. It is never wholly clear who they are: some amalgam of the government and the elite - but nearly all of them definitely here-today, gone-tomorrow expats.
There is an elected legislative council that selects an executive, which, according to the St Helena government website, advises the governor in most areas of government policy. I looked in on one of its meetings, and the tone was supplicatory, not executive. It is astonishing that a territory with sparky, intelligent people who thrive overseas should be governed as if this were 1890.
Mandy Peters, chief executive of Solomon’s, left, and May Young at her shop in Jamestown
Three years ago a plan to have a chief councillor, a role that might have mutated into one of leadership, was heavily defeated in a referendum with a 10 per cent turnout. This feels like a terrible decision. One visiting scientist calls the islanders’ situation learnt helplessness, the fate that afflicts wild animals brought up in zoos. The population are used to following outside orders, says Dancoisne-Martineau. The mentality has become deeply rooted.
It is not just the islanders’ fault. They [that word again] are really into secrecy, even on the most insignificant things, Dancoisne-Martineau adds. This is a universal opinion and, as a result, distrust of the government is also universal. In such a tight-knit community, rumour spreads like the leftover flax plants, strangling the few truths that exist. The Saints’ deep-rooted belief in God and the royal family is nothing like as strong as their certainty that the airport is primarily intended as a British military base, which makes no sense. Rumour is equally convinced that the airport will not be ready for the opening ceremony, scheduled for May, and that the RMS will have to stay in service beyond its planned farewell in July.
The failings of government in St Helena were exposed last month by the publication of a report into allegations of widespread child abuse, by Sasha Wass QC (who led the successful prosecution case against Rolf Harris). Wass concluded that the stories of depravity were massively exaggerated but also found the St Helena government secretive, and had trouble getting access to the relevant files - she discovered that hers was the 35thoutside report into child abuse on St Helena since 1998.
In her report, she criticised the present governor, Governor Mark Capes, quoting local interviewees who called him a headmaster and colonial, while also accusing him of abnegating responsibility by over-delegating: The Governor of St Helena’s august title belies the need for a shirt-sleeved manager.
Distrust of the government is universal…The Saints’ deep-rooted faith in God and the royal family is nothing like as strong as their certainty that the airport is primarily intended as a British military base
The word I heard most often to describe Capes was remote, like the island itself, though no man can successfully be an island in a community the size of a small English market town. Capes, however, was overseas when I visited, and not available for interview in the UK either. The kindest opinions do give him credit for driving through the airport project.
I was outraged by an incident, recounted in Wass’ report, whereby Capes used a power to dissolve the legislative council because it seemed unlikely to agree to his plan to build a new prison in Jamestown’s main residential suburb, Half Tree Hollow. The present tiny Victorian jail is a slum and needs to move but the new site should obviously be decided by the islanders who must live with it, not some London-appointed satrap who will be gone before 2016 is out. The last native-born governor was appointed in 1873, before even Jonathan arrived.
The relationship with all the governors seems mutually abusive. The Saints I met struggle to remember the names but they do remember their occasional humiliations: the one who suffered a petition against his rule, the one who was locked in his office by protesters and had his tie pulled, and the one who almost fell in the water, plumed hat and all, when greeting Prince Andrew.
You should have the job, I say, only half-teasingly, to Basil George. No St Helenian wants to be admiral of a rowing boat, he replies. Especially if it has only one oar in the water.
For all that, I found St Helena a magical place. It matches Trinidad or New Orleans for parades. It is also the global capital of nicknaming: older islanders can instantly identify the likes of ‘Pickaxe’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Darlings’, ‘Fishcake’, ‘Tommy Punch’, ‘Teabag’{9}, ‘New Pence’ and ‘Fartegg’.
Two incidents brought home the sense of community. One came on my first - hot - afternoon when, having failed to find tea (nothing open), I walked up the hill to the edge of Jamestown and began to crave an ice-cream. Eventually, I found a small, rather random little shop of the sort lost to Britain in the 1950s. A kindly grey-haired woman was behind the counter. Do you have any ice-cream, please? No, sorry. But Dora might. I’ll phone her. No ice-cream, only ice lollies, she reported back. That would be lovely. So she instructed a small girl to lead me across the road to a private house where Dora sold me a 50p lolly from her back door. (Later, I went back and asked the shopkeeper her name. May Young, she said. Any relation to Rodney, the captain? I’m his mama! she replied proudly.)
Something even more telling came when I visited the island production of Cinderella. It was a typical English village-hall pantomime, except for one thing: in the audience were various clients of Shape, St Helena’s charity for the disabled. Some were severely handicapped mentally, and screamed so loudly at the wrong moments that the actors could barely be heard. In England there would have been shushing and dirty looks, and the embarrassed carers would have wheeled their charges out. But, on St Helena, these were not anonymous sad cases, they were all known: somebody’s brother, somebody’s son. They had a right to be there.
The islanders have too many people lost from sight. The boat that took me home was also taking the émigrés back to Ascension after Christmas. The atmosphere on board was far more sombre than on the journey from Cape Town. And the requests on Saint FM that morning included ‘When Will I See You Again?’, ‘Goodbye is the Saddest Word’ and, of course, ‘Sailing’. The tears on the quayside were real and poignant. I heard one teenage boy saying goodbye to his mate: Jimmy. Have a nice… he groped for the word …Life, he said finally.
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Me, I ache to return. And I hope for good news. That would include new industry, though Enterprise St Helena’s impressive brochure for investors does not include my own big idea: it would be the perfect setting in terms of both growing conditions and security for Britain’s first legal marijuana farm. Nor does the brochure mention the obvious site for the much-needed new hotel: Governor Capes’ underused mansion. This is not that radical an idea: it was suggested in 1938 by the island’s historian, Philip Gosse.
My fear, though, is that the airport will not generate enough tourism to make a real difference. And if it did, then St Helena’s fragile human ecology would soon go the way of its natural balance. I do hope for the continued health of Jonathan. The local vet Joe Hollins is certain the giant tortoise is now blind but has repaired his beak to help him graze, and supplemented his diet with fresh fruit, which, ironically, most islanders struggle to get.
What the island needs most of all, however, is a successor to its most famous resident of all. It needs its own home-grown Napoleon - more pacific but equally forceful - to give it the leadership and self-respect it deserves.
Our Comment: This article sets out many challenges for our new Governor, when she takes office in April 2016.
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