Outposts

by Simon Winchester

The Jamestown church—St James’s, though presumably not named after the James who was Duke of York when the East India Company annexed the island in 1651—stands on the right of the parade ground, opposite the castle, beside the tiny prison. It is an unlovely church, with a white stone tower, and, when not blown off by a storm, has a weathervane in the shape of a fish.

  Most of the Jamestown aristocracy is buried here, and the same names recur. Benjamin, Thomas (‘Throw a stone and hit a Thomas,’ the islanders used to say, there were so many of them), Hudson, Young, Green, Yon (descendants of the indentured Chinese workers brought to St Helena by the Company), Moyce, Maggott, Youde, Jonas. And a batch of classical names, plucked from scholarly memory and given to the freed slaves who arrived here in the mid-nineteenth century, and which exist still as memorials to Victorian enlightenment: Plato, Caesar, Hercules, Mercury. (A Mr Jeff Scipio was enjoying congratulations when I visited the island: he had just repaired a stricken cargo ship by fashioning a new shaft bearing out of eucalyptus wood. The ship managed to get across the Atlantic to Recife, still going strong.)

  There is a tablet in St James’s to one of the island’s great dynastic figures, Mr Saul Solomon, who died in 1892. His ancestor, who was also called Saul, was put ashore, gravely ill, from an India-bound merchantman, in 1790; he recovered, persuaded his brothers Benjamin and Joseph to come down from London and join him in business—one of the very few to have enough confidence and imagination to try to make money in St Helena. (Some would say his considerable success was a testament to his Jewishness, though the family later became Anglicans.)

  The first Saul Solomon is said to have tried to help Napoleon escape by smuggling a silken ladder to him, hidden in a teapot. The plot evidently failed, but Solomon’s admiration for the Emperor was recognised by the French, who made him French Consul, and gave him a medal when they took Napoleon’s body away to be buried in Paris. The dynasty dominated St Helena for generations; it is still barely possible to get by on the island without doing business with Solomon and Company, who brew beer, run a banking service, sell Carnation milk and act as sole agents for the shipping line that is the Saints’ only means of escape to the outside world.

  Jamestown lies at the base of a valley between two immense ridges of basalt. On the eastern side is Munden’s Hill, with the ruins of two batteries; the western side is Ladder Hill, where the old fort, the barracks, the observatory and signal station were built. There is a road that winds and twists its way dangerously along the valley sides, and must be two miles long. But there is also a stairway—a remarkable, unforgettable stairway of 700 stone steps each eleven inches high. (The lowest one is buried, so you only count 699.) The ‘Ladder’ thus formed must surely count as one of the most extraordinary and breathtaking structures to be found anywhere.

  I could hardly believe my eyes when I first saw it. I hadn’t read about it in the guidebooks, and the name on the map—Jacob’s Ladder—meant nothing. It was the first morning; I was waiting for an appointment to see the Governor, and was mooching about in the square, admiring the tiny fire engine, chatting to the prison guards (only one inmate that day in the Empire’s tiniest gaol, as ‘we normally let our guests out each afternoon to have a swim’) and peering behind the minute city power station. It was then that I noticed a flight of steps, flanked on each side by black iron railings, running up the mountainside.

  But they didn’t end at rooftop height, nor level with St James’s steeple. I had to crane my neck right back, until it hurt. The steps went up and up, their steepness apparently increasing as they did so, so that they seemed to curve outwards and become vertical, like a rope ladder into the sky. They went so far and so high that they and their guard rails vanished into a single line, and were just a faint black etching as they reached the lip of Ladder Hill and the fort. It looked like a trick, painted to amuse passing tourists; and for a second I thought it was a cunning piece of trompe-l’oeil, until the first schoolboy hurtled down, breathless and grubby, and landed at my feet.

  The boys’ slide was, a hundred years ago, said to be ‘a feat most indescribably terrible to watch’. It began in the days when soldiers from the Ladder Hill barracks had to be on sentry-go down in Jamestown at lunch. The steps had been built, along with a pair of tramways, to help carry ammunition, stores—and, in particular, manure—between fort and city: the soldiers decided it could be used to bring their lunch. Boys were thus directed to climb the stairs—which rise at an average angle of thirty-nine degrees, enough to give most first-time climbers severe vertigo—and fetch tureens of soup. The boys, determined to serve the soup hot, devised a perilous-looking descent: with shoulders over one rail, and ankles over the other, and arms spread along the bars to act as brakes, they would slide down, tureens balanced on their stomachs. The average time from taking a squaddy’s orders, running up the stairway and returning with a bowl of steaming mulligatawny was eight minutes.

  And down the boys—and girls—still come, their satchels where the tureens once were, their mission simply to get out of school, and back to their homes in Jamestown, as quickly as possible. Terrible though the slide may be to see, only one person is said to have been killed on the Ladder, a sailor who tried the climb after a night in one of the Jamestown pubs. (A retired colonel lived in the old signal station during the 1950s; he had perched his bed against a railing overlooking a thousand-foot drop and, had he rolled over in his sleep, would surely have fallen. He said he had lost his breakfast cup of tea more than once, but had never fallen over the edge himself. He died, peacefully, in his bed, in 1982: he had moved to the Isle of Man.)

  Like so many of the great Atlantic rocks, this forty-seven square mile confection of basalt and banana trees was first glimpsed, its mist-topped mountains surging theatrically from the warm seas, by the Portuguese, in 1502. They named the island after Hellena, mother of Constantine the Great, upon whose birthday the discovery was made; the spelling was modified on the second map, and has remained thus ever since.

  But despite the evident pleasantness of their find, the Portuguese made no attempt to colonise it. They left some animals and planted some trees; and eleven years later they called back on their way home from India, and left behind a nobleman named Fernando Lopez, who had been mutilated, in Goa, for desertion, and who had stowed away on the ship. The Goanese magistracy had cut off his nose, his ears, his right hand and the little finger of his left—so it was perhaps hardly surprising he decided, rather than carry on home to meet Mrs Lopez, to stay alone on this charming, if deserted island. He hid in a cave until the ship had left, only to find that his shipmates had taken pity on him, and left him a barrel of biscuits and a fire, which he kept alight for months.

  A year later a southbound ship stopped by; a terrified Lopez fled into the jungle. When he emerged, and the ship had gone, he found more food and clothes, and a letter telling him not to be afraid, but to present himself next time his countrymen turned up. But he wouldn’t. For a decade he would run and hide whenever he sighted a sail. A letter from King John III offering him a free pardon and safe passage back to Lisbon had no effect.

  But then a ship was wrecked and its sole survivor, a Javanese slave boy, came ashore to join Lopez. Romantics might wish the boy to have been Friday to Lopez’s Crusoe, but in fact they loathed each other; and when the next Portuguese ship stopped in the bay, the child betrayed Lopez, and led the sailors to his hiding place. He agreed, eventually, to come back to Europe. He was a great celebrity; he was seen by the King and Queen, and went on to Rome to confess his sins before the Pope who asked him—according to this most charming of St Helenian legends—what his greatest wish might be. ‘I yearn to go back to the peace of St Helena,’ he is supposed to have said; and so went back, and lived for thirty further years in the valley where Jamestown now stands. ‘He cultivated a great many gourds, pomegranates and palm-trees,’ a Portuguese history relates. ‘He kept ducks, hens, sows and she-goats with young, all of which increased largely, and all became wild in the
woods.’

  When I stayed on the island in 1983 I lived with a couple of similar pioneering spirit, keen to return to quieter ways, eager for island solitude. He had been an electrician in Devon; he had always yearned to go to St Helena; when he retired he took a ship there, and bought—for a pittance—a splendid Georgian mansion near a hill called Mount Eternity. Then came his wife and all his worldly goods, his books, his billiards table, his electronic organ; the couple settled there to farm, to read and live out a peaceful conclusion to their lives. They seemed wholly content with their choice, and not in the least concerned with their distance from home, and friends, and intellectual stimulus. I used to waken every day at seven when the flock of geese began to cackle madly; when I went down into the garden that was cool and fresh with dew I would find him, picking each goose up in his arms, cuddling it, and kissing it lightly on the beak.

  The Portuguese managed, more by luck than judgement, to keep their discovery of St Helena totally secret for nearly a hundred years. Luckily—and rather oddly—no other nation’s ships strayed close to the island; and it was not until the English sea rover, John Cavendish, captured and looted a Spanish galleon and carefully read the ship’s pilot, that anyone learned of the approximate position of the island. He sailed there in 1588, finding ‘a valley…marvellously sweet and pleasant, and planted in every place with fruit trees or with herbs’. There were some slaves on the island, and thousands of goats, which proved a pest, gnawing everything to pieces. But pleasant as the island was, Cavendish did not colonise it either; nor did any of the Dutch or French or Portuguese or Spanish sailors who stopped by in succeeding years. They simply used it as a watering station, left letters under a prominent boulder (the practice of using remote islands as mid-ocean post-boxes was then well established, with outbound masters leaving mail for homebound ships to collect and deliver at their final port), and collected fruit and vegetables and fresh meat.

  The Dutch finally claimed it, in 1633, but never occupied it permanently, and when the Cape Settlement in Africa was established, promptly abandoned it (though they did send expeditions there to look for fruit trees; Cape Town’s best-known variety of peach comes from the island, via one of those early Dutch expeditions). But this was, in Britain, the time of the great royal trading companies, and it was not long before the merchant adventurers of the City reached out into the South Atlantic. Armed with capital of seventy-two thousand pounds (more than thirty times the capitalised value of the Bermuda Company half a century before), the East India Company annexed the island, claimed it in the Company’s name, and, using the four vessels Dragon, Hector, Ascension and Susan, occupied it and set about building a fort.

  Within two years the island had a charter; and although it was attacked by the Dutch in 1673, the force was routed in a matter of weeks and guns were erected and batteries installed so that any further attacks would be repulsed. A new charter was issued on 16th December 1673—it can still be seen at the Castle—and St Helena was from that day on indubitably, in theory perpetually and, as it has turned out, rather less than fortunately, ruled by the British.

  At first it was a happy little place. Posters went up in London advertising its charms, and after the Great Fire in 1666, scores of homeless Cockneys set sail for a new life on the new possession. Their Cockney accent is still very much a part of the strange tongue that is spoken on St Helena—an accent that is part Devon, part Hottentot, part Olde English, and with that curious transposition of v and w so often mentioned in Dickens. The purest form of St Helenian speech, delivered with machine-gun rapidity and intensity, can still be found among the fishermen, and Lawrence Green was able to quote an entire conversation: ‘Dere was sumting say bout Govinmint ought to send for nets and men to sho how to ketch fish. Tcha! man, foolish…us can ketch fish better den orrer fellers. You know, sir, when us get gude luck and plentee fish and tinks for once will get couple shillings dem wimmin in fish maarket stick up fer price. When peepil see plentee fish and price high they buy little tinking bum-bye cheap. Us poor fishmin get werry little.’

  The islanders tilled and planted, raised their cattle and pigs, built their cottages and generally turned the island’s interior into the soft, green countryside they had left behind to the north. The legacy of those early farmers remains: for although St Helena, ringed with frightening cliffs and with inhospitable mountains frowning over all, has a wild, prison-like aspect for many visitors, the inner valleys and meadows are as charming and delicate as any in southern England. Those refugees from London soothed and teased all the harshness from the island’s rugged topography, and left it a model of what they thought lay down the road from Spitalfields and Lambeth.

  (They lived in a time of terrible discipline, though: when a woman named Elizabeth Starling beat up the captain of a visiting ship she was stripped naked and given fifteen lashes, and then ducked three times; thieving slaves had their hands cut off; and when two runaway apprentices stole a gun and shot a pig each had the tip of an ear sliced off, the letter ‘R’ branded on to his forehead, and a pair of pothooks riveted around his neck before being flogged from one end of Jamestown to the other.)

  The polyglot community filled up with slaves, Chinese indentured labourers, Malays, Madagascans, Indians—and still more Englishmen and Scots lured by promises of comfort and opportunity. The array of inhabitants and visitors produced bewildering complications: there was no island currency, and at one time a treasurer complained that among the coinage in common use in Jamestown were gold dubloons, mohurs from Bengal, moidores, star pagodas, gold gubbers and Venetian sequins, as well as rupees and ducatoons, German crowns, Marie Thérèse dollars, joes from Portugal, guilders from Holland, rixdollars, francs and English shillings.

  A steady cavalcade of the distinguished dropped by: Edmund Halley, the astronomer who gave his name to the comet, came to the mountains of St Helena to observe the transit of Mercury; fog obscured his view, and it often swirls over the flax-covered hill that bears his name, and where he mounted his telescope. Captain Bligh looked in, and presented some breadfruit which he was taking from Tahiti to Jamaica. Captain Cook, on his way back from Antarctica, spent a few days on the island, and made some pointed criticisms of the islanders’ agricultural methods. HMS Beagle stood off for six days in 1836 when Charles Darwin made as near as possible a complete inventory of the unique flora and fauna. (Not all of it home-grown: the British brought in furze and blackberry, frogs and rabbits, and an enthusiastic naturalist, Phoebe Moss, released five mynah birds at a country house in mid-island, and the colony is now thick with them. But the wirebird, a small fat plover which lives in the Kaffir figs, is unique; and the depredations of the voracious native white ant have become a St Helena legend. They had an eccentric liking for theological books, and contentedly munched their way through the entire library, leaving only the bindings. Hardly a house has escaped the attentions of their jaws; the main staircase at the Castle collapsed with a roar one night and had to be replaced by a cast-iron model brought out at great expense from England.)

  ‘Without Napoleon, there would be no St Helena,’ the French Consul once remarked to me. And it was, indeed, fortunate for the island that it had so illustrious a prisoner. The other choices for his confinement, according to Lord Liverpool’s notes of the time, were St Lucia, the Tower of London, Fort William, Dumbarton Castle, Gibraltar, Malta and the Cape of Good Hope—one trembles to think of the present state of St Helena had the Emperor not been exiled there, and the island had been forgotten by everyone. His six progressively more wretched years—they started well enough, playing whist and blind-man’s buff with the flirtatious Betty Balcombe in the house that is now the island’s cable station—effectively produced two more colonies for Britain.

  A garrison had to be sent to Ascension Island, and another to Tristan da Cunha, to foil any French adventures to free their subject. The houses constructed by the soldiers and marines, and later inhabited by some of them who opted to remain, formed the basis of pio
neering colonial settlements; and St Helena, too, benefited hugely from the military interest placed upon her in consequence of her notorious guest. Nearly 3,000 soldiers were camped up on Deadwood Plain, within easy sight of the house eventually chosen for Napoleon’s residence (and now, like his empty grave, the property of the people of France, and presided over by a resident consul, complete with tricolour and diplomatically immune motor car).

  Such cruise ships as arrive at Jamestown today do so because of Longwood House. Here are the mournful portraits and the billiard tables, the marble busts and the formal gardens where Napoleon walked along deeply incised paths so his hated sentries would not see him. There are the wooden shutters from behind which the Emperor would gaze at the stars—one hole for his telescope when he was standing, another below it for when he sat. Here is Vignali’s massive sideboard, used for the celebration of Mass, and there the great copper bath in which Napoleon would lie, soaking gently and dictating his memoirs. The visitors can twirl, if the watchman is dozing in the sun, the globes of earth and sky which still bear the marks of the Emperor’s fingernails; and they come to see the deathbed.

  And one can scrabble about in the garden to look for shards of glass from old French wine bottles: no greater evidence of British insolence can be found, French visitors believe. For the Governor of the day, the much-loathed Sir Hudson Lowe, had demanded of the Emperor that, after drinking wine, he return his empties to the British Government. Napoleon, not surprisingly, angrily refused, and had his staff smash the bottles and scatter the glass among the roses.

  I met a pretty young girl one afternoon at Longwood House, walking around the gardens in a dress that looked uncannily out of date. She was, it turned out, from California, and worked at a dull task, punching out pieces for the insides of a computer. She had become obsessed by the sad story of Napoleon since her childhood, and had vowed to visit the island of his exile. Easier said than done. She worked hard, earned the necessary money to get across to England to catch the once-every-twelve-weeks boat from Bristol to St Helena.