St Helena from the Sea
The Island that Conquered Napoleon
Evans and I are on the homeward leg of our circumnavigation. We leave Cape Town, South Africa bound for the Caribbean aboard our Shannon 37 ketch Silk on January 4, 1995. Ahead of us stretches over 5,500 nautical miles of open ocean, and we are planning only one stop. Lonely St. Helena, arguably the most isolated of all islands, will serve us as it has other ocean voyagers for over four and a half centuries past – with water and food, and perhaps some small amount of hospitality. The only thing we know of it is that Napoleon spent his last years a prisoner on this tiny outpost of the British empire. But history is not our concern. We are considering St. Helena with a sailor’s eye, a stepping stone to our final landfall and the completion of our three year odyssey.
St Helena from a high point
Twelve days out of Cape Town, we make landfall on an island fortress protected by mile-high eroding volcanic cliffs. Black and red soil cascades down the sides of washed out gullies where vegetation can find no purchase. Water-sculpted gulches meet the sea at the base of wind-carved promontories. There is no way to raise this raw, volcanic island without being seen from a dozen points, most of which bore manned forts during the time that Napoleon was incarcerated here. Any ship would have been visible a half a day before it arrived, making a surprise assault and rescue virtually impossible. Even if a ship could have closed with the island, the complete lack of natural harbors would have frustrated any attempt to land the smallest boat and rescue party. Though there is much debate over the actual cause of Napoleon’s death, as the desolate island a thousand miles from any continent rises from the sea before me the thought rises with it—perhaps he died of sheer hopelessness.
Landing warf
Rounding the last point, we see a fort and then a few low buildings huddled between two red rock cliffs. Neither of us can believe that this is Jamestown, the largest settlement on the island, though there are a few fishing boats anchored in the open roadstead. From the fort above the town, one can begin to appreciate both the tenuous nature of the anchorage and the tenacity of those who have sought to tame this island. The entire wharf area was originally constructed by hand along the foot of one of the massive ridges that defines the harbor. This half-mile long corridor snakes under the overhanging cliffs, a man-made quay where fishing boats and small containers vie for the little available space and where the Customs buildings and fumigation sheds back onto the cliff face itself. St. Helena is one of the few places we visited over the course of our three-year circumnavigation without an air strip of any kind, so everything and everyone that has come ashore since the wharf was built has been landed here.
Prison
Besides the few yachts that stop, the islanders’ only contact with the rest of the world is a supply ship, the RMS. St. Helena, which calls once every four to six weeks. Supplies are transferred to barges, ferried into the jetty, and then lifted off by the crane that sits at the wharf’s far end. The ship’s centrality to the island’s survival is evident from where we sit at anchor. High on the eastern point that offers some small protection to the harbor, a greeting to the RMS. St. Helena is visible for more than a mile out to sea. These letters stand as a declaration against the loneliness and desolation of the island itself. The islanders belong to something beyond this ruthless rock surrounded by an uncaring sea, and the RMS St.Helena is the tangible proof of that belonging.
The anchorage that the wharf serves is an open roadstead subject to an almost constant swell. In winter storms, massive breakers have been known to start well behind the front line of boats to crash over the wall protecting the wharf. While we visit the island, the strong South Atlantic high keeps things calm, though we are always ready to head out to sea if conditions start to change. Our hold on St. Helena and her secrets is tenuous and temporary, and we are periodically reminded of that when the swell works its way around the eastern point and sets all the boats to rolling.
The surge near the wharf is so turbulent and the concrete landing area so battered that we don’t take our dinghy ashore. Instead, the local ferry takes us to the landing (St. Helena 007). There we wait for the ferryman to maneuver the banged up metal boat as close as possible to the concrete wharf, then we reach for the ropes that are suspended from an iron bar overhead. As the ferry lifts on the two-foot swell, we swing ourselves and our belongings ashore, landing on the slippery steps, and the island has us in its grip. The thought occurs to me that Napoleon held this rope, stepped on this step, faced this island.
Steps to Fortress
Once past the man-made quays and through the stone archway, the town itself has a distinctly Mediterranean flavor. Stuccoed buildings painted in a broad palette of primary colors march up the main street. On the main square, the church’s white tower houses a lovely golden-handed clock that reflects the morning sun. The jauntiness of the buildings seems but a brave facade meant to hold off the rugged hills that crowd the town from either side. The settlement’s location was dictated not by the hospitality of the surrounding landscape but by the presence of the almost-anchorage at its foot. The town seems desperate to reach out of the valley, to make its way from the harsh volcanic cliffs to the verdant interior of the island. The crisscross of fortified roads sketches gray lines, diamonds and X’s across the red cliff faces that reach out of the valley. Seen from above, the town is a glacier sliding down into the sea, and the gray-walled roads are fingers clawing to maintain a precarious hold on the encroaching red rock of the cliff faces.
WWe tour the island in a Chevy truck which arrived here three decades before I was born. After climbing out of the valley that imprisons the town, we come for the first time to the verdant plateau which is often shrouded in mist. The fog and clouds swirl around us, but through it we catch glimpses of sleek cattle lying in terraced fields, of lush green grass melting into pine trees that climb to the top of the hills. Bright colors flash by in the mist – hibiscus and jacaranda, but also little orange and yellow birds that look like canaries. As we drive, the sun shreds the low clouds and we find ourselves on the edge of the high plateau where the verdant fields meet the barren valleys of red volcanic rock that plunge down into the restless sea. The wind has carved fantastic shapes into the soft cliffs, in one place leaving a lone rock balanced precariously on a high mound – Lot's Wife. The bickering of the ghosts that haunt this isolated place are for a time completely overwhelmed by the raw power of the natural forces that have truly defined this island over millennia.
Napoleon’s house
Longwood, Napoleon’s house and prison, is surrounded by magnificent gardens, and the riot of colors from a hundred different types of blossoms provides a cheery counterpoint to the heaviness of the house itself, painted in a brick red except for one wing which is an unfortunate robin’s egg color. The gardens were Napoleon’s last campaign, his only diversion when the paranoia of the then Governor of the island confined him to the house and its grounds. We roughly translate a French plaque as, “These gardens will be the only empire that I leave behind.” The current Longwood, the grounds around it, and the tomb where Napoleon was originally buried are now French territory, and it was the French who had painstakingly rebuilt and refurbished the house and gardens.
Steps to fortress
Despite the dozens of chronicles of Napoleon’s final days, no one knows what really caused his death. Was it arsenic administered by one of his entourage who could no longer stand exile on this inhospitable island? Or was it lead poisoning from the lead-lined bathtub that he bathed in up to his chin for three to four hours every day, his only escape from the stultifying attentions of his enemies and his friends? Or did the paranoid Governor poison him to ensure that Napoleon never escaped the island to ruin his promising career? Or was it stomach cancer, the same disease that had felled his father at a young age? The rushed and unprofessional autopsy at the time revealed perforations in the stomach consistent with any of these hypotheses, so the final cause of Napoleon’s demise remains a mystery.
The more we learn of the island, the more we find that Napoleon was not the only one to come to St. Helena reluctantly. The island’s entire history is one long list of unwilling inhabitants. Initially discovered by the Portuguese in 1502, St. Helena’s location was a closely guarded secret which helped them to hold the trade routes to India. Passing ships took on water and dropped off tortoises, goats, and also crew members suffering from tropical diseases or scurvy who would die or recuperate while waiting for the next ship to take them home. The water and supplies often made the life or death difference on the long run back to Europe.
Later, after the British had discovered the island and prised the East India trade away from the Portuguese, the island continued its central role in controlling the spice trade. To maintain its grip on the island, Britain required that each of its ships drop off at least one slave from Malaysia or Madagascar to be used to build the network of roads and fortifications that we still see today. Later still, after the British had freed their slaves, they tried to break the American’s continuing trade in humanity by intercepting slave ships. Many of the Africans who had been bound for servitude were brought here, where they were used as indentured labor to continue fortifying the island. A bit later, indentured labor started to come from China. While the Chinese were eventually taken to Cape Town, their genes are still evident in the facial structure and skin color of many of the inhabitants.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the island became a backwater. Still, other inhabitants found their reluctant way to St. Helena’s shores. During the Boer War the island was used to house prisoners, some of whom left children behind when they were returned to South Africa. And of course the British have left their mark, though until recently the “ex-pats” have tried to maintain a certain British reserve and not mix with the “natives.”
The result of all of these disparate elements on the local population is a wonderful mixture of accident and fate. Most of the people we meet have a coffee complexion, dark hair and a hint of the orient in their bone structure and movements. Today the islanders have little sense of their ethnicity, but they have an overwhelming sense of their own identity. Nowhere in our travels did we have such an uncompromising sense of place in British history or of Britain in a place. Elsewhere, history has marched on and both Empire and Commonwealth suffer a mixed legacy of national glory and colonial shame. But here, without a heritage of their own, all these people have is their role in history, and the history they have is Britain’s. Their link to Britain and the sense of identity they feel is what makes their isolation in time and space bearable, just as it must have for all of the transplanted British when the sun never set on the Empire.
The islanders’ sense of community is automatically extended to us as visitors. As we wander through the small town, we realize that everybody knows who we are and almost everything about us. The details of their knowledge astonish us, and include the names of siblings and parents gleaned from faxes we have been sending at the local telegraph office. The day we arrive the bank is closed, but a dozen strangers try to give us money so we can buy a few supplies. A freak wave broke the plywood blade for our windvane about halfway to St. Helena. The local carpenter scours the island for a thick enough piece of plywood, crafts it into a new blade in half a day, and refuses to take anything in return. For the time that we stay here, we are one with the islanders’ in forging an alliance against the uncaring realities of nature.
After a week in St. Helena, we are as reluctant to leave as those before us had been to stay. On our last evening, the cliffs glow golden in the setting sun highlighting the message to the RMS. St. Helena and silhouetting one of the many abandoned forts from which sentries once watched the sea for approaching ships. The next morning as we motor out from under the island’s wind shadow and set our sails for the almost 4,000-mile voyage to the Caribbean, I find myself wondering again what really killed Napoleon. As the island slips under the horizon, I decide that in all of the possible answers, there really is only one answer. This lonely and implacable island conquered the emperor. Death was his only escape.