A dwindling population and defiant island geology – which, as Charles Darwin put it, “rises abruptly like a huge black castle from the ocean” – were long-time barriers to the development of an airport. But fears that the island could become nothing more than a remote old age home as younger Saints look elsewhere for employment finally forced the issue. Planned weekly flights will replace the monthly ship visits, and tourism is projected to take off.were one of the last travellers to do so.
Now, for the first time, visitors won’t risk being doused in the Atlantic swell when they reach for the ropes at the sea-washed Jamestown landing, trying to time their first step onto solid ground.
I, however, had expected the ropes at the landing – and even the strong arms of the Saints as they pulled me away from the swirling sea. I knew that the capital of Jamestown would be a crayon-coloured English village wedged improbably into a volcanic cleft on a tropical island. I’d read that Napoleon Bonaparte had been the island’s most famous prisoner.
But knowing of a place and knowing a place are different things. Of all the islands I’ve visited, Saint Helena is the most wonderful and strange. Caught somewhere between today and a time that may never have existed, St Helena has a retirement home for donkeys who have been replaced by cars; it only got mobile phone service a few months ago; it has a tiny bit of France (literally) in its lush interior; and it’s home to an estimated 187-year-old giant tortoise called Jonathon who, I was told, was just given his first wish.
“What do you think a tortoise wishes for?” my daughter Maia asked me, after our guide Robert Peters told us about Jonathon. I had no idea, especially when Peters added: “Some say he already had a wish, so this might really be his second.”
We found Jonathon (along with the much younger David, Emma, Myrtle and Fredrika) on the lawn of the governor’s residence, Plantation House. Set in the rugged island’s surprisingly bucolic interior – which appears transplanted in its entirety, complete with charming parish churches, from the English countryside – Plantation House and Jonathon are just two of the 162-square-mile island’s eclectic highlights.
Others include spectacular hiking and diving, Edmond Halley’s 1677 observatory, a quarantine station and refugee camp for freed slaves, former Boer concentration camps, a smidgen of native jungle which was once catalogued by Charles Darwin, and – most oddly – 14 hectares of French territory that’s under the administration