by Mark Nicholson
Last November a colleague called to ask if I would take two visitors for a tour round my ecological restoration project in Kenya. Two cheerful ladies turned up but I was totally unable to pinpoint the accent. “And where do you come from?” I asked. “We are Saints”, they replied. “Er, yes”, I said, “Well, they are few and far between in this part of the world, so welcome”. They were on their way back to St. Helena and before they left, they invited me to visit and give a lecture about my work.
‘Saints’ is how St. Helenians refer to themselves. And their ethnicity? My hostess, Vanessa Thomas-Williams just describes herself as “pure Saint” which means a healthy mixture of genotypes including Welsh, Portuguese, Indian, English, Chinese, Irish, Indian, Dutch, Filipino, French, and various parts of Africa.
For centuries, the only way to the island was by sea. An airport was discussed during the Second World War and it was finally opened in 2016 at a cost of £285m. A regular flight from the UK was envisaged but it never happened. The runway cannot take the large aircraft needed for the 8500 km trip and the island’s population of 4000 means it would always be uneconomical. There is now one flight a week from Johannesburg via Walvis Bay in Namibia, where the plane is re-fuelled in case of aborted landings, ensuring it has enough fuel to get back to the mainland 2500km away. This regular flight is a life-saver for the Saints. Literally, in case of medical emergencies.
The runway lies on the eastern end of the island on a bare volcanic plain. The landscape is lunar. The landing is not for the fainthearted. The maiden flight of BA subsidiary Comair with a 737 was not a happy one and required three go-rounds. If the wind backs from the SE trades, a large rock outcrop, the King and Queen, blocks the airflow and causes alarming shear before touchdown. Straight after that, there can be strong crosswinds. A South African airline now flies an Embraer, which is much more manoeuvrable in wind shear and the flight crew always comprises a team of two experienced Captains. Landing is always accompanied by a big round of applause. The flight two weeks before I arrived resulted in passengers staying in a Johannesburg hotel for a week waiting for the fog to clear. Just before I left, the plane aborted its landing on its first attempt.
The head of Air Traffic Control, a Kenyan and his wife, thrilled to have another Kenyan on the island, asked me over for a traditional meal of ugali. “How did you get the job?” I enquired. He told me he was seconded to Johannesburg for the World Cup in 2010, became Director of ATC in East London until he was driven out as a Kenyan by ‘black-on-black’ xenophobic discrimination. He accepted the St. Helena position and now practises on the most modern ATC simulator in the world. I asked him how he fills his week. “I am the captain of the Golf Club and play two rounds of golf daily except when the plane arrives. It has killed my job prospects of course: a normal ATC handles 20 aircraft movements an hour, so one plane a week may not impress. But I love it here so I will stay till I retire”.
When you leave the barren eastern end, you drive through a lush and magical island with a ridge of cloud forest in the middle.
Cloud forest in the centre of the island
Being used to the steamy tropical islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans, I fell in love with the benign climate of St. Helena. It lies in the centre of a line of three islands, all administered as UK Overseas Territories. Much hotter Ascension Island, an air base for the RAF, USAF and NASA is 1300km to the north. Tristan da Cunha is an island group with stormy seas 2500 km to the south with 300 inhabitants. Over 6000 km to the southwest are the cold Falklands. Many Saints get much higher- paid jobs on Ascension or the Falklands but they always come back.
The capital, Jamestown (above), where 90 percent of the population live, lies in a narrow valley between two barren volcanic cliffs. The most delightful part of driving round the island is that one waves to everybody, whether one knows them or not (and most of the time one does). Life is slow: work starts at 8ish, followed immediately by breakfast with one’s workmates, which lasts a good hour.
When the Portuguese arrived in 1502, they planted fruit trees and brought goats, which destroyed most of the native vegetation. The Dutch followed in 1633 but it was the East India Company that laid claim to the island in 1659. It was a wise move: a tiny island barely 10 km across and now ‘owned’ by the UK, controls a marine exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of over 100,000 sq. km. of sea and what a beautifully clear, warm ocean it is. Beyond the volcanic peak of the island, the sea goes down to 6000m. On the island itself, the names are redolent of Treasure Island: Prosperous Bay, Half Tree Hollow, Alarm Forest, Two Gun Saddle.
The main purpose of my visit was to see the restoration of the unusual biodiversity. There is only one endemic bird species on the island, the Wire Bird, a small plover. The ubiquitous and invasive bird species are the Indian Mynahs, which everyone hates as they gobble up every fig and other fruit they can find. Exquisite Tropic Birds flit all over the island. There are 45 species of endemic plants compared with 376 species of invasive or naturalized plants, which make up a staggering 99 percent of the vegetative biomass. The endemic trees have strange names such as She Cabbage (Lachanodes arborea), He Cabbage (Pladaroxylon leucodendron) - yet neither are cabbages - and the beautiful Bastard Gumwoods and Scrubwoods (Commidendrum rotundifolium & C. rugosum). The last St. Helena Olive on earth (Nesiota elliptica & not an olive) succumbed to disease in 2002. The St. Helena Ebony (Trochetiopsis melanoxylon and no, not an ebony) was recorded by Joseph Banks in 1771 and went extinct in the 1800s. The Dwarf Ebony (Trochetiopsis ebenus) was believed extinct at the same time. In 1980, my hostess’s botanical teacher George Benjamin discovered two Dwarf Ebony trees while climbing with ropes down forbidding sea cliffs. My hostess then collected seed and planted 20,000 plants all over the island for which she was recently awarded an M.B.E.
St. Helena Ebony (extinct)
Plant collecting near the cliffs
Scrubwood on the coastal cliffs
The island is known as the place where Napoleon was exiled until he died in 1821. Unlike Andrew Roberts[1] and most of the French nation, I do not adulate a man who was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of young lives. I met a French couple on the top of High Knoll Fort who were doing an oceanographic survey between the island and Cap Verde. I asked them why they revered Napoleon: “Because if it wasn’t for him, we would probably have been forced to become Englishmen, Mon Dieu!”
His house, Longwood, is a modest building ill befitting a man who wished to be Emperor of the World. Conspiracy theorists still maintain that he died of arsenic poisoning from the wallpaper. I had dinner with a visiting Danish gastroenterologist in Jamestown who dismissed that theory. Far more likely is that he succumbed to stomach cancer and possibly too much drink. The colleague[2] of a good friend of mine in Cambridge has been begging the French for a tiny biopsy of muscle from the silver urn in Paris that contains Napoleon’s heart so he can look for familial gastric cancer genes. Nevertheless, the French have continued to say ‘Non’ for a decade, while Napoleon, an autodidact, would almost certainly have approved.
Tourists who drop in to visit St. Helena on cruise ships all go to Longwood and see the empty tomb from where Napoleon’s body was transferred in great state to Paris nineteen years later. The slab is unmarked because the British refused to allow the name Bonaparte to be engraved while the French insisted. If you are not a botanist, there is not a huge amount for the average tourist to see; there is one beach, which is dangerous to swim in owing to the strong undertow.
Many now ask why so much fuss is still made of Napoleon while the skeletons of 325 unknown slaves were exhumed while building the airport road. Around 9000 of the 30,000 slaves who were transported from Africa via St. Helena died on the island and a memorial plaque has now been erected.
Yes, I would be happy to emigrate to St. Helena as long as I had an internet connection. My family would probably not follow me. I have only two minor gripes. Flying there is very expensive: Nairobi to St. Helena (6611km) costs 0.35c/km. An air ticket from New York to Hawaii (7849km.) costs 0.7c/km. That is a bit thick since the northern hemisphere contributes 95 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
Secondly, a UK pound is valid in St. Helena but a St. Helena pound (the same value) is not accepted in the UK.
If Napoleon had not been so self-absorbed, maybe he could have taken up arboriculture and saved some of the remarkable trees. Alternatively, he could have learned ‘Saint’, the local dialect. Perhaps he would have understood more of it than I did. They say a good hobby prolongs one’s life.
The Saint dialect. A Saint tractor-driver I had tea with. I understood one word in twenty.
[1] Recently ennobled by Boris Johnson and now the pretentiously named Lord Roberts of Belgravia
[2] Carlos Caldas, Award Laureate 2021, European Society of Human genetics.