But, after many years of planning and false starts, an airport has now been built and flights implemented from late 2017. Every Saint seems to have their own view on its possible impact: some hopeful for the opportunities it can open up and how it can reverse the island’s fortunes; others apprehensive of change, or sceptical as to whether it really will bring more tourists. They do at least have the peace of mind that they can get off the island quickly now if they have a medical emergency. Yet many are already feeling nostalgic about the RMS St Helena (which completed its final run earlier this year), the ship that was once the island’s lifeline.
I’d had an itch to go to St Helena for years, fascinated even as a child by an island that was best known as Napoleon Bonaparte’s last place of exile. Situated 1,900km from the coast of Angola, 2,500km from Brazil, and measuring a third the size of the Isle of Wight, St Helena really is a speck on the map, and boasts probably the world’s most remote golf course, most remote distillery and most remote marathon. With the arrival of the airport, I was curious to see how life here would change.
Same but different
Being on St Helena was disorientating at first. The island’s Britishness has a whiff of exoticism about it and reminders of its rich history were everywhere. For example, English may be the main language here but Saints often slip into a dialect that visitors struggle to understand, just as Sunday roasts are popular yet are often accompanied by curry.
The more I explored, the more local flourishes I noticed. Instead of pigeons and crows, the birds flying overhead were beautiful fairy terns, snowy-white in colour. The local currency is the pound but the images on the notes and coins are different: the 10p piece shows the island’s ubiquitous dolphins, while the 5p is emblazoned with St Helena’s most famous resident, Jonathan the giant tortoise, who is believed to be the world’s oldest terrestrial animal at around 186 years old (no one knows for sure) and currently lives a pampered existence at the Governor’s country residence.
But mention the island to anyone and it’s a notorious former resident who they always reference: “Isn’t that the place where Napoleon was imprisoned?” Yes, having previously escaped from Elba (off the coast of Italy), it was clear that somewhere much more remote and fortified was needed after his final defeat at Waterloo. St Helena became the ‘Cursed Rock’ where the French Emperor was exiled in 1815 and lived until his death from stomach cancer in 1821.
“There was no way the British were going to let him escape,” said guide Aaron Legg when I joined his day tour. “You had to know the day’s password just to pass through here,” he explained as we drove through a former gateway in the direction of Longwood, the house where Napoleon spent the majority of his internment.
Billed as a 4WD adventure, Aaron’s trip was the perfect introduction to the diverse landscapes of St Helena. On paper the island is diminutive, but its topography makes it feel much larger, no matter whether exploring on foot or by car. We drove through microclimate after microclimate, sometimes within a few metres of each other, experiencing everything from an arid plain of cacti, to lush cattle-grazed pastures, shaded lanes and riots of tropical vegetation all inside a few short minutes. With such contrasts crammed into a small area, I could see why the island is often described as a walker’s paradise.
En route, I was learning more than anticipated about history, flora, fauna, and just about everything. We had already had good sightings of St Helena’s endemic bird, a plover known locally as the wire bird – supposedly because of its skinny legs. Once critically endangered, a local conservation programme has been successful and its numbers are increasing again. They are easily spied on windswept Deadwood Plain (a former Boer prisoner of war camp), a view that Napoleon would once have looked down on from the grounds around Longwood.
The last emperor
We stopped for a picnic lunch at a viewpoint in the Millennium Forest, although I was initially surprised at how low the trees were. When first discovered, the island was rich in endemic species, including St Helena ebony, but overexploitation and the introduction of goats and other plants and animals resulted in many of the island’s native species going extinct. It was thought by 1850 that there was no St Helena ebony left here, but in November 1980 a single specimen was discovered on a cliff by a botanist, and today the species is thriving again in the forest and is the national flower of the island.
Flax grows abundantly in some valleys, forming the hedgerows that line the road in places. It was an important crop here during the two World Wars but lost money outside of that period, ultimately proving to be too uneconomical to farm. Today, it grows wild and free as a potent reminder of yet another false dawn for the island.
That search for financial independence still continues, and yet you get the impression that anything could grow here, given the sun, rain and variety of altitudes. On another day I visited a coffee plantation where Bill and Jill Bolton grow one of the purest and rarest coffees in the world, first introduced from Yemen in 1732 and now available in Harrods as well as their own café in Jamestown.