Saint Helena's history: an island that lived on passing ships

Who found Saint Helena and who used it first

Tradition gives the discovery to the Galician navigator João da Nova, bringing the four ships of the third Portuguese armada home to Lisbon, and dates it to 21 May 1502, the Eastern Orthodox feast of Saint Helena of Constantinople, after whom the island is named. A paper of 2015 traced that date to a book Jan Huyghen van Linschoten published in 1596 and preferred 3 May, the Catholic feast of the True Cross. A paper of 2022 doubted that da Nova found the island at all, since the Cantino planisphere, finished by November 1502, shows Ascension and leaves Saint Helena out. Britannica keeps da Nova and May 1502 and gives 3 May as the alternative.

The Portuguese found nobody living there. They landed goats, fruit trees and vegetables, built a chapel and one or two houses, and left sailors sick with scurvy to wait for the next ship, but made no permanent settlement. The trade winds carried ships from the Cape of Good Hope past the island on the homeward run from Asia. Outbound ships were carried towards South America and seldom called.

Its first known permanent resident was Fernão Lopes, a Portuguese who had turned traitor in India and been mutilated on the orders of Afonso de Albuquerque. He lived there from about 1516 and died on the island in 1545. Some time before 1557 five people escaped from a ship, two enslaved men from Mozambique, one from Java and two women, and stayed hidden until their number had grown to twenty.

Britannica holds that only the Portuguese knew of the island until Thomas Cavendish called in 1588; the Wikipedia history cites a Dutch book of 1508 that already gave its name and its distance from the Cape. English warships were soon lying in wait there for Portuguese carracks coming home from India, and in 1592 Philip II of Spain, also Philip I of Portugal, ordered the Goa fleet on no account to touch at the island. The Dutch Republic claimed Saint Helena in 1633. Britannica allows a Dutch occupation from about 1645 to 1651, the Wikipedia history finds no evidence of one, and by 1651 the Dutch had turned to their colony at the Cape.

Why the East India Company settled an empty island

How the Company made the island a fleet station

By 1649 the East India Company was ordering its homeward-bound ships to wait for one another at Saint Helena, and Oliver Cromwell granted it a charter to govern the island in 1657. Captain John Dutton arrived as the first governor in 1659 in the Marmaduke, and a fort, the Castle of St John, was finished within a month. After the Restoration of 1660 the fort became James Fort, and the town and the valley took the same name, after the Duke of York. Saint Helena dates its claim to be the oldest British colony after Bermuda from Dutton's arrival.

Basil George, the island historian quoted in the St Helena Government's World Heritage scoping report of 2019, calls it "the first place outside Britain that the EIC took possession of as a British Island", settled from England and "run as a company island". Company ships coming home could not stop at the Cape while the Dutch held it, and in his words "had to stop at St Helena".

The settlement never fed itself. Each planter was allotted one of 130 pieces of land, but recruits were scarce, and by 1670 the population had fallen to 66, of whom 18 were slaves. The Company ordered every homecoming ship to land a ton of rice.

The Dutch East India Company invaded from the Cape at the turn of 1672 and 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and the Company retook the island in May 1673 without loss of life and garrisoned it with 250 troops. The St Helena Government's heritage page dates the Dutch seizure to 1665. Charles II's charter of 1673 granted the island as though it were part of England, "in the same manner as East Greenwich in the County of Kent", and because Saint Helena had no trade the Company could send provisions from England free of customs.

Why the garrison kept mutinying

The soldiers who held the island for the Company mutinied again and again. A rising of soldiers and planters in 1684 left three mutineers dead in an attack on Fort James and four more executed. In 1693, after Governor Joshua Johnson ordered outgoing ships to sail only by daylight so that soldiers could not stow away, a party of them seized a ship and escaped, and Johnson was killed.

Drink lay behind several of the risings. When Governor Daniel Corneille confined troops and sailors to army canteens, about 200 soldiers fought loyal troops for three days over Christmas 1783; courts martial condemned 99, and one in every ten, chosen by lot, was shot. A ban on the public sale of spirits brought a mutiny of about 250 troops in December 1811, and nine of its leaders were executed.

William Dampier, calling in 1691, found 20 to 30 small stone houses in Jamestown, lived in only while ships were in the bay. Women born on the island, he wrote, wanted to be released "from that Prison" and saw marriage to a seaman or passenger as the only way.

How the settlers stripped the island's forest

The settlers cleared the native forest to distil spirits, tan hides and plant crops, and wood was short by the 1680s. Rats and goats had reached plague numbers by the 1690s. In 1710 the Great Wood, which had run from Deadwood Plain to Prosperous Bay Plain, was reported to have not a single tree left standing, and in 1715 Governor Isaac Pyke suggested moving the whole population to Mauritius. The Company kept paying for the island because of its place on the route. An ordinance of 1731 cut the goat population, but floods followed in 1732, 1734, 1736, 1747, 1756 and 1787.

In 1709 a soldier claimed to have found gold and silver in Breakneck Valley, and almost every able-bodied man went prospecting until an assay in London showed iron pyrites. Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster, sailing with Cook on the Resolution in 1775, recorded floods after the vegetation was removed. The St Helena ebony, thought extinct, was found again by George and Charlie Benjamin; the government dates the rediscovery to 1980, the Wikipedia history to 1981.

Who the ships brought to Saint Helena to work

Slaves arrived with the first settlement in 1659, according to the Museum of St Helena's account of Colin Fox's history of abolition on the island, A Bitter Draught, published in 2017. The sources disagree about where they came from. The Wikipedia history names Madagascar and Asia, the St Helena Government East Africa and Madagascar, and Basil George mostly the countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean. Every ship that traded with Madagascar had to deliver one slave to the island, and the census of 1723 counted 610 slaves in a population of 1,110.

Some slaves were burnt alive in the late seventeenth century, and rumours of a rising in 1694 led to three executions. Black islanders were first allowed to give evidence against white ones in 1787, and the import of slaves was banned in 1792. In 1818 Governor Hudson Lowe persuaded owners to free every child born to a slave after Christmas that year once it reached its late teens.

The end of slavery is dated differently in each account. The Wikipedia history records the phased emancipation of more than 800 slaves in 1827, Britannica gives 1826 to 1836, Basil George 1834, and the main Wikipedia article an ordinance of 27 May 1839. The Museum of St Helena describes the method. Slaves were made to take out loans to buy their own freedom, and the repayments became impossible once sovereignty passed to the Crown in 1834 and the economy crashed.

The first Chinese labourers arrived in 1810, about 600 of them by 1818 in the Wikipedia history's count, and after 1836 many were allowed to stay. Basil George writes that settlers, soldiers, slaves and Chinese had lived under different laws, and that within a few generations of abolition they had merged into one community with a common identity.

Why Britain kept sending prisoners to Saint Helena

How Napoleon lived out his exile at Longwood

The British government chose Saint Helena in 1815 to hold Napoleon Bonaparte. The Fondation Napoléon quotes the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, as saying that so far away "no scheming of any kind will be possible". Napoleon arrived on the Northumberland on 17 October 1815, stayed at the Briars pavilion while Longwood House was made ready, and moved there in December. During his captivity the island was placed under a general officer of the Crown, Sir Hudson Lowe. About 2,000 extra troops and staff were stationed there and Royal Navy ships circled it. The navy also garrisoned unoccupied Ascension on 22 October 1815.

Napoleon died at Longwood on 5 May 1821 and was buried in the Geranium Valley, called the Valley of the Tomb ever since. The garrison left and the Company took the island back. His body was exhumed on 15 October 1840 and handed to the Prince de Joinville aboard the Belle Poule for return to France. Longwood House and the Valley of the Tomb became French property in 1858, after Napoleon III negotiated their purchase in 1854, and a French representative has lived on the island since.

Who followed Napoleon into exile on the island

Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, son of the Zulu king Cetshwayo, was held on the island from 1890 to 1897, and the St Helena Government counts 25 Zulu chiefs among its exiles. The first 514 Boer prisoners landed from the SS Milwaukee on 14 April 1900, General Piet Cronjé and his wife among them, and transports followed into 1902; the King's Own Royal Regiment Museum puts the total at over 5,000 and the Wikipedia history at over 6,000. They were held at Deadwood Plain and Broad Bottom, and the island's population reached 9,850 in 1901. Khalid bin Barghash, the self-proclaimed Sultan of Zanzibar, was held from 1917 to 1921. Three Bahrainis, princes in the Wikipedia history and nationalists in the government's list, arrived in 1957 and stayed until a writ of habeas corpus freed them in 1960.

What the Liberated African Establishment left in Rupert's Valley

In 1840 Britain based a naval squadron at Saint Helena to suppress the Atlantic slave trade, and a Vice-Admiralty Court sat in Jamestown to try the crews of captured slave ships. The St Helena National Trust records that the court operated for 27 years, condemned 450 slave ships and liberated more than 26,000 Africans. The UK St Helena Heritage Trust dates those captures to 1840 to 1872. A University of California, Santa Cruz account of a study published in 2026 gives nearly 27,000 between 1840 and 1863, and the Wikipedia history counts 15,076 landed between 1840 and 1849 alone.

Most were housed in the Liberated African Establishment in Rupert's Valley, beside Jamestown: a receiving centre, hospital and quarantine of tents and wooden huts that at the worst times held well over a thousand people. John Melliss, the colonial engineer, wrote in 1861 of boarding a slave ship anchored off Rupert's Valley and finding its deck "thickly strewn with dead, dying, and starved bodies". About a third of those received died there, mostly of disease, 8,000 or more by the estimates of both trusts, and the National Trust adds that most of those buried were children and teenagers. Most survivors were shipped back to Africa or on to other countries, and about 500 stayed on the island. The depot closed in the 1870s, ten years after the naval station was withdrawn in 1864.

The graves were unmarked. Archaeologists found two burial grounds in 2007 and 2008 while excavating ahead of the airport works, and the UK St Helena Heritage Trust records 325 intact skeletons, with name tags, metal bracelets and beads. In August 2022 members of the island community reburied the remains in coffins made by students at Prince Andrew School.

A study published in Science in July 2026 combined archival records, strontium isotopes and ancient DNA to trace the childhood origins of 152 of the dead, most of them to western Central Africa, consistent with ships that had sailed from what is now Angola and the Congo region. No. 1 Building, put up in 1865 to house up to 80 people and the only structure of the establishment still standing, is being restored as a memorial and interpretation centre with £165,000 agreed with the Commonwealth Heritage Forum in 2026.

How steam and the canal emptied the anchorage

Control passed from the Company to the Crown under the India Act of 1833, with effect from 22 April 1834, the date the constitution's preamble gives. In practice it passed on 24 February 1836, when Major-General George Middlemore landed as the first governor appointed by the British government. He disbanded the St Helena Regiment and dismissed most of the Company's former officers. Those who could afford to leave began to go, and the population fell from 6,150 in 1817 to fewer than 4,000 by 1890. Basil George notes that the Act's article on Saint Helena outlived the repeal of the rest and is now called the St Helena Charter Act 1833.

The route moved at the same time. After Britain took Aden in January 1839 and set up a coaling station there, the passage to the Far East through the Red Sea took roughly half as long as the voyage round the Cape, and steamships did not need the trade winds that had carried sailing ships past the island. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, and Britannica dates the island's prosperity as a port of call to about 1870. Ships calling at Saint Helena numbered 1,100 in 1855, 853 in 1869, 603 in 1879 and 288 in 1889.

Termites carried in timber from condemned slave ships were eating through houses and documents by the 1860s. In 1871 the Royal Engineers built Jacob's Ladder, 700 steps up the steep side of the valley above Jamestown.

What kept the island going after the ships left

A submarine cable from Cape Town was landed in November 1899. The garrison was withdrawn in 1906, the first time the island had been without one, and the Boers had gone home. The flax industry, re-established in 1907, did much to make up the loss: it earned well in both world wars and became the main export. Ascension became a dependency of Saint Helena by letters patent on 12 September 1922, a year after the first islanders went to work there, and Tristan da Cunha followed on 12 January 1938. The airfield the United States built on Ascension in 1942 gave islanders work.

Flax prices peaked in 1951. Synthetic fibre undercut the island's more expensive product, the British Post Office changed to synthetic fibre for its mailbags, and the flax mills closed in 1965. From 1958 the Union-Castle line reduced its calls. A report of 2019 quoted in the main Wikipedia article found that by the 1970s "a majority of Saints were working abroad and sending money home". Curnow Shipping took over the mail service in 1977 with the RMS St Helena, a coastal vessel that had worked between Vancouver and Alaska, and a purpose-built successor entered service in November 1990.

Self-government came in steps. An Order in Council of 1966, effective in January 1967, created executive and legislative councils, and a new constitution took effect in January 1989. The one in force since 1 September 2009 added a bill of rights, limited some of the governor's powers and raised Ascension and Tristan da Cunha from dependencies to equal parts of a territory renamed St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. How that arrangement works, and where sovereignty sits, is the subject of the politics article.

How the islanders regained citizenship and got an airport

The British Nationality Act 1981 made Saint Helena a British Dependent Territory, and the islanders lost their status as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies and their right of abode in Britain. For the next 20 years, the Wikipedia history records, many could find only low-paid work for the island government, and work abroad was open to them only on the Falklands and Ascension; the island was often called the "South Atlantic Alcatraz". In 1982 the RMS St Helena was requisitioned for the Falklands conflict, and its whole crew volunteered to sail south. A Bishop's Commission on Citizenship, set up in 1992, campaigned for the right of abode. A British review of 1997 promised to restore it, and the British Overseas Territories Act 2002 gave back full passports.

The airport took longer. Islanders voted for one in January 2002. The British government announced the plan in 2005, paused it in 2008 and in 2011 signed a £285.5 million contract with the South African firm Basil Read. Construction was completed in May 2016, but test flights found severe wind shear and turbulence, and the first scheduled commercial flight, an Airlink service from Johannesburg by way of Walvis Bay, landed on 14 October 2017 with a smaller aircraft than planned. The mail ship's last departure from the island was set for 10 February 2018, after 27 years and 268 voyages. Since September 2023 Saint Helena has also been connected to the Equiano subsea fibre-optic cable.