Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 5

And then, with a whoop of triumph, a cry from the bridge. 'There she is! That's her! Right ahead.'

At first there was nothing, just the endless steel edge of the Atlantic horizon, pinkish in the early evening, touched by a small patch of settled cloud. But then, slowly, from within the cloud a vague darkness took form and shape-a grey, shadowy thing with straight, steep sides. It was the island: some of our pa.s.sengers, standing mute, gazing at her gradually spreading bulk, were weeping. They were almost home.

The s.h.i.+p rolled closer and closer. Grey became brown, and patches of green mottled the upper slopes. The steep sides became sheer cliffs, rearing suddenly out of the empty sea. Seabirds came wheeling at us now in great clouds. As the sun slipped away so lights twinkled on the island ahead. I could see the crawling firefly of a car moving high up on the mountainside.

The master, a quiet Scotsman for whom this was a final voyage-he was about to retire to his house many thousands of miles away in Milngavie, and make a living in the bed-and-breakfast trade-rang down to the engine room. 'Half ahead!' The bells jangled. 'Slow ahead!' Then 'Stop!' The anchor chain rattled away in a cloud of iron dust. We came to a firm and definite halt, and a dozen small boats began las.h.i.+ng towards us, their occupants waving and cheering at our pa.s.sengers, who waved and sobbed back. 'Finished with engines' the master telegraphed, with a tired smile. The Royal Mail s.h.i.+p Aragonite Aragonite, 682 tonnes, and of Glaswegian registry, had arrived at last at the loneliest major outpost of the British Empire. 'This most solitary island,' as the Edwardian writer E. L. Jackson began her cla.s.sic book, 'of St Helena.'

If we can agree that in the ragged spectrum of the current Empire the islands of Bermuda sit firmly at one end-important, prosperous, by and large contented and a.s.sured of a reasonably stable and secure future-then the colony of St Helena, sad to relate, lies foursquare at the other. This 'pinpoint of inaccessibility, unbelievably remote' was once a place of significance; it is now, to Britain, of no consequence whatsoever, is steadfastly ignored and neglected by a mother country to whom her natives look in vain for succour and friends.h.i.+p. It has been turned, in consequence, into what one recent visitor called 'an Imperial slum'.

One cannot come away from St Helena without shaking one's head and muttering that something must be done; but nothing has been, nothing is, and nothing ever will be done-under the suzerainty of Britain, at least. The story of St Helena is a tragedy of decay and isolation, poverty and ruin, and all played by a princ.i.p.al cast of proud and enchanting islanders, and in their home of magical beauty. (But a recent decision taken in London, taking the daily running of the island away from the Foreign Office, may yet improve matters.) Jamestown, the capital, provides the first indication of the charm and loveliness of this forlorn little island. There is no harbour, and I was puttered to sh.o.r.e in a tiny dinghy, and had to step on to dry land by way of a slimy, sea-washed step. The legendary Atlantic rollers-long swells born in Newfoundland storms, six feet high in the inner bay, and booming ash.o.r.e every half-minute or so-make any landing perilous in the extreme, and there are stout ropes hanging from a stanchion for nervous visitors to grab. I most certainly did; and so, on his visit there in 1984, did Prince Andrew. But his host, the Governor of the day, did not, and half of him vanished in the sea, spoiling his white duck trousers and splas.h.i.+ng his Imperial jacket. The dunking, recorded for British television, remains about the only popular vision Britons have of their faraway possession. (The Governor left soon afterwards, and was offered a posting in a considerably drier segment of the former Empire, in Guyana.) The quayside was jam-packed with islanders-'Saints' as they are known by outsiders, 'Yamstocks' as they call themselves, a nickname supposedly derived from the diet of yams on which the island slaves were once fed. s.h.i.+ps are infrequent callers at St Helena these days-the island was for many years on the Union Castle main line, and there would be a liner a fortnight-and any s.h.i.+p, even so small and undistinguished a vessel as a former North Sea dynamite carrier, brings out the crowds. People were jammed up against railings, perched on parapets, s.h.i.+nned up lamp standards, sitting on the old stone walls. There was a buzz of excitement in the air, and many of the eyes shone with tears. Every so often a cheer would go up when a relation or a friend would step on to sh.o.r.e-everyone would cheer, since everyone was a relation, and all were friends.

For all the shortcomings of their isolation in mid-ocean, the Saints are a home-loving people. They loathe the year-long contracts they have to work on Ascension 700 miles north or the four-year scholars.h.i.+ps their students take up in Cheltenham, or Southampton. Few places can feel with such intensity the unalloyed pleasure, after years away, of just coming home.

'Three weeks I been away,' said one young man whom I met, and who told me he had been working for the Americans at their base on Ascension. 'Not a long time, I know. But too long for me. I give it up. I miss my brother and my mother. I miss home too much.' He had been a good companion on the boat, had taught me a new card game and had helped me rig a hammock on deck. Now he was back on his beloved island. He vanished into the thickets of friendly brown arms, and it was three days before I saw him, happily nose down in a pint of beer at the Consulate Hotel, surrounded by his workmates. He vowed he would never leave home again.

For him, as for many another islander, St Helena is a place 'with only one entrance, and no exit'. And it feels like an entrance, what is more-you walk along the seafront for fifty yards, then turn inland, cross a narrow bridge over the dry castle moat and pa.s.s through a portcullis'd gate, and a wall a dozen feet thick. Inside, to the wonder of all who first enter this unique little ocean city, is the eighteenth century, preserved by happy accident, in every last detail.

'Lifted bodily from Tunbridge Wells,' wrote one visitor, on first seeing the square called Lower Parade. 'A bright-looking tree in the centre...but still the capital of a second-cla.s.s Imperial coaling station,' said another, less kindly, at the turn of the century. '...the town resembles St Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey...' according to Mrs E. L. Jackson a few years later.

Two rows of Regency houses, all bright paint and high dignity, iron trellis-work and sash windows, look at each other across the main street. In the square there is a castle-whitewashed stone walls with the coat of arms of the Honourable East India Company in red, white and silver, and all enclosing a little courtyard with shade trees and cobblestones and worn stone steps leading to the old offices of the present Governor. There are courts, and the library, and an exquisite public park with peepul trees brought from Hindoostan by John Company's brigantines as they stopped at the island for fresh food, or by the wars.h.i.+ps back from the India station, and who called for water and coal.

There is a zig-zag path above the park-Governor Patten had it laid out for the pleasure of his two daughters at the beginning of the last century, and it is now called the Sisters' Walk. It was probably the first view of the island seen by the island's most famous resident, Napoleon, and leads to a not insignificant tale-as does so much in a town that, as the South African writer Lawrence Green suggested, 'holds more of the strong meat of history than any other town in Britain's colonial possessions'.

Napoleon had arrived on the evening of 17th October 1815, to begin his exile (an astonished St Helena had learned about the plan to keep the defeated Emperor on the island only a few days before, when he and his court of twenty-seven French men and women were but a few days' sailing away). The Royal Navy-he had been brought from Plymouth aboard HMS Northumberland Northumberland-decided to bring him ash.o.r.e at night, to avoid the crowds. Sir George c.o.c.kburn, whose flag Northumberland Northumberland flew on this most splendidly Imperial voyage, decided to put the Emperor up-for the first night, at least-in a pleasant Georgian house at the side of the park, and where the government botanist, a Mr Porteous, supplemented his meagre India Office wage by taking in lodgers. flew on this most splendidly Imperial voyage, decided to put the Emperor up-for the first night, at least-in a pleasant Georgian house at the side of the park, and where the government botanist, a Mr Porteous, supplemented his meagre India Office wage by taking in lodgers.

But there was a coincidence, though whether Napoleon was told about it that night, and whether his sleep was thus disturbed, we do not know. It turned out that only a few months before Mr Porteous had rented the very room he now gave to Bonaparte to the man who met and savaged the Emperor at Waterloo-Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington.

A few months after Napoleon had arrived-and was by now settled into a very grand mansion in the cool island interior-Wellington learned of the coincidence, and wrote to Admiral Malcolm, who then commanded the naval garrison on the rock of exile. And what is more, when Wellington wrote, he did so from Paris.

'You may tell "Bony",' the Iron Duke scoffed, 'that I find his apartments at the Elisee Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes mine (in St Helena)...It is a droll sequel enough to the affairs of Europe that we should change places of residence...'

It sometimes seems as if there is more history and a greater fund of anecdotes squeezed into the tiny city of Jamestown than in any other place on earth: it is, after all, a very tiny place indeed, with only 1,500 people jammed into a maze of lanes at the base of a narrow valley, its craggy walls given to collapsing with calamitous regularity.

The monuments tell of real local heroes, like Dr W. J. J. Arnold, whose obelisk stands in the very centre of the parade ground, and which is convenient to read as you step out into the suns.h.i.+ne from the old Consulate Hotel, and take a short walk after breakfast. 'The best friend St Helena ever had,' says the inscription.

He was an Irishman, colonial surgeon, and Acting-Governor for a few weeks before he died in 1925. He, unlike most of his peers, loved the islanders, and did all he could to help. He recognised their poverty and their need. And in turn the island poor wors.h.i.+pped him. He is said never to have charged those who couldn't pay, and would buy medicines for those who couldn't afford them. 'He knew the heart of every poor person on St Helena,' a boatman reminisced to a visitor in the Fifties. An old woman added that, in her view, 'a s.h.i.+ver went through this place the day the doctor died'.

Dr Arnold is one of the few colonial figures the islanders remember with affection: as we shall see later, the British sent to run the colony, and those officials back in London who administered its fortunes, have never been liked or admired by the Saints themselves-except, it seems, Dr Arnold and a very few recent Governors, who seem game to stand up for the islanders' cause, no matter how eccentric the notion seems back at head office.

The Jamestown church-St James's, though presumably not named after the James who was Duke of York when the East India Company annexed the island in 1651-stands on the right of the parade ground, opposite the castle, beside the tiny prison. It is an unlovely church, with a white stone tower, and, when not blown off by a storm, has a weathervane in the shape of a fish.

Most of the Jamestown aristocracy is buried here, and the same names recur. Benjamin, Thomas ('Throw a stone and hit a Thomas,' the islanders used to say, there were so many of them), Hudson, Young, Green, Yon (descendants of the indentured Chinese workers brought to St Helena by the Company), Moyce, Maggott, Youde, Jonas. And a batch of cla.s.sical names, plucked from scholarly memory and given to the freed slaves who arrived here in the mid-nineteenth century, and which exist still as memorials to Victorian enlightenment: Plato, Caesar, Hercules, Mercury. (A Mr Jeff Scipio was enjoying congratulations when I visited the island: he had just repaired a stricken cargo s.h.i.+p by fas.h.i.+oning a new shaft bearing out of eucalyptus wood. The s.h.i.+p managed to get across the Atlantic to Recife, still going strong.) There is a tablet in St James's to one of the island's great dynastic figures, Mr Saul Solomon, who died in 1892. His ancestor, who was also called Saul, was put ash.o.r.e, gravely ill, from an India-bound merchantman, in 1790; he recovered, persuaded his brothers Benjamin and Joseph to come down from London and join him in business-one of the very few to have enough confidence and imagination to try to make money in St Helena. (Some would say his considerable success was a testament to his Jewishness, though the family later became Anglicans.) The first Saul Solomon is said to have tried to help Napoleon escape by smuggling a silken ladder to him, hidden in a teapot. The plot evidently failed, but Solomon's admiration for the Emperor was recognised by the French, who made him French Consul, and gave him a medal when they took Napoleon's body away to be buried in Paris. The dynasty dominated St Helena for generations; it is still barely possible to get by on the island without doing business with Solomon and Company, who brew beer, run a banking service, sell Carnation milk and act as sole agents for the s.h.i.+pping line that is the Saints' only means of escape to the outside world.

Jamestown lies at the base of a valley between two immense ridges of basalt. On the eastern side is Munden's Hill, with the ruins of two batteries; the western side is Ladder Hill, where the old fort, the barracks, the observatory and signal station were built. There is a road that winds and twists its way dangerously along the valley sides, and must be two miles long. But there is also a stairway-a remarkable, unforgettable stairway of 700 stone steps each eleven inches high. (The lowest one is buried, so you only count 699.) The 'Ladder' thus formed must surely count as one of the most extraordinary and breathtaking structures to be found anywhere.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I first saw it. I hadn't read about it in the guidebooks, and the name on the map-Jacob's Ladder-meant nothing. It was the first morning; I was waiting for an appointment to see the Governor, and was mooching about in the square, admiring the tiny fire engine, chatting to the prison guards (only one inmate that day in the Empire's tiniest gaol, as 'we normally let our guests out each afternoon to have a swim') and peering behind the minute city power station. It was then that I noticed a flight of steps, flanked on each side by black iron railings, running up the mountainside.

But they didn't end at rooftop height, nor level with St James's steeple. I had to crane my neck right back, until it hurt. The steps went up and up, their steepness apparently increasing as they did so, so that they seemed to curve outwards and become vertical, like a rope ladder into the sky. They went so far and so high that they and their guard rails vanished into a single line, and were just a faint black etching as they reached the lip of Ladder Hill and the fort. It looked like a trick, painted to amuse pa.s.sing tourists; and for a second I thought it was a cunning piece of trompe-l'oeil trompe-l'oeil, until the first schoolboy hurtled down, breathless and grubby, and landed at my feet.

The boys' slide was, a hundred years ago, said to be 'a feat most indescribably terrible to watch'. It began in the days when soldiers from the Ladder Hill barracks had to be on sentry-go down in Jamestown at lunch. The steps had been built, along with a pair of tramways, to help carry ammunition, stores-and, in particular, manure-between fort and city: the soldiers decided it could be used to bring their lunch. Boys were thus directed to climb the stairs-which rise at an average angle of thirty-nine degrees, enough to give most first-time climbers severe vertigo-and fetch tureens of soup. The boys, determined to serve the soup hot, devised a perilous-looking descent: with shoulders over one rail, and ankles over the other, and arms spread along the bars to act as brakes, they would slide down, tureens balanced on their stomachs. The average time from taking a squaddy's orders, running up the stairway and returning with a bowl of steaming mulligatawny was eight minutes.

And down the boys-and girls-still come, their satchels where the tureens once were, their mission simply to get out of school, and back to their homes in Jamestown, as quickly as possible. Terrible though the slide may be to see, only one person is said to have been killed on the Ladder, a sailor who tried the climb after a night in one of the Jamestown pubs. (A retired colonel lived in the old signal station during the 1950s; he had perched his bed against a railing overlooking a thousand-foot drop and, had he rolled over in his sleep, would surely have fallen. He said he had lost his breakfast cup of tea more than once, but had never fallen over the edge himself. He died, peacefully, in his bed, in 1982: he had moved to the Isle of Man.)

Like so many of the great Atlantic rocks, this forty-seven square mile confection of basalt and banana trees was first glimpsed, its mist-topped mountains surging theatrically from the warm seas, by the Portuguese, in 1502. They named the island after h.e.l.lena, mother of Constantine the Great, upon whose birthday the discovery was made; the spelling was modified on the second map, and has remained thus ever since.

But despite the evident pleasantness of their find, the Portuguese made no attempt to colonise it. They left some animals and planted some trees; and eleven years later they called back on their way home from India, and left behind a n.o.bleman named Fernando Lopez, who had been mutilated, in Goa, for desertion, and who had stowed away on the s.h.i.+p. The Goanese magistracy had cut off his nose, his ears, his right hand and the little finger of his left-so it was perhaps hardly surprising he decided, rather than carry on home to meet Mrs Lopez, to stay alone on this charming, if deserted island. He hid in a cave until the s.h.i.+p had left, only to find that his s.h.i.+pmates had taken pity on him, and left him a barrel of biscuits and a fire, which he kept alight for months.

A year later a southbound s.h.i.+p stopped by; a terrified Lopez fled into the jungle. When he emerged, and the s.h.i.+p had gone, he found more food and clothes, and a letter telling him not to be afraid, but to present himself next time his countrymen turned up. But he wouldn't. For a decade he would run and hide whenever he sighted a sail. A letter from King John III offering him a free pardon and safe pa.s.sage back to Lisbon had no effect.

But then a s.h.i.+p was wrecked and its sole survivor, a Javanese slave boy, came ash.o.r.e to join Lopez. Romantics might wish the boy to have been Friday to Lopez's Crusoe, but in fact they loathed each other; and when the next Portuguese s.h.i.+p stopped in the bay, the child betrayed Lopez, and led the sailors to his hiding place. He agreed, eventually, to come back to Europe. He was a great celebrity; he was seen by the King and Queen, and went on to Rome to confess his sins before the Pope who asked him-according to this most charming of St Helenian legends-what his greatest wish might be. 'I yearn to go back to the peace of St Helena,' he is supposed to have said; and so went back, and lived for thirty further years in the valley where Jamestown now stands. 'He cultivated a great many gourds, pomegranates and palm-trees,' a Portuguese history relates. 'He kept ducks, hens, sows and she-goats with young, all of which increased largely, and all became wild in the woods.'

When I stayed on the island in 1983 I lived with a couple of similar pioneering spirit, keen to return to quieter ways, eager for island solitude. He had been an electrician in Devon; he had always yearned to go to St Helena; when he retired he took a s.h.i.+p there, and bought-for a pittance-a splendid Georgian mansion near a hill called Mount Eternity. Then came his wife and all his worldly goods, his books, his billiards table, his electronic organ; the couple settled there to farm, to read and live out a peaceful conclusion to their lives. They seemed wholly content with their choice, and not in the least concerned with their distance from home, and friends, and intellectual stimulus. I used to waken every day at seven when the flock of geese began to cackle madly; when I went down into the garden that was cool and fresh with dew I would find him, picking each goose up in his arms, cuddling it, and kissing it lightly on the beak.

The Portuguese managed, more by luck than judgement, to keep their discovery of St Helena totally secret for nearly a hundred years. Luckily-and rather oddly-no other nation's s.h.i.+ps strayed close to the island; and it was not until the English sea rover, John Cavendish, captured and looted a Spanish galleon and carefully read the s.h.i.+p's pilot, that anyone learned of the approximate position of the island. He sailed there in 1588, finding 'a valley...marvellously sweet and pleasant, and planted in every place with fruit trees or with herbs'. There were some slaves on the island, and thousands of goats, which proved a pest, gnawing everything to pieces. But pleasant as the island was, Cavendish did not colonise it either; nor did any of the Dutch or French or Portuguese or Spanish sailors who stopped by in succeeding years. They simply used it as a watering station, left letters under a prominent boulder (the practice of using remote islands as mid-ocean post-boxes was then well established, with outbound masters leaving mail for homebound s.h.i.+ps to collect and deliver at their final port), and collected fruit and vegetables and fresh meat.

The Dutch finally claimed it, in 1633, but never occupied it permanently, and when the Cape Settlement in Africa was established, promptly abandoned it (though they did send expeditions there to look for fruit trees; Cape Town's best-known variety of peach comes from the island, via one of those early Dutch expeditions). But this was, in Britain, the time of the great royal trading companies, and it was not long before the merchant adventurers of the City reached out into the South Atlantic. Armed with capital of seventy-two thousand pounds (more than thirty times the capitalised value of the Bermuda Company half a century before), the East India Company annexed the island, claimed it in the Company's name, and, using the four vessels Dragon, Hector, Ascension Dragon, Hector, Ascension and and Susan Susan, occupied it and set about building a fort.

Within two years the island had a charter; and although it was attacked by the Dutch in 1673, the force was routed in a matter of weeks and guns were erected and batteries installed so that any further attacks would be repulsed. A new charter was issued on 16th December 1673-it can still be seen at the Castle-and St Helena was from that day on indubitably, in theory perpetually and, as it has turned out, rather less than fortunately, ruled by the British.

At first it was a happy little place. Posters went up in London advertising its charms, and after the Great Fire in 1666, scores of homeless c.o.c.kneys set sail for a new life on the new possession. Their c.o.c.kney accent is still very much a part of the strange tongue that is spoken on St Helena-an accent that is part Devon, part Hottentot, part Olde English, and with that curious transposition of v and w so often mentioned in d.i.c.kens. The purest form of St Helenian speech, delivered with machine-gun rapidity and intensity, can still be found among the fishermen, and Lawrence Green was able to quote an entire conversation: 'Dere was sumting say bout Govinmint ought to send for nets and men to sho how to ketch fish. Tcha! man, foolish...us can ketch fish better den orrer fellers. You know, sir, when us get gude luck and plentee fish and tinks for once will get couple s.h.i.+llings dem wimmin in fish maarket stick up fer price. When peepil see plentee fish and price high they buy little tinking b.u.m-bye cheap. Us poor fishmin get werry little.'

The islanders tilled and planted, raised their cattle and pigs, built their cottages and generally turned the island's interior into the soft, green countryside they had left behind to the north. The legacy of those early farmers remains: for although St Helena, ringed with frightening cliffs and with inhospitable mountains frowning over all, has a wild, prison-like aspect for many visitors, the inner valleys and meadows are as charming and delicate as any in southern England. Those refugees from London soothed and teased all the harshness from the island's rugged topography, and left it a model of what they thought lay down the road from Spitalfields and Lambeth.

(They lived in a time of terrible discipline, though: when a woman named Elizabeth Starling beat up the captain of a visiting s.h.i.+p she was stripped naked and given fifteen lashes, and then ducked three times; thieving slaves had their hands cut off; and when two runaway apprentices stole a gun and shot a pig each had the tip of an ear sliced off, the letter 'R' branded on to his forehead, and a pair of pothooks riveted around his neck before being flogged from one end of Jamestown to the other.) The polyglot community filled up with slaves, Chinese indentured labourers, Malays, Madagascans, Indians-and still more Englishmen and Scots lured by promises of comfort and opportunity. The array of inhabitants and visitors produced bewildering complications: there was no island currency, and at one time a treasurer complained that among the coinage in common use in Jamestown were gold dubloons, mohurs from Bengal, moidores, star paG.o.das, gold gubbers and Venetian sequins, as well as rupees and ducatoons, German crowns, Marie Therese dollars, joes from Portugal, guilders from Holland, rixdollars, francs and English s.h.i.+llings.

A steady cavalcade of the distinguished dropped by: Edmund Halley, the astronomer who gave his name to the comet, came to the mountains of St Helena to observe the transit of Mercury; fog obscured his view, and it often swirls over the flax-covered hill that bears his name, and where he mounted his telescope. Captain Bligh looked in, and presented some breadfruit which he was taking from Tahiti to Jamaica. Captain Cook, on his way back from Antarctica, spent a few days on the island, and made some pointed criticisms of the islanders' agricultural methods. HMS Beagle Beagle stood off for six days in 1836 when Charles Darwin made as near as possible a complete inventory of the unique flora and fauna. (Not all of it home-grown: the British brought in furze and blackberry, frogs and rabbits, and an enthusiastic naturalist, Phoebe Moss, released five mynah birds at a country house in mid-island, and the colony is now thick with them. But the wirebird, a small fat plover which lives in the Kaffir figs, is unique; and the depredations of the voracious native white ant have become a St Helena legend. They had an eccentric liking for theological books, and contentedly munched their way through the entire library, leaving only the bindings. Hardly a house has escaped the attentions of their jaws; the main staircase at the Castle collapsed with a roar one night and had to be replaced by a cast-iron model brought out at great expense from England.) stood off for six days in 1836 when Charles Darwin made as near as possible a complete inventory of the unique flora and fauna. (Not all of it home-grown: the British brought in furze and blackberry, frogs and rabbits, and an enthusiastic naturalist, Phoebe Moss, released five mynah birds at a country house in mid-island, and the colony is now thick with them. But the wirebird, a small fat plover which lives in the Kaffir figs, is unique; and the depredations of the voracious native white ant have become a St Helena legend. They had an eccentric liking for theological books, and contentedly munched their way through the entire library, leaving only the bindings. Hardly a house has escaped the attentions of their jaws; the main staircase at the Castle collapsed with a roar one night and had to be replaced by a cast-iron model brought out at great expense from England.)

'Without Napoleon, there would be no St Helena,' the French Consul once remarked to me. And it was, indeed, fortunate for the island that it had so ill.u.s.trious a prisoner. The other choices for his confinement, according to Lord Liverpool's notes of the time, were St Lucia, the Tower of London, Fort William, Dumbarton Castle, Gibraltar, Malta and the Cape of Good Hope-one trembles to think of the present state of St Helena had the Emperor not been exiled there, and the island had been forgotten by everyone. His six progressively more wretched years-they started well enough, playing whist and blind-man's buff with the flirtatious Betty Balcombe in the house that is now the island's cable station-effectively produced two more colonies for Britain.

A garrison had to be sent to Ascension Island, and another to Tristan da Cunha, to foil any French adventures to free their subject. The houses constructed by the soldiers and marines, and later inhabited by some of them who opted to remain, formed the basis of pioneering colonial settlements; and St Helena, too, benefited hugely from the military interest placed upon her in consequence of her notorious guest. Nearly 3,000 soldiers were camped up on Deadwood Plain, within easy sight of the house eventually chosen for Napoleon's residence (and now, like his empty grave, the property of the people of France, and presided over by a resident consul, complete with tricolour and diplomatically immune motor car).

Such cruise s.h.i.+ps as arrive at Jamestown today do so because of Longwood House. Here are the mournful portraits and the billiard tables, the marble busts and the formal gardens where Napoleon walked along deeply incised paths so his hated sentries would not see him. There are the wooden shutters from behind which the Emperor would gaze at the stars-one hole for his telescope when he was standing, another below it for when he sat. Here is Vignali's ma.s.sive sideboard, used for the celebration of Ma.s.s, and there the great copper bath in which Napoleon would lie, soaking gently and dictating his memoirs. The visitors can twirl, if the watchman is dozing in the sun, the globes of earth and sky which still bear the marks of the Emperor's fingernails; and they come to see the deathbed.

And one can scrabble about in the garden to look for shards of gla.s.s from old French wine bottles: no greater evidence of British insolence can be found, French visitors believe. For the Governor of the day, the much-loathed Sir Hudson Lowe, had demanded of the Emperor that, after drinking wine, he return his empties to the British Government. Napoleon, not surprisingly, angrily refused, and had his staff smash the bottles and scatter the gla.s.s among the roses.

I met a pretty young girl one afternoon at Longwood House, walking around the gardens in a dress that looked uncannily out of date. She was, it turned out, from California, and worked at a dull task, punching out pieces for the insides of a computer. She had become obsessed by the sad story of Napoleon since her childhood, and had vowed to visit the island of his exile. Easier said than done. She worked hard, earned the necessary money to get across to England to catch the once-every-twelve-weeks boat from Bristol to St Helena.

This was her second visit. She had had some dresses made, along the lines of those worn by Josephine. A hairdresser had shaped her blonde hair in ringlets, just like the most famous painting of Josephine. And thus armed and fas.h.i.+oned, this otherwise normal young lady from San Mateo would glide around Longwood, or sit on the empty grave beneath the willows with wildflowers in her hand. She would read, and dream, and compose odd poems about the inhumanity of Sir Hudson Lowe and Britons involved in the defeat and humiliation of her hero.

She had ample reason to dislike the Government a few weeks after I first met her. An order was issued from the Castle dismissing her from the island, and though she hid in a clump of bushes, two policemen dragged her out and forced her on to a s.h.i.+p. I saw her in London a few weeks later: she was deeply hurt, and considered she had suffered as awful an injustice as had Bonaparte. The islanders had a soft spot for her, too, and were sorry to see her go. 'Pretty girl,' said the old man who drove me around. 'A bit touched. But 'armless enough. Very American, I s'pose.'

The Crown took over all the running of the island in 1834; of all the disasters attendant upon St Helena's history, this was quite probably the worst. None of the islanders wanted the change; most were appalled at the cavalier way King William's men dismissed faithful Company servants, slashed budgets, reduced the status of the island to a mere cipher in the grand colonial roll. Hundreds left the island for good, and settled in Cape Colony, or came to England. The Governors chosen to rule on the Sovereign's behalf-no longer, that is, as representative of the Court of Directors-were henceforth the pygmies of Empire, paid less money, and less attention, than any other Excellency in any other colony. (The Governor of Nigeria by tradition always received the highest salary; the man in Jamestown Castle took home about a sixth as much.) The tradition of exile and imprisonment of Her Majesty's enemies, evidently spurred on by the success of Napoleon's banishment, took hold; the Chief of the Zulus stayed there with his two uncles, and learned to play hymns on the piano; 6,000 Boer prisoners, including General Cronje, were put into huge prisoner-of-war camps up on the high meadows. Both groups evidently loved the island and its inhabitants, and one Boer baker was still alive and working in Jamestown sixty years after the end of the war. There was an elderly Zulu living on the island in the 1980s. The prison industry did brief wonders for the Saints' economy: it was said that during the Boer War the place was crowded, rich and extraordinarily happy. But then the Boers went away, peace returned, and the old habits of neglectful superintendence once more held sway.

There were all manner of brave but brief agricultural experiments. St Helena coffee was briefly famous, particularly as Napoleon had said he liked it. A London firm was sent samples: 'we find it of very superior quality and flavour, and if cultivated to any extent would no doubt amply repay the grower.' It wasn't. Admiral Elliot ordered cinchona trees to be planted, and for a while the island produced quinine. But later Governors wearied of the idea, and the plantation was allowed to run wild.

Only New Zealand flax did well. The huge plants, with their spiky leaves that often grew ten feet long, covered thousands of the island's upland acres. The Colonial and Fibre Company built the first mill in 1874: seven more were put up over the next twenty years, and a rope factory was built in the 1920s. The familiar whine of the flax scutchers, stripping the long fibres from the leaves, echoed across the hills for half a century. At its peak the n.o.ble Phormium tenax Phormium tenax gave employment to 400 men, and the little factories made cloth, rope, tow and hemp, which was sold to the British Post Office to make string for tying up bundles of letters. A fifth of the hemp went to make Admiralty ropes-the gave employment to 400 men, and the little factories made cloth, rope, tow and hemp, which was sold to the British Post Office to make string for tying up bundles of letters. A fifth of the hemp went to make Admiralty ropes-the Manual of Seamans.h.i.+p Manual of Seamans.h.i.+p still quotes the breaking strain of St Helena hemp. still quotes the breaking strain of St Helena hemp.

But this reliance on the flax industry proved, ultimately, as injurious to the St Helenian economy as was the making of lime juice to Montserrat or the milling of sugar in Barbados-too much of a concentration in one product meant, inevitably, that the colony became a prisoner of its customers' whims. In this particular case the fatal day came when the Post Office decided it would be cheaper to use nylon twine for its bundles, and abandoned its contract with the faraway Saints. At about the same time the world price of flax and hemp dropped-St Helena's crop no longer had a ready market.

But that was not the only reason. No one disputes that the Colonial Office must take the responsibility for its lamentable decision to turn St Helena into a one-crop island; but its sorry management of the finances of that crop contributed also to the economic disaster that followed, as a brief explanation will show.

Fluctuations in the price of hemp gravely affected the island, and it was agreed after the Second World War that the Government would help. It did so in a cunning manner. If the market price fell below a certain level, the millers would receive a subsidy. If it rose above the level, however, the Government would charge export duty. The net result was that more duty was paid in than subsidy was paid out-so the Government's 'support' was carried out at no effective cost.

Nevertheless, the subsidy was regarded as irksome-not so much by the Castle, who tried to support the sole industry, but by London. On New Year's Eve 1965 the then Governor, John Field, called the two major mill-owners to his office: from the next day the basic wage of government workers on the island would be doubled (to two pounds fifty a week-well below the poverty line, and about a tenth of the wage then paid in England), and to help finance the increase, and at the insistence of London, the flax subsidy would be removed, instantly, and with no right of appeal.

The industry collapsed. The Government had no other ideas for the mills, and one by one, they all closed. The last scutcher sounded its rasping note in midsummer 1966. The Foreign Office, at whose behest the industry essentially collapsed, was accused of 'grave irresponsibility' by one miller; but appeared to show no remorse.

Coffee, quinine, flax-and s.h.i.+pping; a litany of failures and mishaps, poor planning, bad decision-making, the steel-eyed rule of uncaring accounts-men and faraway time-servers. Nothing could be done, of course, to help the island when the Suez Ca.n.a.l opened in 1869 and the steamers bound for India no longer called at this convenient mid-ocean coaling station; when the Navy switched to oil the need for St Helena diminished further, and the last vessel recorded as having taken on some tons of Welsh steam coal for some Imperial adventure, or duty, was in the 1920s. Even before that there seemed to the War Office no real point in maintaining a garrison at the top of Ladder Hill once the coal was gone and the island's strategic value was devalued.

And nothing could prevent the Union Castle line-'Intermediate Vessels carrying First and Tourist cla.s.s pa.s.sengers are despatched at intervals from London for Cape Town, proceeding via Grand Canary and with calls with Mails at Ascension and St Helena'-from withdrawing its service. There had been two cargo vessels, one each way each month. But they were cancelled in 1967, and the final lifeline, the Cape Mail Service, was ended a decade later. Since then a single s.h.i.+p run by a firm in Cornwall, helped by a huge and grudgingly given government subsidy, has provided the colony's only means of physical contact with the outside.

All the enginework of Empire remains on St Helena. In the Castle there are vast airy rooms hung with the oil paintings of past Governors-Robert Jenkins (of the War of Jenkins' Ear-there is a plaque on his cottage at Sandy Bay), Charles Dallas, Sir Harry Cordeaux, Sir Edward Hay Drummond-Hay. There are shelves of leather-bound books of great age, rubbed with beeswax and fragrant still. Clocks tick gently and when they strike, the booms shake the bougainvillaea and the banana fronds beyond the ever-open windows. There are great silver inkwells and blotters to match; in His Excellency's office there is a spyhole so that his a.s.sistants-such as the Colonial Treasurer, the last to hold that t.i.tle in the Empire that remains-can see if he may be disturbed. One expects periwigs and vellum, sealing-wax and quills, and the courtly language of Victoria's diplomats, and the prosy essays to the Court of Directors. If there is a telex (and there must be, since the Foreign Office lists a number, 202) its vulgar presence is well concealed.

Plantation House, where Governors have lived since the East India Company built the mansion in 1792, is a gem-perhaps the loveliest house available for any senior British diplomat anywhere, though it is neither as large, nor as smartly furnished as some of the residences elsewhere, as Paris, Singapore, or Vienna. When I arrived the Deputy Governor was busily moving in; His Excellency had departed for home leave, and his Deputy wasn't going to miss the opportunity to spend a few weeks in the place. 'Best thing about the job,' he said. 'Pay's rotten, as you know. But did you ever see such a perfect place as this?'

Visitors-if invited, and deemed at all important-arrive by black Jaguar (a silver crown in place of a number plate, and a small Union flag with the St Helena arms on the fly), which whispers up the gravel drive scattering the four tortoises which are, invariably, busily munching up the lawn. The tortoises are named Emma, Myrtle, Freda and Jonathan, the last-the biggest-said by experts to be 255 years old. Whether he has attained that great age-and he is blind, and staggers more than tortoises usually do-he is doc.u.mented as having munched across the lawns for at least a hundred summers, and doubtless did the same on lawns in Mauritius for some years before. A Rothschild tried to buy one to take home, but was refused, whereupon the animal he wanted threw itself over a cliff. But however Methuselan the qualities of the Plantation House Quartet, they are not, by St Helena standards, as big as some of the local turtles. Many islanders remember an 800-pounder being landed-it provided soup for two regiments for three days, and the sh.e.l.l was used by a soldier as a roof for a new house he was building for his family.

Plantation House, staffed by a dozen servants decked out in starched uniforms of white and sky blue, is quiet and fragrant. As in all colonial government houses there are portraits of the Queen and Prince Philip, and a photograph of the Prime Minister; there are acres of polished oak floors and polished mahogany tables, of silver salvers and Spode china dinner sets, each with a crown and a dark blue rim. The older rooms have bra.s.s plaques above each doorway-Governor's Room, Admiral's Room, General's Room-dating from the Company days, and there is one room with a plaque saying 'Chaos' outside, and which is said to house a friendly poltergeist who hurls chairs about at night.

There is also a quite magnificent library, built by Sir Hudson Lowe during Napoleon's stay-presumably to occupy his mind with other than the vexing matter of his dangerous neighbour. Distinguished visitors were often asked to address St Helenian society in the library: Joshua Sloc.u.m, who called in on his solo circ.u.mnavigation in his tiny boat Spray Spray, recalled meeting Paul Kruger in Pretoria. When he told him he was going around the world Kruger snorted and said, 'You mean across across the world, young man!' The crusty old Boer still believed the world was flat. the world, young man!' The crusty old Boer still believed the world was flat.

Every nut and bolt of the Imperial machine remains in St Helena, preserved in the amber of her isolation. There is a colonial policeman, in charge of a police force known as the Toys. The last chief came from Birmingham, and by marrying a local girl quite scandalised the island Establishment (though the Attorney-General did the same, and promptly took the stunningly pretty Saint off to a new posting on the Caribbean island of Anguilla). One advantage of the chief's marriage is that he became wholly accepted by the island community, to the point of being given a nickname. Islanders take nicknames quite seriously: there was a Conger Kidneys, a Cheese, a Fishcake, a Biffer and a b.u.mper. The police chief, for reasons perhaps better known to his wife, was called Pink b.a.l.l.s.

There is a fully-fledged bishop, too, and a cathedral that was prefabricated in England and brought out to the island on a s.h.i.+p. The bishop presides over the smallest diocese in the Anglican communion (though the largest in area-it extends all the way up to Ascension Island, and while only having 7,000 souls, looks after an almighty stretch of ocean). He and his priests, who are recruited in England for thirty-month contracts, seem not the slightest bit reluctant to marry off young islanders who quite cheerfully bring a baby or two along to the wedding ceremony. Half the children born on the island are, technically, illegitimate. The islanders who dote upon all children call them 'spares', and if they are old enough to take part in the baccha.n.a.l that usually follows an island wedding, are welcomed like old and much-favoured relatives. Since the ceremony legitimises them they, too, have something to celebrate.

Both police and church worry about the growing crime rate. Some blame the fact that many islanders now work on Ascension, and come back full of American ideas (many of the jobs on the dependency being for the US Navy, or NASA, or PanAm). Some say video ca.s.sette recorders, of which there are a number on the island, bring evil in their train. Whatever the cause, there has been a dismal increase in misbehaviour. There have been three murders since 1980 (the previous killing was eighty years before; in some intervening years so little crime was committed that the magistrates were presented with white silk gloves as a token of island innocence). Murder trials, almost without precedent in living memory, are major events: a judge has to come from Gibraltar, defence lawyers must be brought out from England, and on conviction the prisoner must be taken to Parkhurst to serve his time-the island prison being too small and insecure. The St Helena Governor pet.i.tions the Home Office in London under the terms of the Colonial Prisoners (Removal) Act.

All the inst.i.tutions that provide a link with 'home' are lovingly nurtured. There are Boy Scouts (the 1st Jamestown Troop, shorts still worn, and socks with flashes) and their Guides, an Armistice Day parade, an Agricultural Show, a St Helena Band and a specially composed St Helena march. And there is cricket, played on the only piece of level ground on the island, about the size of a postage stamp (one of the island's only ways of making money is through the sale of stamps) and with deep ravines on all four sides. (They say that if they could find another piece of level ground they would build an airfield, which might solve the island's problems overnight.) The ravines have caused problems in the past: during one match a fielder, running backwards for a high ball, fell off the edge and was killed. The scorecard, as laconically as befits the sport, recorded his pa.s.sing by writing 'Retired, Dead'. The Governor of the day built a fence along the boundary, and a ball that falls down the cliff scores six.

And along with the trappings of Empire, so also a real affection for its leaders. It is rare to find a house in St Helena, no matter how humble a shack, without its picture of the Queen, or the Queen Mother, or Princess Diana and Prince Charles, pinned over the mantel. Sometimes it is an official portrait, bought from Solomon's store; more usually it is a gravure print torn carefully from the likes of Woman's Own Woman's Own. Once I called at a small house on Piccolo Hill and asked the woman, in pa.s.sing, if she had a portrait. She reddened, and looked briefly terror-struck. 'I'm terrible sorry but I've not,' she stammered. 'I had no idea they'd be sending anybody up to check.' It took some time to convince her I was not from the Castle, testing the loyalty of Her Majesty's most distant subjects.

In every apparent way, then, St Helena is, or seems to be, British. The people, from whatever ethnic origin, all sound like friends of Sam Weller; they have their own version of the BBC relayed down to them each day; they get the Telegraph Telegraph and the and the Observer Observer at the local library; there are still Humbers and Veloxes and Minis parked on the streets; people eat marmalade, and fishcakes, and stop in mid-afternoon for tea. at the local library; there are still Humbers and Veloxes and Minis parked on the streets; people eat marmalade, and fishcakes, and stop in mid-afternoon for tea.

But there are two signal differences between the citizenry of St Helena and Her Majesty's subjects back home in Britain.

The Saints, first, are poor. There is no work for them, barring a few jobs in the vestigial fis.h.i.+ng industry (an industry which by rights should take off-the island is surrounded by rich fis.h.i.+ng grounds, and one day I sat next to a man with a bamboo pole and a hook and who pulled tunny out of the sea at the rate of one every two seconds). Almost all capable males, aside from those who go to Ascension, or crew s.h.i.+ps away at sea, are employed by the Government-digging holes and filling them in again, in effect.

London complains that its aid to the island amounts to about a thousand pounds per head-more than to anywhere else on earth (except the Falkland Islands since the 1982 war). But in effect most of that money is paid out in wages-and, by British standards, derisory wages they are, too. I spent some time with a man who lived in a tiny cottage overlooking Sandy Bay. His family of ten and his eight cats lived with him. He worked as a labourer for the Public Works Department, and was paid twenty-six pounds a week-'hardly enough' he admitted. The nearest shop was five miles away, and sometimes one of his daughters walked the entire way barefoot. Living, he said, was 'very hard'.

And yet he was loyal, did have a picture of Prince Charles hanging in the living room, thought the Falklands War was an excellent thing and was sorry not to have gone himself. He would have done anything to fight for Her Majesty, to show how British and loyal he was. The only thing was...

And then he raised the second point-a point which came up again and again during my stay. Why-just why-were the islanders not counted as Britons by the Government back home? The Falklanders and the Gibraltarians were: why not the Saints? 'These are not primitive tribesmen or coolies,' as the South African, Lawrence Green, put it two decades ago. 'These are a unique and truly multi-racial community of considerable natural intelligence and loyalty...' So why does Britain not take them in-more precisely, why, by the pa.s.sage of the British Nationality Act, did Britain seek to exclude them from the privileges of Britishness, and yet still rule them?

After all, islanders would keep mentioning to me-the Charter was our guarantee. The Charter promised we would have rights.

I first learned about the famous Charter-famous, that is, to every St Helenian-one sunny afternoon, when I was strolling up Napoleon Street in Jamestown. I was pa.s.sing a little cafe, where motherly waitresses bring tea and buns each afternoon (and barracuda fishcakes for supper), and where the customers are slow old ladies in enormous summery hats who look like refugees from a Women's Inst.i.tute in England, only rather more tanned. One lady stepped out of the shadows as I pa.s.sed and, with a quick look up and down the street to make sure no one was watching, thrust an envelope into my hand.

Inside was a letter, and a leatherette-covered diary for the year half gone, with more writing inside, and a five-pound note. It asked me to send a copy of my researches to a Saint who now lived in Yorks.h.i.+re, and to make sure that 'the sad matter of our Nationality is raised back in London. The Charter says we are British, and can come to Britain any time we want. But we can't. The Government won't let us. They won't admit we are full citizens. It is very unjust. We were colonised by British people, from Britain. And now they turn us away. We want to know why?'

The doc.u.ment, preserved in the Castle, is written in the name of King Charles II. It is very long. The section that most Saints know by heart-or have since the Nationality Act was pa.s.sed in London-runs as follows:

Wee do for us, our heirs and successors declare...that all and every the persons being our subjects which do or shall inhabit within the said port or island, and every their children and posterity which shall happen to be borne within the presincts thereof shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises, immunities, capacities and abilities, of franchises and natural subjects within any of our dominions, to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and borne within this our realms of England or in any of our dominions...

In other words, the Saints are, by ancient right, as British as had they been born in Sevenoaks, or Knotty Ash. So why have they had their privileges stripped from them? And will they get them back?

A long and energetic campaign has been mounted on their behalf. (The island's Anglican synod sent a telegram to Downing Street, which raised some eyebrows.) Calculations were made showing that even if they were handed proper British pa.s.sports, and not the half-worthless ersatz papers they have today, only about 800 would ever come to settle in Britain. 'Hardly a flood,' said one islander. 'You've nothing to be afear'd of.'

But the Government seems in no mood to budge. There was a debate in the House of Lords late in 1984, at which friends of the island, men such as Lord Buxton and Lord Cledwyn (who went there in 1958, returned home shocked at the poverty and neglect, and wrote an article in the Daily Mirror Daily Mirror ent.i.tled 'Paradise on the Dole'), spoke with pa.s.sion and eloquence about the sad fate of this most enchanting island. But Lady Young, representing the polite but unyielding face of Mrs Thatcher's immigration policy, said she had no plans to change the law. Of Britain's remaining colonies only the Falklands and Gibraltar enjoyed the privilege of total national equality; the remainder-Hong Kong, in particular, which promises millions of Cantonese at Heathrow should the strictures be relaxed-are, to all intents and purposes, peopled by aliens. (Unkinder critics noted that the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians enjoy one other unique quality within the Empire-a quality which may or may not have been wholly unconnected with the decision to reserve the privilege of full British nationality to them. They are white. The Foreign Office regards such suggestions as unworthy.) ent.i.tled 'Paradise on the Dole'), spoke with pa.s.sion and eloquence about the sad fate of this most enchanting island. But Lady Young, representing the polite but unyielding face of Mrs Thatcher's immigration policy, said she had no plans to change the law. Of Britain's remaining colonies only the Falklands and Gibraltar enjoyed the privilege of total national equality; the remainder-Hong Kong, in particular, which promises millions of Cantonese at Heathrow should the strictures be relaxed-are, to all intents and purposes, peopled by aliens. (Unkinder critics noted that the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians enjoy one other unique quality within the Empire-a quality which may or may not have been wholly unconnected with the decision to reserve the privilege of full British nationality to them. They are white. The Foreign Office regards such suggestions as unworthy.)