Isolation

RMS St. Helena arriving 

It’s Thursday, in the tiny harbor of Jamestown, St. Helena, and the monthly visit of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) St. Helena just ended; the shops are (briefly) full of fruit, sodas, fresh meat, and produce, and the docks are silent after a few frantic days of offloading and loading containers. This complete reliance on ship-borne materials is not unique to this island – most of the Pacific islands we visited were similarly reliant. But St. Helena’s physical isolation from the rest of the world – borne of its distance from any adjoining land or island-based airports – makes it unique among the world’s populated islands. Anything or anyone arriving here passes through Cape Town – itself relatively remote – and then boards the RMS for a five day voyage. Medical evacuations must wait for the ship. Fruit is at least a week old when it arrives. No one is in a real rush, and the locals exude a sense of resigned pride – or is it acceptance? – in their geographic fate.

Initially, after its discovery by European explorers (there were no natives to displace, evangelize or exploit), the island’s isolation was its appeal: a place where ship, headed to and from India and the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope, could stop for water, or a place to send unruly Emperors. Its earliest settlers were either sent here or brought here to serve the passing ship traffic; there were precious few “volunteers,” in the sense of intrepid souls seeking a new land. Then and now, there were and are many other places better suited to starting a new life, places not nearly as isolated as this rock in the ocean.

Turk's Bay

Today, that isolation is threatened, one might say, by the big news that the British Government has finally committed to building an airport on this jagged volcanic island 1700 miles northeast of Cape Town, South Africa. Of course, the development-minded citizens and ex-pats of St. Helena see the airport as the harbinger of all things good: better access to the rest of the world, more tourists, more business, and, well, you know the drill.

600 feet of stairs - town to fort

But after spending a week here, I worry that the very thing that a small majority of Saints – as the locals are referred to – see as their salvation may prove, in the end, to be another disappointment, and may, in fact threaten it’s self-proclaimed and somewhat dubious status as “the most extraordinary place on earth.” For aside from its isolation – limiting immigration and emigration, as well as tourism – it is not clear how to define the soul of this curious island. Unlike many Pacific islands, which have their millennia-old native cultures to serve as foundations for their identities, St. Helena’s relative youth as a peopled land leaves it grasping at straws in its effort to define itself. Viewed in that light, the island’s history seems one of successive efforts to define itself to themselves and the outside world, only to have those efforts fall short in the face of its unalterable isolation, its seemingly non-entrepreneurial culture, and its forbidding geology.

Cinder block houses; no termites!

The airport is scheduled for completion in 2016 or so; the plebiscite on its construction passed with a bare majority, with ex-pat Saints in the Falklands, Ascension and England providing the margin of victory. Local sentiments tend toward the skeptical; one local promised us that the airport “would destroy the island;” a mail clerk highlighted that it “would be good for medical evacuations, but that’s about it.” A groundskeeper told us that the airport would be the excuse used by England to reduce and then eliminate its considerable annual subsidy to the island, a goal echoed the next day by the island’s appointed governor in the press conference announcing this year’s subsidy. In so many words, the governor described the new budget as focused on the airport with the goal of economic sufficiency.

Flax, covering a hillside

Hmm. Years ago, the island puts all its chips on flax, the spiked, narrow-bladed plant that can be milled into thread and fabric. Today, the island‘s wet interior is overrun with the plant – a not-unattractive, albeit impenetrable ground cover. In 1966, the island’s six flax mills closed: economically untenable. More recently, an effort to become self-sufficient in lumber – the island has many old forests – fell victim to a similar fate. The cost of transporting timber to a mill, and the cost of maintaining the mill, proved too much. It was cheaper to ship the 2x4s in from South Africa. There are some coffee trees on the island – reportedly, the beans are exquisite – but volumes are not high. There’s a small commercial fishing fleet, but the markets are in South Africa, and depend on the ship.

Tourism and ex-pat repatriations seem to be the dominant source of foreign exchange. Most islanders seem content to eke out a living, growing a few vegetables, driving the few tourists around, re-selling imported items to each other and to tourists, or working for the government, maintaining the narrow roads, rebuilding rickety retaining walls, or, now, lining up to work constructing the airport. Mostly, people like their subsidy from England, content to wait for the occasional influx of tourists.

Longwood House, Napoleon's last stand

Tourists are drawn to this island for several reasons, not least of which are its isolation (I’ve been to St. Helena!), and its claim as Napoleon’s place of exile and death. We visited Longwood, his home away from home, as it were, and were underwhelmed. Maintained in a lackadaisical fashion by the French Government, the home is filled with replica furniture and artifacts, a seemingly random collection of portraits and busts of the Emperor, with just a few pieces of written curation – in French. The local guides do their best to provide context, but too often we heard that this piece or that was a “faithful copy.” Even Napoleon’s Tomb is a bait-and-switch, his body having been exhumed long ago and returned to France. Call me cynical, but I’m not sure the lack of an airport is the only thing responsible for the limited number of visitors to the Napoleon Complex.

There’s talk of a five-star hotel and an 18-hole golf course, post-airport. Maybe so, but the island has no beaches, and aside from a few forts in various states of renovation and decay, there’s not going to be much going on outside the grounds of the resort. Limited access to the internet costs almost US$200/month, and for US$50/month, you get three TV channels. Intra-island phone service is expensive (the phone booths are marked on the island’s maps and there are no cell phones), and fuel is a staggering US$10 per gallon. These are not indices for a vibrant tourist destination.

Northern vistas -- Lot and Lot's Wife formations

What the island does have is magnificent geology – spectacular peaks and valleys, cliffs and bluffs, and a breathtaking diversity of micro-climates. You can practically live anywhere in the world on this island: rainforest, arid plain, desert, seaside – it all depends on where you build your house. Four seasons can be experienced in the same day. There are hikes galore, passing through and across a landscape whose vistas change by the mile. The sea is a constant visual presence. In these respects, one can see the truth in the island’s claim to be the most magnificent place on earth. The geology is a defining and limiting factor: roads are impossibly narrow, carved out of steep cliffs, switching back and forth up sheer walls. There’s no flat land to speak of; the airport will be excavated out of the only relatively level land on the island, and, interestingly for an airport about 600 miles from the nearest (military) airport, is fogged in from time to time during the winter months. There are three herds of cattle on the island – nearly all the land is just too steep for grazing, farming seems out of the question. There are just a few settlements of more than a few dozen houses – most houses are built above or beyond the roads, their access to adjoining houses limited by the need to climb down or up steep driveways and to navigate roads whose sides are defined by rock walls on one side and deadly drops on the other. It’s a difficult place to imagine being developed further.

We have enjoyed our stay here; we are used to the logistical limitations of islands, to their high prices and short supplies. We are comfortable ferrying from boat to land and back again. We spend our time touring the island, visiting with fellow cruisers, and doing boat maintenance. St. Helena is a wonderful place for boats and ships to stop on their way to somewhere else; I’m just not sure it’s ever going to realize its promise as a tourist destination. The airport’s viability is predicated on increased tourism, and on it not irrevocably changing the essential attraction of the island – its isolation. As we leave here for the islands of the Caribbean, I worry that St. Helena’s airport may, in fact, result in the worst of both worlds: inadequate economic activity coupled with a permanent loss of that which makes this island unique: its extraordinary remoteness.