St |Helena's New Tourism
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Just in time: St |Helena’s new tourism map Sensational Developments for St Helena In this issue • St Helena has an operational regular weekly commercial 2 Editorial / Joining the Friends air service in operation. The first commercial flight 3 Report on the autumn meeting and book launch landed at Prosperous Bay Plain on 14th October with 4 Review of A Bitter Draught some 70 passengers on board. 5 -6 Waterwitch: A Warship and its Voyages by Andrew Pearson 7-8 SA 8131 – The St Helena Flight Experience by E. Baldwin • There is an operational monthly air service from St 9-10 Easter Island: A Model for St Helena’s Tourism? I. Mathieson Helena to Ascension (where it overnights) which was inaugurated on 18th November returning on 19th. 11/14 Country Shops of St Helena (part 2) by Sharon Henry 12-13 St Helena Sea Life by Richard Hewitt • Jamestown has a high-class hotel. On 1st November the 15 -16 The Mantis St Helena Hotel Opens by Edward Baldwin new 30 room Mantis Hotel opened at 1-2-3 Main St in 17 Miscellaneous Jamestown. 18 Napoleon’s Representative on Earth: M Martineau’s new book • The new cargo service carried by the MV Helena will by John Tyrrell commence on 21st February and make monthly calls at 19 Book Page by Ian Mathieson St Helena and four calls per year at Ascension. 20-21 St Helena’s Genealogical Database by Chris & Sheila Hillman 22 Fibre-Optic Cable is the Way to Go by Christian von der Ropp • The RMS will make a final voyage to Tristan and finally 23-24 St Helena’s Endemic Species by St Helena Tourism retire at Cape Town on 15th February 2018 Summer Meeting 2018: the next meeting will be held at the Oxford Quaker Meeting House, 42 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW on Saturday 9th June 2018. The meeting will feature talks on Ascension Island. Further details to follow in the New Year. Editorial After many months, or even years, there is at last good news for St Helena. Not just some good news but a lot with the main items being listed on our front page. Suddenly things have come together; we can sit at home and, at least once week say “I could be in Jamestown in three days’ time.” It may not be so long before we will be able to say these words two or three times a week. Access issues have dominated the life of the St Helena Connection. Indeed our first issue, eleven years ago, opened with the headline “latest news on the airport” under an aerial view of the eastern side of the island showing the location of the main components of the project. So now the island has real access and things enter a new phase when we see if tourism really will work on the island in the low volume, high value way in which it was conceived more than ten years ago. And we look forward to dealing with headlines which are not dominated by boats, planes and runways – indeed on page 22 we already have an account of the fibre optic cable that St Helena can expect to receive in the not too distant future which could change its future almost as much as access will. Easter Island tourism was used as one of the proxies in the 2005 airport feasibility study to illustrate how tourism might develop on St Helena. Your editor has familial links with that island and Chile so it seemed a good moment to visit and see how things were developing. Despite annual tourist numbers in the region of 100,000 on an island only about 50% bigger than St Helena, Easter Island hasn’t been destroyed by mass tourism - at least yet - as we report on pages 9 and 10. For the Society our big event during the last six months has been the launch of Colin Fox’s A Bitter Draught: St Helena and the Abolition of Slavery at our autumn meeting at the Victory Club in London. This is the third title to be published under our Wirebird imprint and represents the most ambitious project to date, not just for the book’s size but also for its subject matter which extends in importance well beyond the confines of a small South Atlantic island. For our treasurer and the book’s author, Colin Fox, this represents a magnum opus that has taken a good many years to produce. He has received sterling support from fellow members Ian Bruce and Edward Baldwin as well as from Professor Dan Yon as we report on page 3. We also had a further talk from Andy Pearson at the autumn meeting. Following his archaeological work on the liberated Africans’ graves in Ruperts Valley and the associated quarantine station at Lemon Valley, Andy researched the role of HMS Waterwitch in bringing many of the Africans to St Helena. His article is on pages 5-6. Edward Baldwin provides us, on pages 7-8, with a lively account of being a passenger on only the second scheduled flight to St Helena. He describes how the aeroplane, with many empty seats because of weight restrictions, doubles up as a sitting area in which passengers can freely change seats so as to catch up with friends and acquaintances before they reach the island. To see the picture of the boarding gate of flight SA8131 to Saint Helena is to view a significant milestone in the island’s history. Edward also follows up his article on the development of the Mantis Hotel in Jamestown with an account of its opening and some views of its rooms. Trip Advisor currently offers us a view of “all 2 traveller photographs” of St Helena. By this time next year things will be very different and no doubt the Mantis Hotel will have that owl with their marks out of ten displayed on their front door. The remainder of this issue is taken up with a range of topics from different authors. Sharon Henry continues her amusing account of St Helena’s shops with more to come in further issues. I can assure our readers that, compared to Easter Island, St Helena’s grocery shops have a lot more character and a lot more to offer! Member Richard Hewitt provides the subject for the centre pages with some fine shots of island sea-birds taken during his visits in 2011 and 2013 while St Helena Tourism provide an abbreviated listing of the island’s endemic flora and fauna. Ever good on statistics SHG provide us with forecasts of St Helena’s projected population growth in the years to come but whatever happens it seems that the island will be run by women – there were no men filling any of the five places on SHG’s future leaders course (p17). Members Chris and Shelia Hillman provide an account of how to explore St Helena ancestry (p20-21) while new books reviewed feature our old friend Fernao Lopes, the island’s first resident, an update of Duff Hart-Davis’s Ascension and an interesting review by John Tyrrell of Michel Martineau’s account of Gilbert - a book which unfortunately has only been published in French. The St Helena Connection The St Helena Connection aims to provide news and information on people and current and historical events of interest to anyone with connections to the Island of St Helena. All contributions welcome. Please contact the editor: Ian Mathieson, Callender House, 90, Callender St, Ramsbottom, Lancs BLO 9DU. T 01706-826467. Email [email protected] Published by the Friends of St Helena c/o the Editor at the above address Printed by Direct Offset, Glastonbury, Somerset. Joining the Friends or Subscribing to the St Helena Connection Membership To join the Friends please contact the Membership Secretary, Margaret Dyson on [email protected] Annual Membership is £20.00 per family at the same address in the UK and £30 overseas. Life Membership £350.00. The St Helena Connection is published twice a year in June (after the AGM) and December. It comes as a benefit of membership together with a copy of Wirebird which focusses on island history and is published in September. The Friends of St Helena President: the Earl of Iveagh The St Helena Connection Editor: Ian Mathieson Chairman: Ian Mathieson Wirebird Editor: Colin Fox Vice-Chairman: David Young Web Manager: Margaret Dyson Treasurer: Colin Fox Committee Members: Edward Baldwin, Vicky Beal, Trevor Secretary: Brian Frederick Reynolds, Patricia Young, Matthew Woodthorpe, David Hall, Nick Braddock and Conrad Eades. Membership Secretary: Margaret Dyson Page 2 St Helena Connection 23 Autumn Meeting 2017 The autumn meeting was held as usual at the Victory Club in London with some 60 members attending. The theme centred around St Helena’s slavery history with the launch of Colin Fox’s A Bitter Draught: St Helena and the Abolition of Slavery. In addition, Dr Andy Pearson gave a talk on the activities of HMS Waterwitch and its activities during the mid-19th century as part of the navy squadron suppressing the West African slave trade. This was the third time Andy had given a talk to a Friends meeting; the previous ones being in 2009 on the Liberated African graves in Ruperts Valley and in 2011 on his research at Lemon Valley, which acted as a quarantine station during the early years of the activities of the West Africa Squadron. (see pp 5-6 for the text of Andy’s talk). We were also delighted to welcome Dr Steve Royle whose 2007 Company’s Island examined, amongst other things, the role of slavery in the early years of the EIC on St Helena and also Dan Yon who launched A Bitter Draught.