In the affluent society, no sharp distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.
-J.K. Galbraith-
THE LOST WORLD OF SAINTS
Instead of putting the dinghy in, I do what most yachts do in Saint Helena and call "Ferry Service" on the VHF. A cute old wooden punt with a loud low revving diesel under a box in the centre pulls alongside to pick us up. Half way the 200m trip the cylinder head burns and the engine dies. We continue under tow from a fishing vessel. A gentle swell sweeps in, making the punt rise and fall and pull back and forth in the surge. We grab one of the tarzan ropes hanging at the landing and haul ourselves on land.
It's a strange place. A rock in the middle of the Atlantic. I feel relieved to be there but in the back of my mind I constantly remember the 3800 miles ahead of us, the broken vane, the broken autopilot, the lack of money and the uncertain future that will unfold in Caribbean. Will we get work there? Will we continue straight to Finland? Will Paula jump ship? Would I want her to jump ship? Yes. No.
The port captain meets us at the jetty. Scruffy jeans, a two day growth and a hand held VHF in his hand. "Ye jest goe right up de meen strait and find the police and the emmegrition" or something like that. (I'm not real good at fakaing ferin accents so please excyuose may. The point is that the Saints speak funny, "...a cross of between Jamaican, Dickensian English and a smattering of Deep South American" as Tony Weaver puts it in the glossy booklet celebrating the islands 500-year history.)
We get robbed in.. sorry cleared in and return to the boat minus 40 quid. The port fees are ridiculous but we manage to avoid the mandatory 1 pound 20 pence a day for a health insurance by me showing my Australian Medicare card and saying nothing. Maybe they thought it was a travel insurance. Paula promised to show her card the next day but we forgot.
I fell in love with Saint Helena very quickly. We took a tour around the island. Napoleon Bonaparte was heavily featured on the tour. He spent his last years on the island as an exile and that's enough reason to look down valleys and stand infront of trees and inside buildings that "may be where he once stood" or "that have been re-built to resemble the excact room that he may once have slept in" and so on. We didn't bother with his gravesite, knowing that the main ingredient is now tucked in a box in Paris and all that's left is a slab of concrete. I went crazy and paid 10 pounds for a Napoleon T-shirt.
We commit ourself for a weeks stay. The boat stuff is always haunting me and the wind vane that we got from Kevin in Durban needs further work. I clean the bottom of the hull and we relax in Jamestown. We have burgers in Ann's Place and I find a 10-year-old entry in from Yacht Merivuokko from Finland. I fiddle with the vane and get a small welding job done in a "garage" as they call them here. One day I notice that some vital parts of the vane are missing. Conclusion - I had put a split pin through witout bending the ends (why???) and the push/pull rod with plastic gears were now somewhere in 20m of water below us.
Ten years ago I would have been able to free dive it but even then it would have been futile with no idea when the rod fell in and with large swinging circle with 50m of anchor rope out. I called the local dive-club and the next day a team of two came in for a "search and rescue". No success. The day after the team returned with reinforcements and this time...bingo!
Got it!! Cost me 20 pounds but hey, what's a bottle of water worth for someone lost in Sahara desert?
I notice a sign at the decaying rock building lining the old concrete harbour area. "SHYC". A yacht club. One afternoon as we walk out to have dinner ashore, the door is open and a group of young people are sitting inside. We walk in and meat Rosie, Oscar and Leroy. The very reason why my money is always running out? I spend too much. So I get a SHYC T-shirt and a club burgee. They throw in a free ashtray. A few days later we have the three visiting Aliisa for a good night of beers and snacks. The club is really just a dinghy sailing club but I do my best to convince them that they should grab every cruising yachtie by the neck and make a quid from them.
ST.HELENA HISTORY
The makeup of Saints is not your typical English village, as much as Jamestown has that feel to it. Saint Helena got her name from the mother of the Portugese Emperor Constantine. The official discoverer, Portugese Admiral Joao Da Nova Castella arrived at her birthday, 1502.
In the coming years - as the Cape Town route to the East Indies was getting busy, Portugese, Dutch and the Brits continued to fight for the control of the island. Though the first "Saint" is said to be a Portugese castaway hermit called Dom Fernando Lopez, the first official settlment of 400 people arrived in 1659. The British flag was firmly planted on the island and never to be taken out again.
Since then the old slave trade with addition to shipwrecks and other odd additions guaranteed a racial mix of all sorts and the Saints today could trace their roots to Maldives, India, England, Portugal, Cape Verde, West and East Africa, Madagascar, Indonesia, Middle East, Holland, China, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Malaysia and so on.
The most well known chapter in the Saint Helena history started in 1815 when Napoleon Bonaparte arrived to spend the rest of his days in exile after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. Enjoying a great deal of respect, a private house and servants, his status as an Emperor - even if defeated - was never taken away from him and the Brits paid a hefty sum of money to maintain a suitable lifestyle for the small man with an itch under his shirt.
While Bonaparte's body has long been in Paris, his years on the island, the remaining buildings and "Napoleonic sites" still attract many tourists to the island.
ST.HELENA FUTURE
The main economy of the island used to be the production of flax, a textile fibre produced from the stalks of a plant of the Linaceae family. Then main use for the flax was by the British Mail service which used the plaited string for bundling piles of letters. The industry was killed in 1966 when the British Post Office decided to go for synthetic nylon twine instead.
Today there is hardly any economy to speak of. A small coffe exporting venture, the export of tuna and small scale tourism relying on the twice a month Mail Ship RMS Saint Helena are the island's only income in addition to large hand-outs from the UK government.
A decade-old plan to build an airport is still a hot topic today and the current goverment is now claiming to open an international airport with a 5-star resort and a golf course to go with it, in 2008. This hefty investment has to potential to destroy the very community or to save its economy. People of the island are divided and future will show wheather the Airport project is going to be good or bad for the island's so far isolated communinty.
