Ascension Island's cloud forest was planted on a cinder at Darwin's urging
When Charles Darwin landed in 1836, Ascension was a treeless volcanic island that St Helena's residents mocked as a cinder. A decade later Joseph Hooker, spurred by Darwin, persuaded the Royal Navy to ship in trees. By the late 1870s pines, eucalyptus, bamboo and bananas crowned Green Mountain as a man-made tropical cloud forest.
Ascension sits alone in the South Atlantic about 8 degrees south of the Equator, roughly 1,540 kilometres from Africa. The Portuguese navigator João da Nova sighted it in 1501, and Afonso de Albuquerque named it on Ascension Day in 1503. Dry and barren, it drew passing sailors only for seabirds and the huge green turtles nesting on its beaches; the Portuguese released goats for future crews. In 1701 William Dampier's HMS Roebuck sank in Clarence Bay, and sixty men survived two months, almost certainly after finding a strong spring in the high interior.
Britain garrisoned the island in 1815 as a precaution once Napoleon was imprisoned on St Helena, and the Royal Navy even listed it as a ship, HMS Ascension. Darwin found springs guarded so carefully that he compared the whole place to a huge vessel kept in first-rate order. Hooker visited in 1843, and from 1850 ships brought plants from Argentina, Europe and South Africa so that trees would catch rain and build soil.
In 1877 the astronomer David Gill and his wife Isobel came to measure Mars at close approach using a heliometer. Nightly cloud over Green Mountain spoiled the view from Georgetown, so Isobel crossed miles of lava to find clearer skies in the southwest. They landed 20 tons of equipment at a beach now called Mars Bay and produced a solar distance of 93.08 million miles, close to the modern figure.
Ascension became a communications and flight hub. A submarine cable arrived in 1899, and in the Second World War the United States built Wideawake airfield, named for the noisy sooty terns nearby. Expanded in the 1960s, its runway was then the longest in the world and was designated an emergency strip for the Space Shuttle. Today the island hosts one of four ground antennas supporting GPS.
Source: Ascension Island
