Nobody is quite sure who really discovered Saint Helena, or when
Tradition says the Portuguese navigator João da Nova sighted Saint Helena on 21 May 1502. Yet a map finished months after his return omits it, sailors the next year treated it as unknown, and the date itself may come from a Protestant feast day added a century later. The Spanish may have known it first.
The island is a volcanic speck roughly 16 by 8 kilometres, some 1,860 kilometres off Angola, and among the most remote major islands anywhere. It was empty of people when the Portuguese arrived, rich in trees and fresh water. They left livestock, fruit trees and vegetables, built a small chapel, and used it as a place to drop off sick sailors to recover until the next ship passed. When the Dutch traveller Linschoten landed in 1589, he found a fig tree carved by seamen as early as 1510.
The doubts about da Nova are persuasive. The Cantino map of late 1502 shows his other find, Ascension, but not Saint Helena. In 1503 the scribe of Estêvão da Gama's fleet described the island as unknown, even though his ships had just met captains who should have heard of it. A 2022 paper points to Spanish charts from 1500, and a 2015 study notes that 21 May was first cited in 1596 and suggests 3 May, a Catholic feast linked to Saint Helena, as more credible.
England's East India Company took charge in 1657 under a charter from Oliver Cromwell, founding Jamestown in a narrow valley between cliffs. Settlers were hard to attract, with just 66 residents by 1670. Edmond Halley set up a telescope there in 1676 to chart southern stars, and a hill still bears his name. At its peak around 1,000 ships a year called, and the town grew so rowdy with taverns that the cathedral was built outside it.
The island's past also holds darkness. The British brought about 25,000 enslaved Africans there, and slavery was not abolished until 1839; road-building in 2008 uncovered over 9,000 remains in Rupert's Valley. Napoleon spent his final exile on Saint Helena from 1815 until his death. The 2021 census counted 4,439 people.
Source: Saint Helena
