Home
Home
WELCOME TO THE ST HELENA HISTORY WEBSITE
This is a searchable archive of St Helena's East India Company records, 1659-1836.
St Helena's history has long suffered from circular citation - errors in a handful of older works (Brooke, Janisch and Gosse foremost among them) have been repeated and entrenched by successive authors sourcing from them instead of the primary records.
The cure has always been obvious: consult the original records rather than the flawed secondary works. However, this was never easy because the island's remoteness kept those archives inaccessible. That changed when the St Helena records were photographed and put online by the British Library.
THE RECORDS
The British Library offers an alternative to the records held on St Helena, thanks to the East India Company's practice of requiring duplicate copies to be sent to its directors in London, now held in the Library's India Office Records section.
The two collections are not equivalent: the British Library is the stronger source for St Helena's place within the wider Company network, while Jamestown’s Archives office holds a fuller resource for matters relating to the island itself - particularly incoming correspondence and records of the population. Accessing the British Library is far easier than travelling to St Helena, but neither collection is indexed or searchable, and researchers must still work through the volumes page by page.
FROM IMAGES TO SEARCHABLE TEXT
Making St Helena's records genuinely accessible has taken three stages of work, each with its own challenges.
- Photography. Vulnerable to fire, water and termites, around 325 volumes of St Helena's handwritten East India Company records (1659-1836) - some 110,742 pages - were photographed by a team from the island's National Trust in a project sponsored by the British Library.
- Transcription. The images are not searchable, and extracting their content means reading the collection page by page - a task made harder still by poor handwriting, foxing, ink bleed-through and missing sections. AI has therefore been used to transcribe the images and produce modern-English interpretations alongside the originals, with contextual notes clearly flagged as separate from the transcription itself.
- Publication. This site presents those transcriptions, allowing researchers to search the entire collection at once for specific words or phrases.
PROGRESS SO FAR
Transcription is under way in chronological order, beginning with the earliest volumes. Completed to date:
- St Helena Records (Council Meetings): 10 volumes*
- Letters from England: 3 volumes
- Letters from England (Goodwins Abstracts): 1 volume
- Letters to England: 1 volume
- Constitution, Laws and Instructions: 1 volume
- Register of Leases and Deeds: 1 volume
- Register of Wills: 1 volume
* Excludes the St Helena Records for 1705-1706, where the reflective surface of the pages rendered AI transcription impossible.
A companion project led by Dr Chris Hillman is transcribing land leases, deeds, wills, estate inventories and passenger lists by eye - a slower but more precise method, particularly valuable for the accurate spelling of names.
USING THE SITE
Transcriptions can be searched online or downloaded as PDFs for offline use with free-text search tools such as X1, Agent Ransack or DocFetcher.
ABOUT
This site is maintained by Ian Bruce. Contact: sthelenahistory@gmail.com
Last updated: [date]
Note: free public domain images on https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaSearch
Old Home
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. In non dolor finibus, feugiat nulla ut, luctus enim. Curabitur consectetur mauris nec condimentum pellentesque. Aenean feugiat dapibus posuere.
Vestibulum sed tristique nulla. Sed vel lacus orci. Maecenas in purus vel nisl viverra semper. Curabitur id mauris nibh. In hac habitasse platea dictumst.
Donec iaculis massa nec magna suscipit, quis viverra nisl sollicitudin. Fusce vel placerat ipsum. Nunc rutrum varius augue, vel posuere velit faucibus vel.
Search Instructions
You can use simple words, exact phrases, wildcard symbols, and Boolean operators to refine searches.
Boolean keywords must be in UPPERCASE e.g. AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, NOT NEAR.
Captain NEAR Brooke finds terms close together in the same section, usually in the same sentence or an immediately adjacent sentence.
- Single word:
cartographyfinds sections containing that word. - Multiple words (default OR):
Governor Councilfinds sections containing either term. - Exact phrase:
"Mary French"finds that exact phrase. - Wildcard:
M?rymatches one unknown character (for example,Mary). - Wildcard:
surv*matches word starts (for example,survey,surveyor). - AND (uppercase):
witchcraft AND Powellreturns sections containing both terms. - OR (uppercase):
Brooke OR Bealereturns sections containing either term. - NOT (uppercase):
powder NOT rumexcludes sections containingrum. - NOT NEAR (uppercase):
Captain NOT NEAR Brookefinds sections whereCaptainappears but not nearBrooke. - Phonetic:
^Mordauntcan help find similar-sounding spellings.
About
This page is loaded from navContent. You can edit this file directly without touching index.html.
Use numbered filenames in navContent to control top-level ordering after Archive.
Guides
Guides is a dropdown group example. Child pages are listed under this menu item.
Getting Started
Use this file to add practical onboarding instructions for contributors.
Editorial Workflow
Document your editorial process and review checklist here.
Archive
Morbi eget malesuada turpis. Proin sollicitudin hendrerit leo, sed sagittis felis porta at. Suspendisse semper dictum arcu, nec tristique arcu interdum at.
Phasellus pellentesque tempor sapien, nec efficitur orci finibus et. Donec bibendum dictum est in condimentum. Suspendisse potenti. Cras lacinia odio non magna blandit, in suscipit ligula varius.
Aliquam erat volutpat. Ut euismod auctor eros, vel sodales metus mattis id. Pellentesque et est vitae erat viverra vestibulum in non libero.
Search Results
Archive Viewer
Select an archive entry to view its content.