St Helena History

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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

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OR (uppercase): Brooke OR Beale returns sections containing either term.
NOT (uppercase): powder NOT rum excludes sections containing rum.
NOT NEAR (uppercase): Captain NOT NEAR Brooke finds sections where Captain appears but not near Brooke.
Phonetic: ^Mordaunt can help find similar-sounding spellings.

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