Search St Helena’s original records

Explore a searchable collection of St Helena’s colonial government records under the East India Company: ultimately around 250 closely handwritten volumes of council proceedings, two-way correspondence with London, wills, leases, deeds and more.

This site lets researchers search the entire collection of primary sources at once for specific words or phrases, rather than relying on later second-hand histories.

Why the original records matter

Much of St Helena’s history rests on a handful of standard older works, such as those by Brooke and Gosse. The many errors in these books have been entrenched by circular citation, repeated by successive generations of authors who drew on them rather than on the primary records themselves.

Janisch certainly published extracts from these records, but he could include only a limited number. He was forced to abbreviate and reword passages, especially where the information was scattered across different sections, and it is sometimes unclear whether his accompanying commentary comes from the records or reflects his own interpretations.

For most of the island’s history, consulting the original records was simply impractical. St Helena’s remoteness kept them out of reach, until they were photographed and made available on the British Library website.

This site builds on that: the original records, transcribed in full. Transcription is ongoing, working forward in time from the oldest volumes, with new material added regularly.

The records

Where the records are held

St Helena’s records for the 150 years of East India Company (EIC) rule, up to 1836, are held in two places: the Archives Office in Jamestown, and the India Office Records at the British Library. Many documents survive in both, a result of the Company’s practice of sending duplicate copies to its directors in London.

The two collections are not equivalent. The British Library is the better source for understanding St Helena’s place within the wider Company network, while the Jamestown Archives Office holds the fuller record of the island itself and its population. The British Library is, of course, far easier to reach than St Helena, but it does not hold the whole story.

Neither collection is indexed or searchable. To find anything, a researcher must first know the rough date, then work out whether the information is likely to sit in the council consultations, in letters to or from St Helena, or elsewhere, and only then search the densely handwritten pages by hand.

Photographing the records

In 2022, concerned that the records at Jamestown were vulnerable to fire, water and termites, the British Library sponsored a team from the St Helena National Trust to photograph more than 110,000 pages of the Jamestown records, covering the whole of the EIC period. All these images are now available on the British Library’s website.

This lets researchers read the records without travelling to London or St Helena, but finding information remains slow, because the images themselves cannot be searched. Reading them is hard work too, made harder still where the handwriting is poor or the paper is foxed or marred by ink bleeding through from the other side.

Transcribing the records

This project was set up to transcribe as much of these records as possible. Transcribing by eye gives the most accurate result, but the sheer volume of material makes that impractical, so the images have been transcribed using AI.

With experience, the AI was set two distinct tasks: first to transcribe each image as accurately as possible, and second to render that text into a modern English explanation. Each page was then supplemented with an analysis in two parts: an interpretations section, which explains the meaning of the archaic text and defines some of the terms used, and a speculations section, which considers what the record may imply beyond what it states. As the work proceeded, a short handover file was created at the end of each volume, allowing details to be cross-referenced against information from earlier records.

How the records are presented on this site

Each page of the records is presented as a single row of four columns. The first two give the source reference: the British Library film number and the page number within the volume. The third column holds the verbatim transcription, and the fourth the modern English explanation together with the interpretations and speculations. Keeping the transcription and the commentary in separate columns means the reader can always see where the original records end and the analysis begin.

Every film number is also a link to the original image on the British Library’s website, so readers can examine the source for themselves. This matters, because the records cannot be taken as flawless. The original documents contain misspellings, including many variant spellings of the same name, and the AI itself may also mistranscribe a word. Linking each entry to its source image means any reading can be checked against the original.

Images courtesy of The Friends of St Helena.