This website lets you search St Helena's East India Company records, 1680s to 1836 - a collection of 252 volumes of original manuscripts, free to explore by name, date, place or event. Transcription is proceeding in date order, and so far 35 volumes have been completed, with new ones added regularly.
Use the search box above to find people, places, dates and events across the transcribed volumes. For the first time, historical research into St Helena can be conducted directly from the original records rather than through second-hand accounts. The records serve other purposes too: genealogists can trace island families through names scattered across consultations, censuses and church records, while researchers of ships, trade and the East India Company will find the island's role as a vital port of call documented in detail.
These records have always been effectively inaccessible. The manuscripts are held on St Helena itself, one of the remotest inhabited islands in the world, and consulting them meant travelling there. Their recent photographing has placed images online, but images alone cannot be searched - they remain hundreds of thousands of pages of hard-to-read handwriting. Only transcription turns them into data that can be explored, and that is what this website provides.
St Helena preserves one of the most substantial early colonial archives in existence: 252 volumes created between the 1680s and 1836, maintained through East India Company record-keeping and protected by the island's isolation. The original collection on St Helena is even larger than the duplicate volumes held by the British Library.
For too long, the island's history has rested on a small group of out-of-date secondary works - notably the standard histories of St Helena by Brooke and Gosse. Their errors and omissions have been repeatedly reproduced from one account to the next, giving rise to persistent myths about the island's past. Even the extracts published by Janisch offer only selective summaries, his wording often differing from the original. Direct access to the full archival record has long been overdue.
In recent years, the St Helena National Trust has photographed the entire manuscript collection, and the British Library has made these images available online. That opened the way for a major transcription project, converting the photographed pages into searchable text. This website is the result: a dedicated search facility allowing users to explore the archive as transcription progresses, opening new ways to analyse the unique history of this isolated colony.
The Digest section presents a series of special studies, each demonstrating the depth of research that becomes possible once the records are available as searchable data:
Two sets of text accompany every manuscript page. The first is a transcription of the original text, reproduced as accurately as possible - here, Goodwin's Abstracts recording the Charter granted by King Charles II on 3 April 1664, when the island was retaken from the Dutch. The second is an interpretation of that page in modern language, with two analysis sections: an explanation of archaic or unusual wording, and a speculation section exploring what the entry may reveal. Both are interpretations, offered to help the reader, while the transcription itself stays faithful to what the manuscript says.