Digests – aspects of life at St Helena and its people, 1680s-1720s

These studies were produced to demonstrate how much can be learned from the transcribed records, and how richly they repay reading. They supply the primary information here, supplemented by external sources such as books, academic papers and theses.

At present these reports rest on only the thirty earliest of St Helena's records. More subjects will follow, and the existing studies will be revised and deepened, as the transcription progresses.

Subjects

Alcohol: Drink at the Company's island, 1673-1725. Arrack came south in the holds of the Indiamen, and the Company sold it, taxed it and worried about it. With almost no coin in circulation, liquor became the money: wages went in drink, and debts to the punch houses swallowed men whole. It was dispensed as medicine and it fuelled sedition. Vines were planted and failed, and stills turning potatoes into spirit ate through the woods until the trees were nearly gone. Governor and Council raged against sottishness, licensed the trade anyway, and drew a useful revenue from the very ruin they deplored.

Body, soul and mind at St Helena: St Helena's East India Company rulers took on more than trade: they answered for their people's souls, bodies and minds alike. This report follows that unlikely triple burden across sixty years, from a single minister-cum-schoolmaster in 1673 through decades of drunken chaplains, quarrelsome governors, untrained surgeons, and slaves baptised but never freed. Drawing on nearly two hundred original manuscript entries, weighed against published histories and set beside comparable struggles in Bengal and the Caribbean, it traces a small, remote colony perpetually short of the right men to act as medical practitioners, religious pastors or teachers, doing its faltering best by conviction rather than competence, and rarely quite living up to its own better intentions.

Defence and the garrison: The Dutch took the island in 1673 and the English took it straight back, and the fear of losing it again never quite went. What followed was less a fortress than a struggle to keep one standing. The guns rusted, the powder was watered down, sentries slept, and soldiers who had run up debts at the store slipped away on passing ships to escape them. Three times the men mutinied. Slaves and soldiers hauled up walls and batteries, and the sea pulled them apart nearly as fast, so that some in the fort argued for giving them up altogether.

Disputes and Resolutions: With no professional bench and no realistic appeal, the Governor and Council were the whole apparatus: they heard the debts, slanders and fence disputes of a Wednesday, and passed sentence of death when it came to that. Juries were drawn from the same few hundred faces, and knew every man they judged. Law reached furthest and cut deepest against slaves, whose evidence convicted their own. Officers feuded and libelled, planters quarrelled over title, and widows and orphans came before the same table. Order rested on men who were also neighbours, employers and rivals.

Food: An island kept to feed fleets could never reliably feed itself. Bread grain never took, sugar failed, and the yam that did grow gave bulk without nourishment, so slaves lived and sickened on it. Rain governed everything: when it failed the cattle died in their hundreds, prices soared, and the fishery became the difference between hardship and starvation. Even the citrus that guarded seamen from scurvy proved fragile. Meat, dairy and fruit went to the Fort table, roots to the yam-grounds, and what a man ate declared exactly where he stood.

Land and property: The Company owned everything and granted it away on conditions, so a freehold was never quite free. Land came with a wife, a cow and an obligation to build and improve it, and it could be forfeited if a man let it lie idle. What a settler's life amounted to was cattle, tools, a few household goods, and slaves listed among them and left to widows and children like furniture. Debt bound the small economy together, land secured it, and the woods were felled to feed it. Property, in the end, drew the line between freedom and servitude.

Monetary system: There was never enough coin, so the island invented ways to live without it. Debts were settled in cattle, in yams, in slaves and in labour, while everything was still reckoned in pounds, shillings and pence that scarcely existed. The Company was landlord, employer, government and bank at once, and nearly everyone owed it something. Credit ran in a web from the store to the planter to the soldier, secured on land and beasts, and enforced when patience ran out. When the rains failed, prices climbed, and the debts grew heavier with them.

Slavery: Slaves were listed in the Company's schedules after the cattle, and treated accordingly. They built the fortifications, worked the plantation and fed a garrison that lived off their labour. The law grew harsher as fear grew, and punishment was written on the body with the iron and the lash. They ran, they stole boats, they conspired, and they were burned and hanged for it. Children were sold to raise money, families broken up by inheritance, and lives cut short by hunger and disease. Baptism and manumission offered a narrow way out, and very few passed through it.

Textiles and dress: English wool went out on the ships and Indian cotton came back, and both were unloaded here, so islanders wore printed calicoes that Parliament had forbidden at home. Nothing was woven on the island, yet tailors, tanners and cobblers cut, dyed, stitched and mended everything. Cloth served as money where coin was scarce, and it also served as a badge: scarlet broadcloth for the gentry, coarse kersey doled out yearly to slaves, whose bodies were also marked. Tanning the leather meant stripping bark, and the endemic woods paid for the island's shoes.

Woodland, Water and Want at St Helena: A forested island was stripped bare in two generations. Goats browsed the seedlings so nothing replaced what fell, tanners stripped the bark, and the stills and lime kilns swallowed the rest as fuel. Order after order was passed to protect the trees, and each was ignored while the men who passed them took their share. Bare slopes shed their soil, springs failed, and droughts bit deeper because the wood that held the rain had gone. Timber came in by ship instead. Some on the island saw plainly what was happening, and could not stop it.

People

Names in censuses: Every surviving head-count of the island stands here: the tax rolls, the road-labour lists, the church polls and the full censuses. The free are named, household by household. The slaves are mostly not, appearing instead as a number beside an owner's name, until the Company's own rolls begin naming its own. Names are misspelled, totals fail to add up, and widows and orphans surface where a man has gone. Read together, the lists show a very small population, and the same few families holding it together for thirty years.

Names in the church records: The church registers to 1836. Baptism, marriage and burial for everyone the island's clergy wrote down: 3,260 free surnames and 13,264 entries, the same families recurring across a century and a half. The slaves are set apart at the end, 485 given names and no surname between them, because none was thought needed. Spellings shift from hand to hand, a name buried is sometimes a name baptised the year before, and the years alone tell you how briefly many of them lived.

Names in the St Helena government records: Everyone the clerks wrote down, from governors to the men who simply appear on a list of labourers: 1,427 surnames among the free, 198 slaves recorded by a single name and their owner. Each entry says why the person surfaced in the record - a will, a jury, a theft, a lease, a ship left behind. Spellings wander wildly, since clerks wrote by ear, and one man may be Field, Feild or Feilde within a single volume.

Shipping

Index of ships and persons: Every ship and every person the St Helena records tie to the island's shipping since the 1680s, searchable in two ways. The first gathers the names of 354 vessels across 519 recorded voyages, from lone East Indiamen to whole homeward fleets. The second lists 709 people searchable by surname: commanders and mates, surgeons and pursers, crew, passengers, stowaways, and shore folk drawn into a ship's business. Brief details of each visit are summarised - a mutiny, a cargo, a death at sea, a desertion - with the source of where the details can be found in the records.

Chronological ship arrivals: Every recorded call of a ship at the island since the 1680s, presented chronologically, with full details from the manuscripts. Includes tonnage, rig and captain, and a note of what happened while she lay in the road - a cargo landed, a mutiny quelled, a seaman buried, a stowaway carried off. More than 500 vessels and hundreds of individuals appear in all, each entry carrying its source so any call or person can be traced back to the record.

Ship origins and destinations: Every ship that dropped anchor off James Bay since the 1680s, and the two questions the clerks cared about most: where had she come from, and where was she headed next. Some carried convicts from Bombay, some slaves from Madagascar, some tea from Canton; others were homeward Indiamen pausing for water and news. Each row pairs a vessel with her date of call and, where the record allows, the port behind her and the one ahead - Surat, Bencoolen, Mocha, London, the Cape and dozens more - so the whole forms a working index of the routes that carried Company trade past the island.

1675 depiction of St Helena by John Seller