‘Departure is a Central Fact of Ascension Life’
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 10.05.10 | 11:08 AM ET
The Economist offers up this compelling five-part series from Ascension Island, a remote British overseas territory located just south of the Equator, in the middle of the Atlantic. Part one explains the ways in which Ascension has drifted back and forth, over the years, from being a useful mid-point to being “on the way to nowhere”:
Ascension Island turns on its head the old sailors’ folklore about islands that move from place to place. It sits still, but the world shifts around it in a way that sometimes, unexpectedly, put Ascension Island between an A and a B that people want to get to. Such a realignment happened at the onset of the Falklands war; similar ones have shaped the island’s whole history.
Discovered in 1501 by the Portuguese, Ascension Island was on the way to nowhere and deemed uninhabitable, so it was left uninhabited, most of the time, for centuries to come, though goats were introduced to give anyone with the misfortune of being ship wrecked something to eat. Then in 1815 the British decided to exile the most important man in the world, Napoleon, to St Helena, further south in the Atlantic. Now the island was on the way back to Europe from St Helena, and it was pre-emptively garrisoned lest it be used by vile Buonapartists to ease his escape. After Buonaparte died in 1821, it took on a new role as a base for the navy’s actions against the Atlantic slave trade. As the garrison developed better (though still meagre) water supplies, and gained expertise in the slaughter of turtles, deemed a delicacy, ships on the way back from the Indian Ocean called in more often; the way the trades blow mean that while Ascension is not on a sailing ship’s way from Europe to India, it is on the way back.
(Via The Daily Dish)
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