The Voyage to Saint Helena

For this week's blog I decided to write about an object I found while I was in the Maps Library. Last week while I was working with my intern advisor, Karl, I was shown an interesting discovery. We were preparing for an open house of the library featuring islands and our task was to find interesting and unique maps of islands throughout the world. Karl, who as it seems knows everything about every map in the library, decided to show me an interesting map of an island that he had found in the recent past as the atlas was a new acquisition. He pulled out a very old atlas. He told me it was by an English cartographer, engraver, globemaker and publisher named, John Cary. The atlas was named, the "Universal Atlas" and it was created in 1808.

He opened the atlas to its index and explained that while he was looking over the atlas, he noticed that somebody had curiously written in, "Saint Helena."

He then opened up the atlas, and there in the middle, somebody had pasted in a beautiful map of an island labeled, "Saint Helena." This map was added in later, as it was created in October of 1815. Everything about this map is intriguing.

My favorite part, however, are some of the names of locations labeled on the island. One in particular is a region labeled, "good shooting grounds." There's a valley named, "Old Woman's Valley," as well as "Break Neck Valley." If you head over to "Old Woman's Valley," you may stumble upon "Granny Mary's House," which is right next to the lemon garden.

Karl told me that Saint Helena was famous because Napoleon was exiled there. I don't know a ton about European history, so I did a little research afterwards about the island and found out that Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena after losing in the battle of Waterloo, and would spend the rest of his life there. The battle of Waterloo was in June of 1815, and Napoleon was transported to Saint Helena in August of that year, which means that this map was created only two months after the beginning of his exile!

While research Saint Helena I found out some geographic information as well as some current information about the island, which i equally as intriguing. It is basically in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in between Brazil and South Africa. I will be honest in saying that I never even knew that there were islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but apparently there are a few. According the the CIA's World Factbook, 4,255 people live on this island and there isn't even an airport. In fact the only means of transportation I could find to the island is an old British Mail ship, called the RMS Saint Helena that leaves from Cape Town, South Africa, and it takes three days to get there.

This makes Saint Helena the most remote inhabited island in the world!

Jamestown, which is the only city on the island is a large port city and is a common stop for ships on trans-Atlantic trips. If you're interested in voyaging to Saint Helena you better be ready to take at least a one-month vacation, and while $4000 dollars may not seem too expensive for a one-month voyage, you have to factor in the price of getting to South Africa! Maybe one day you can venture to this remote tiny island, but until then you make your way up to the 8th floor of the Hatcher Graduate Library and introduce yourself to Karl. He'll gladly take you on an adventure through the historic artifacts we have in our extensive collection, and if you ask, he'll bring out this map and you can see for yourself.