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The pages on Saint Helena Island Info were added on these dates
Below: Pages by creation date Recent Updates
Saint Helena Island Info was last updated on @@JAVASITELASTUPDATED@@.
See also: • Updated This Release
Pages by creation date
The chart below shows the number of pages created each year since the site was created.
Recent Updates
Below: 23rd February 2021 30th January 2021 26th January 2021 15th December 2020 26th October 2020 22nd September 2020
23rd February 2021
As with previous updates, if you’re interested in how the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected St Helena we’ve summarised the main aspects to date on our page A Brief History.
We have a fascinating new contribution for our Memories page - from a VSO teacher in 1966/7. His experience of St Helena adds an interesting perspective to the other stories. How much of what he says remains true today? See Memories of St Helena.
The 2021 Wirebird Census results show another year of decline in total numbers but there is hope for the future. See The Wirebird.
We have further information on the shape of the Fort of St. John - a painting from 1705 showing no triangular buildings.
Just when we thought nobody was writing Blogs anymore a new one arrives! See Blogs.
There’s an interesting new video about Jonathan, on his page.
We’ve improved the way the annual-events data is presented on our pages On This Day, In This Week, In This Month and This Year.
You can see and download the island’s official tourist map for 2021 from our page Maps of St Helena.
All current dates & times on this site are now displayed as St Helena time (GMT). This means you are seeing St Helena as it actually is; as if you are here. Depending on where you are in the world, at certain times of (your) day your date may be different from St Helena’s. This is intentional.
The alerts for people who don’t activate Javascript have been removed. Nobody these days turns off Javascript - in most modern browsers it isn’t even possible. If you do turn off Javascript the site simply won’t work properly, but then neither will most others…
There is a fascinating article about the history and origins of our place names on our page Place Names.
30th January 2021
This is a technical update that fixes a few minor issues with the 26 January release.
26th January 2021
As with previous updates, if you’re interested in how the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected St Helena we’ve summarised the main aspects to date on our page A Brief History.
Was the original Fort of St. John really triangular, as it is usually drawn? Maybe not. See What shape was the fort, and where exactly was it?.
We know why The Cannister (the building at the top of Main Street which houses the Tourist Office and the Arts & Crafts Centre), is spelt with a double-n. See our page Glossary.
We have two new pages. You can learn more about how St Helena is seen on Social Media on our new page Social Media. There is also now a calendar, featuring the facts and events of the current year, on our new page This Year.
Lastly, there are lots of technical changes that should make pages load faster on a slower Internet connection.
15th December 2020
As with previous updates, if you’re interested in how the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected St Helena we’ve summarised the main aspects to date on our page A Brief History.
Our new pages St Helena in World War 1 and St Helena in World War 2 summarise St Helena’s involvement in the world’s biggest conflicts of the 20th Century.
Related to World War 1, thanks to Eric Constantine we now have a photograph of the unveiling of the Bridge Memorial Clock.
The enslaved usually only appear in the Records where they fell foul of the law, but Toby was an exception. Read about him on our other new page.
We’ve added two videos to the page The Flax Industry. One describes the industry in 1962; the other describes the attempted revival in the mid-1980s. On the page Building St Helena Airport we’ve added a video showing the First Fixed-Wing Plane landing.
John Coyle has kindly shared some high-quality colour photographs of St Helena in the late 1960s, which we have included on various pages.
There’s an interesting new German map of St Helena on the Maps page Maps of St Helena which has a unique (wrong!) shape for the island and a nice drawing of Jamestown. There’s also another new map from 1683, also with the wrong shape for the island!☺
Read about the card game Napoleonplayed while he was here: Napoleon at St Helena.
You can now go Go-Karting on St Helena…
Finally a quick ‘Did you know…?’: There are quite a few places in the world called St Helena (or some variation thereof), but our island has the distinction of being the original! Our St Helena was discovered and named in 1502. The places in America and Australia now called St Helena were all not named such until the 19th Century, at least 300 years after we claimed the name…
26th October 2020
As with previous updates, if you’re interested in how the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected St Helena we’ve summarised the main aspects to date on our page A Brief History.
‘Clara’s School’ was a remarkable achievement, providing mostly-free basic education for the enslaved and ‘Free Blacks’ and the first known establishment to teach lace making. It gets a special mention on our Education page and Clara herself features on our Important People page.
Thanks to a contributor we have learned more about the time ball system, so have updated the description on our Time page.
In 1872 they installed new guns at Mundens Fort. How did they get them up the steep, narrow path? See our Guns page for photographs.
The MFV Westerdam was the centre of the first modern attempt at offshore fishing. Read about her on our Fish Processing page.
We have continued to expand our Slavery and the enslaved, Slavery on St Helena and Attacking the Slave Trade pages.
For the first time we have added some short videos to the site, on pages National Flower, The Governor of St Helena, Famous Visitors and RMS St Helena. (Previously we only linked to videos available on YouTube™.) There is also a new page, Videos about St Helena, presenting an index all the videos linked or shown on the site.
We’ve improved the layout of all our Group Index pages, making them clearer and easier to use: Island Activities, Community Pages, Island History, Island Information, Island Nature, Island People, Island Pictures, Island Places and Island Structures.
Lastly, maybe the new Colour Scheme Black Lives Matter would appeal to you? To change the configuration use the ⵙ icon in the Control Icons Panel (top, right).
We’ve also set it as the default colour scheme on our Slavery and the enslaved, Slavery on St Helena and Attacking the Slave Trade pages.
22nd September 2020
As with previous updates, if you’re interested in how the global Covid-19 pandemic has affected St Helena we’ve summarised the main aspects to date on our page A Brief History. There is also an article about our national response on our Saints page.
In the light of the global Black Lives Matter movement we’ve reviewed our coverage of slavery and decided to split our Slavery and the enslaved page to give more emphasis on the two distinct phases of St Helena’s involvement with slavery. The new pages are Slavery on St Helena which describes how St Helena was built by the enslaved, and Attacking the Slave Trade which talks about the way, after slavery was abolished here, St Helena went on to help disrupt the International Slave Trade. The page Slavery and the enslaved remains to introduce these two and discuss common issues. In the process we’ve significantly added to the information presented.
We also decided our sister islands deserved pages of their own. See Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha. There is also additional material and many more images.
In September the Equality & Human Rights Commission wrote to Governor Rushbrook about the changes being proposed to our constitution, making comprehensive proposals. You can download this from our page Our Constitution.
Read about the laws governing St Helena in 1672 (ish) on our page The East India Company.
Our page Zzyzx, the repository for anything we found interesting but which didn’t seem to fit anywhere else, now has content again. Read about the Crime of the Week…
Older items can be found on the Page Updates History page.