We sailed from Saldanha Bay aboard Obsession on the spring equinox — the 22nd of September, 1987 — the one day of the year the sun rises due east and sets due west. The sky looked good for a noon departure. I was fourteen. It was my first ocean passage. There were four of us aboard the 39-foot sloop my stepfather Gary had built: Gary, my mother Ingrid, my sister Sasha, and me. Gary worked the sextant. I was learning how to use it and to keep time. We would listen to the Greenwich Mean Time broadcast daily on the HF/SSB Radio and make sure that the "ships clock" was synchronised.
The sky did not stay clear for long. The first night out the wind came up hard and by midnight we were running under storm jib alone, and it stayed rough for the better part of the sixteen days it took us. The heading, once we were off the continental shelf, was North by West — sixteen hundred and eighty miles of open South Atlantic to a target eight miles wide. I was seasick early. Gary, who never was, went pale. On that first wild night with Obsession surfing up to 12 knots on cresting waves Gary called down the companionway, cheerful against the noise, that we were pointed the right way — St Helena in eight days. Well, it took us twice that.
A sextant is only as good as the horizon it will give you, and ours spent days behind cloud and spray. When a sight came, Gary took it like a gift and worked it fast. When it didn't, we ran on dead reckoning — a pencil line on a paper chart, a course and a speed and a faith that the sea had not carried us somewhere the arithmetic couldn't find.
The landfall I will remember for the rest of my life, and it was nothing like the clean thing you picture. We came up on the island in a thirty-knot southeasterly under a lid of low cloud, no sun, no horizon, nothing to bring the sextant down to. Gary stood out on deck with the instrument and waited — waited for a single patch of blue to open somewhere astern of the sun so he could steal one sight. He got it, ducked below, worked it, and came up and said Speery Island should be ahead of us. My mother held Obsession on North by Northwest and we stared into the rain, and a grey triangle of rock lifted out of the murk for a moment in a wash of watery light, and she and I called Land Ahoy in the same breath. We had found a speck in the middle of an ocean with a brass instrument, a clock, a pencil, and one hole in the cloud.
You cannot arrive that way anymore. Not by sextant — the satellites took that, and I have written before about what we lost when we stopped looking up. And not only by sea. In 2016 they opened an airport on the cliffs above Prosperous Bay, and a fourteen-year-old crossing to St Helena today does it in a few hours, in a pressurised cabin, looking down. The distance is still on the chart. It is no longer in the body.
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The island was a prison before it was anything else to the outside world, and it was chosen to be one for the very reason it had nearly beaten us.
When the British needed somewhere to put Napoleon in 1815 — somewhere he could not escape from, could not be sprung from, could not be reached by any loyal frigate slipping in under dark — they chose St Helena because it was as close to unreachable as the map allowed. A volcanic rock in the middle of the South Atlantic, a thousand miles from the nearest land, garrisoned and watched. The same remoteness that had thrown sixteen days of weather at a small sloop was, to an empire with a defeated emperor on its hands, the island's single most attractive feature. His jailers prized the distance. We, coming in off the passage exhausted, were saved by it: the place was a refuge precisely because it was so hard to reach that nothing followed you there.
My mother put it better than I can, in the manuscript she has been writing for twenty years. Standing at Longwood House, where Napoleon lived out his confinement, she thought it the cruelest possible posting for the most restless man in Europe — an island from which the Atlantic fills every point of the compass. He died there in 1821. He did not stay: in 1840 the French came and took him home, and the tomb in the Sane Valley has been empty ever since — a railed enclosure, a slab, a few trees, no one beneath them. You can visit the place where the most powerful man in Europe was held by distance alone, and find that even he was eventually retrieved across it. Remoteness is a fact until someone decides to abolish it. It is the island's oldest lesson and, it turns out, its newest one.
And some things on St Helena simply outlast the question. Up on the lawn at Plantation House, the governor's residence, there is a giant tortoise named Jonathan, who was hauled ashore as a fully grown adult in 1882 and is, at something like a hundred and ninety-three, the oldest living land animal on earth. He was already old when we were there in 1987 — blind now, but with his hearing intact — and he is still there as I write this, cropping the same grass, while the mailship that served the island his whole life has been sold off and the aeroplanes come and go above him. He has outlived empires, the books like to say. He is also outliving the sea.
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We meant to stay ten days. We stayed four weeks, and the island took us in completely.
I have made landfall in a great many places in the thirty-eight years since, and I have rarely been welcomed the way the Saints welcomed us. Anne's Place, the one restaurant in Jamestown, more or less adopted Sasha and me; before long we had half moved ashore, into other people's families. We climbed Jacob's Ladder — six hundred and ninety-nine steps straight up the cliff face out of the town — and Gary taught me to come down it the island way, knees hooked over one brass rail and elbows over the other, riding it like a tram on a track. What I remember as sharply as the kindness is the sound of it: the St Helena accent, which I had never heard anything like in South Africa or anywhere since. Very British underneath, but turned and softened by four centuries of mid-ocean isolation into something entirely its own. The island had been alone so long it had grown its own voice.
It was not, it turned out, an entirely foreign one to us.
While Sasha and I were ashore with our "adopted" families, Gary took my mother up to the island archives. He was looking for a birth record — his great-grandmother's. Gary's people had come off this rock a few generations back, and the way the family told it, and the way my mother later set it down, she was a St Helenian who spoke French, who married a sailor off a Madeira ship and was carried away by him to the Cape — an island woman and a passing sailor, which is the island's whole history in a single marriage. Gary went through the registers under the name he'd been given, Ivinhoe, and never found it; what he found instead was de Silva — close enough to be her, far enough never to be sure. And around that one unresolved name, page after page of births where the father's column had simply been filled in as an unknown sailor. That is what a four-hundred-year crossroads in the middle of the ocean leaves in its paperwork: a daughter who spoke French on a British rock, a name that changes between the question and the answer, and a column of fathers who were only ever passing through. We had crossed sixteen hundred miles of storm to somewhere my stepfather had, by blood, come from. He had navigated us back to his great-grandmother's island and gone looking for her in the books.
St Helena has been losing its people for a century and a half. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869 it cut the old sailing route that was the island's entire reason to exist — the stopover between Europe and Asia — and the ships stopped coming; the count fell from over a thousand calls a year in the 1850s to fewer than three hundred by the 1880s. The work went with the ships. So the Saints began to leave: to Cape Town and the farms of the Western Cape, to Durban, later to England, wherever a wage could be found. Today the St Helenians scattered across the world may outnumber the ones still on the island. Gary's great-grandmother was one drop in that long outflow, generations before I was born — and the reason a South African boy with a Saint somewhere behind him was standing in that anchorage at all.
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The sea around the island was as alive as the people.
Every night at anchor we heard the dolphins working the bay — the breathing and the rush of them feeding in the dark close around the hull. One night a flying fish came aboard, a big one, two feet long with a wingspan to match, driven up and out of the water by a pack of dolphins and landing on our deck still beating. In the morning I cut it open and found two large roe inside, and Gary fried them up for our breakfast. That is the kind of sea it was: so full it threw its dinner onto your deck in the night.
That sea is still, against the odds, fished the way it was fished then — and St Helena may now be the most honest tuna fishery left in the world.
When destructive fishing finally reached even these waters as a possibility, the island legislated against it. The 2021 Fisheries Bill banned every destructive tuna gear across St Helena's exclusive economic zone, making the waters around the island one of the first exclusively one-by-one tuna fishing zones anywhere on the planet. No nets, no longlines, no purse seines — one hook, one line, one fish at a time, the way the island's fishermen have done it for four hundred years. The whole two-hundred-mile zone is a Marine Protected Area and a Mission Blue Hope Spot. Around twenty small inshore boats still go out to the grounds their grandfathers fished: the inshore waters, and two seamounts rising off the deep — Cardno to the north, and to the west the seamount named, of all things, Bonaparte. The men of St Helena catch their tuna over a mountain in the sea named for the emperor their island once jailed. The place keeps its accounts in long memory.
It would be easy to leave it there, as a clean story about the one place still doing it right. The discipline is to keep reading past the sight you wanted. Doing it right has not been enough to make it pay. The processing plant at Rupert's Bay has never turned a profit and runs on a government subsidy. The recent effort to build a modern, EU-accredited cannery — to put the first British, line-caught, one-by-one tuna on a shelf in London — has been shadowed by a bitter fight between rival operators and by an island where fresh fish became so scarce that a councillor told the legislature in 2023 you could buy marijuana more easily than you could legally buy a tuna steak. The most sustainable tuna fishery in the Atlantic cannot reliably feed its own town or balance its own books. This is the same wall I have been writing about all year, washed up on the one shore that did everything correctly — and it is the same wall that emptied the island of its people. St Helena has exported its tuna at a loss and its sons and daughters for six generations, for the same reason: an honest living, taken slowly and by hand from a remote sea, has never been able to compete with the other kind. Even here. Even on the island that wrote its conscience into law.
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One night near the end I swam back to the boat alone.
The others had gone ahead with the dinghy and I stayed late ashore, and rather than wait until morning I went off the wharf quietly into the black water and swam out to where Obsession lay at anchor, the dolphins still working the dark somewhere out in the bay. I was fourteen and it should probably have frightened me and it did not. The water was warm and full of light where my arms broke it, and the island stood up black against the stars behind me, and the boat rode quietly ahead with one lamp burning, and I have never in my life felt so completely placed — so small, and so exactly where I belonged. That is what the island gave a boy who had crossed an ocean to find it: not a fright, a fit. You earn that by arriving the hard way. There is no version of it you reach by runway.
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Eventually the time came to leave.
The mailship had come in while we were there — I had watched her take up her moorings off Jamestown, too big for any wharf, lying off and running long lines ashore to ride the open Atlantic swell on them, rising and falling against the sea. She was the island's one fixed thread to the world: everything arrived on her and left on her, the post, the supplies, the people going to hospital in Cape Town, the people coming home after years away. The day we sailed we dropped our last letters and postcards into the mailbox — the slow post, the only post — said goodbye to people we had known for four weeks and have thought about for decades, and stood out to the north-northwest. Next stop Fernando de Noronha. The island fell away astern the way islands do, lower and lower, until the sea closed over the place where it had been.
I did not understand, at fourteen, that I had just done a thing a person would shortly not be able to do at all.
A boy cannot reach St Helena that way now. He cannot find it with a sextant and a pencil and one hole in the cloud, because the satellites have made the skill a hobby. He cannot come to it only across the sea, because there is a runway on the cliffs above Prosperous Bay — the airport opened in 2016, the first scheduled flights landed in 2017. He cannot watch the mailship ride her lines in the bay, because the last working Royal Mail Ship in the world made her final voyage in February 2018, and the sea-link that had defined the island since the first settlers closed behind her. He cannot post a letter home from a place where a letter was the only thing that travelled slower than the people. The island is still there, sheer and green and far. Jonathan is still on the lawn. But the distance that was the island's whole meaning — the distance that held an emperor, that nearly turned us back, that taught a fourteen-year-old that some places have to be earned — that distance has been quietly abolished, and almost nobody noticed it go.
I noticed. I made landfall there once, the old way, exhausted and fourteen, and the island rose out of the cloud exactly where the plot said it would.
— Justin
Sources
The passage and the island (first-person). Justin Jenkin, witness account, corroborated by Ingrid Jenkin's manuscript Color Blue: departure Saldanha Bay aboard Obsession, spring equinox 22 September 1987, age fourteen; sixteen-day passage, North by West, ~1,680 nm; sextant-and-DR landfall via Speery Island in heavy overcast; four weeks ashore; the mailship at her moorings; the flying fish; the solo night swim; departure NNW for Fernando de Noronha. Consistent with the published Edition 002 essay Thirty-Eight Years at Sea.
The bloodline. Gary's great-grandmother — a St Helenian who reportedly spoke French, who married a sailor from Madeira and was carried to the Cape — per family record and Ingrid Jenkin's manuscript Color Blue; the registry search under "Ivinhoe" returning "de Silva," and the "unknown sailor" father-columns, from the same source. Confirmed by Gary Jenkin (June 2026).
Napoleon's exile. Exiled to St Helena 1815, lived at Longwood House, died 1821; remains returned to France in 1840 (the retour des cendres), leaving the Sane Valley tomb empty. Well-attested historical record.
Jonathan the tortoise. A Seychelles giant tortoise brought to St Helena in 1882 as a fully grown adult; estimated hatched c. 1832; recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest known living land animal; resident on the grounds of Plantation House. Confirmed alive and well, June 2026 (NPR; Britannica/USA Today; CNN; Guinness World Records; St Helena Government — following a false death rumour on 1 April 2026).
The mailship and the airport. RMS St Helena served the island as its sole scheduled link for 27 years; final voyage from the island 10 February 2018 — the last working Royal Mail Ship in the world (Wikipedia; St Helena Government; sthelenaisland.info). St Helena Airport opened in 2016 after a wind-shear delay; first scheduled commercial flights 14 October 2017 (Wikipedia; CruiseMapper; St Helena Government). (For accuracy: the mailship of 1987 was the original RMS St Helena, in service 1977–1990; her successor is the vessel retired in 2018. The sea-link itself ran unbroken until the airport replaced it.)
The fishery. The 2021 St Helena Fisheries Bill banned destructive tuna gears across the EEZ, making it one of the world's first exclusively one-by-one tuna zones; the island sits within a 200 nm Category VI Marine Protected Area and Mission Blue Hope Spot; roughly twenty inshore boats fish the inshore grounds and the Bonaparte (west) and Cardno (north) seamounts (IPNLF; The Green Fish Company; St Helena Government tuna review; Sourcing Transparency Platform).
The economic complication and the diaspora. The St Helena Fisheries Corporation plant at Rupert's Bay is government-subsidised and has never been profitable; the EU-accredited cannery effort has been shadowed by a corporate dispute; a councillor told the Legislative Council in March 2023 that fresh fish had become harder to buy legally than marijuana (sthelenaisland.info; IPNLF St Helena Social Wellbeing Report). Emigration from St Helena dates to the post-Napoleonic period and accelerated after the 1869 Suez Canal collapse of the island's shipping economy, with major diasporas to South Africa and the UK (Wikipedia; Camissa People / Camissa Museum; sthelenaisland.info).
Location: Jamestown, St Helena — 15.93° S, 5.72° W
Further Reading
Saint Helena Island Info — the island's own granular history of the RMS, the fishery, Napoleon, and emigration.
The Green Fish Company and the International Pole & Line Foundation — the optimistic industry-and-conservation case for one-by-one tuna.
The St Helena Government tuna fishery review (Cefas / Blue Belt) — the management-science perspective, with cautions about expanding the fishery.
The skeptical counter-view: coverage of the Saints Tuna Corporation vs Green Fish Company dispute and the Audit St Helena report — the case that the fishery is an economic problem dressed as an environmental success.
Thirty-Eight Years at Sea (The Waypoint, Edition 002) — the wide-angle companion to this piece: the same voyage, the same year, the same diminishing ocean.