Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/137

SAINT HELENA. 105 Britisli Government, have not had the energy to recover by tillage what they had lost by the stoppage of trade. Most of the farmers, ruined by mortgages, were also compelled to surrender their holdings to the capitalists of the chief town. Monopoly was thus followed by its usual consequence, misery. Jamestown. — Long wood. It has been proposed to develop the cultivation of Phormiiim tenasr, tobacco, and other industrial plants ; but these projects have had no result, and the population has considerably diminished by emigration, especially to the Cape. It thus fell from 6,860 in 1861 to 5,060 in 1881, notwithstanding the perfectly healthy climate and the great excess of births over deaths. The revenue, public service, education, everything, is in a state of decadence, and the island is now visited by few strangers. Jamestoicn, the only town in St. Helena, lies on the west or leeward side, where it could alone have been founded. The opposite coast is rendered almost inacces- sible by the fury of the breakers, caused by the influence of the trade winds. The town with its surrounding gardens occupies the entrance of a narrow mountain gorge, which after heavy rains sends down an impetuous stream, at times sweeping seawards cattle, trees, and debris of all sorts. West of Jamestown the escarpments rise at a sharp angle, forming the so-called Ladder Hill (600 feet), which is crowned by military structures. This eminence takes its name from a flight of nearly seven hundred steps cut in a straight line up the face of the rock. Rupert's Hill, lying farther east, is surmounted by a steep road, which penetrates into the interior, leading to the little house at Longwood where Napoleon lived and died. Near it is the ** Valley of the Tomb ; " but the body, which had been here placed under a clump of willows, reposes since 1840 under the dome of the Invalides in Paris. The inhabitants of St. Helena have no representative institutions. The island, which till the year 1834 belonged to the East India Company, is now a Crown colony, all officials being nominated by the central government in London. Ascension. This island, also an English Crown colony, was discovered in the same year as St. Helena and by the same navigator, Juan de Nova. It lies nearly on the median line of the Atlantic basin, resting on the submerged " Challenger " ridge, by which the deep African waters are separated from the still deeper abysses of the western seas bathing the New World. Ascension is distant about 1,320 miles from Pernambuco on the Brazilian coast, and a little farther from Angola under the same latitude on the west coast of Africa, but not more than 930 miles from Cape Palmas, the nearest point on that continent. Like St. Helena, it falls within the zone of the south-east trade winds, and consequently presents the same phenomenon of surf-beaten shores, rendering the south side almost inaccessible, and obliging ri-AF