The Great Wood Wall

Line of The Wall from Flagstaff

The Great Wood Wall around Middlepoint, crossing Bilberry Field Gut and rising towards Bottom Woods is all that remains of the stone wall built by the East India Company in an attempt to protect its own future wood supplies in The Great Wood from destruction from “browsing by goats and rooting by swine”.  Built in the period 1723 – 1727, mainly by Governor John Smith only about 150 acres were completely enclosed, the scheme was ultimately unsuccessful, none of the original trees remain and only around 800 metres of the original wall.



The best exposition of the "devastation of the native vegetation and the ecological despoilaton" of St. Helena, The Wall and The Vanishing Great Wood can be found in Ashmole and Ashmole, St Helena and Ascension Island: a natural history.  Published by Nelson in 2000.

Looking North towards Flagstaff

Janisch’s Extracts from the St Helena Records describes, year after year, the frustration and impotence of successive Governors to prevent the over-exploitation and ultimately the destruction of the natural assets of St. Helena.   http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23471107M/Extracts_from_the_St._Helena_Records

Rising from Bilberry Field Gut towards Bottom Woods

Both Beatson’s 1816 “Tracts relative to the Island of St. Helena and JC Melliss’ 1875 “Physical, Historical and Topographical Description of the Island” describe in detail, to quote Ashmole “the inexorable progress of the tragedy of the commons, the remorseless destruction of a potentially sustainable resource by a number of independent exploiters following their own self-interest even though the result in the long run is a disaster for everyone.

Looking South-East across Bilberry Field Gut

Alfred Russel Wallace in “Island Life” published in1880 summarised the effects on St. Helena by European occupation. When first discovered, in the year 1501, St. Helena was densely covered with luxuriant forest vegetation, the trees overhanging the seaward precipices and covering every part of the surface with an evergreen mantle.  This indigenous vegetation has been almost wholly destroyed; and although an immense number of foreign plants have been introduced, and have more or less completely established themselves, yet the general aspect of the island is now so barren and forbidding that some persons find it difficult to believe that it was once all green and fertile.  The cause of the change is, however, very easily explained.  The rich soil formed by decomposed volcanic rock and vegetable deposits could only be retained on the steep slopes so long as it was protected by the vegetation to which it in great part owed its origin.  When this was destroyed, the heavy tropical rains soon washed away the soil, and left a vast expanse of bare rock or sterile clay.  This irreparable destruction was caused in the first place by goats, which were introduced by the Portuguese in 1513, and increased so rapidly that in 1588, they existed in thousands.  These animals are the greatest of all foes to trees, because they eat off the young seedlings, and thus prevent the natural restoration of the forest.  They were, however, aided by the reckless waste of man.  The East India Company took possession of the island in 1651, and about the year 1700 it began to be seen that the forests were fast diminishing, and required some protection.  Two of the native trees, redwood and ebony, were good for tanning, and to save trouble the bark was wastefully stripped from the trunks only, the remainder being left to rot; while in 1709 a large quantity of the rapidly disappearing ebony was used to burn lime for building fortifications.  By the records quoted in Mr. Melliss' interesting volume on St. Helena it is evident that the evil consequences of allowing the trees to be destroyed were clearly foreseen, as the following passages show: "We find the place called the Great Wood in a flourishing condition, full of young trees, where the hoggs (of which there is a great abundance) do not come to root them up.  But the Great Wood is miserably lessened and destroyed within our memories, and is not near the circuit and length it was.  But we believe it does not contain now less than fifteen hundred acres of fine woodland and good ground, but no springs of water but what is salt or brackish, which we take to be the reason that that part was not inhabited when the people first chose out their settlements and made plantations; but if wells could be sunk, which the governor says he will attempt when we have more hands, we should then think it the most pleasant and healthiest part of the island. But as to healthiness, we don't think it will hold so if the wood that keeps the land warm were destroyed, for then the rains, which are violent here, would carry away the upper soil, and it being a clay marl underneath would produce but little; as it is, we think in case it were enclosed it might be greatly improved" ... "When once this wood is gone the island will soon be ruined" ... "We viewed the wood's end which joins the Honourable Company's plantation called the Hutts, but the wood is so destroyed that the beginning of the Great Wood is now a whole mile beyond that place, and all the soil between being washed away, that distance is now entirely barren."  In 1709 the governor reported to the Court of Directors of the East India Company that the timber was rapidly disappearing, and that the goats should be destroyed for the preservation of the ebony wood, and because the island was suffering from droughts.  The reply was, "The goats are not to be destroyed, being more valuable than ebony." Thus, through the gross ignorance of those in power, the last opportunity of preserving the peculiar vegetation of St. Helena, and preventing the island from becoming the comparatively rocky desert it now is, was allowed to pass away. Even in a mere pecuniary point of view the error was a fatal one, for in the next century (in 1810) another governor reports the total destruction of the great forests by the goats, and that in consequence the cost of importing fuel for government use was £2,729. 7s. 8d. for a single year.



Looking South



Drainage Detail

Looking North into Bilberry Field Gut

Looking South towards Bottom Woods

Rising towards Bottom Woods



Photographs taken in May 2010.





Maskelyne, Mason and Dixon, 1761

2011 is the 250^th Anniversary of Nevil Maskylene’s visit to St. Helena to observe the June 1761 Transit of Venus and is also the bicentenary of his death.  Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon visited St Helena in October the same year returning from observing the Transit in South Africa.

When I first started reading about Maskelyne the most widely available picture of him was the one below.

Nevil Maskelyne by John Downman, BHC 2854. National Maritime Museum

The Board of Longitude blog, http://www.nmm.ac.uk/blogs/longitude/2011/04/a-mystery-astronomer.html recently posted that the National Maritime Museum now describe this picture as "Formerly called Nevil Maskelyne" as there is some doubt that it is of Maskelyne for the sensible reason that it does not look all that much like the other known portraits.  The late Derek Howse, formerly Head of Astronomy at NMM and biographer of Maskelyne firmly believed that this portrait is misidentified on the basis of its great dissimilarity to Louis van der Puyl's undoubted Maskelyne portrait of 1785 owned by the Royal Society and that this otherwise fine portrait is therefore probably another astronomer, so far unidentified.

Van der Puyl shows him in clerical dress appropriate to his formal status as a clerk in Holy Orders against the background of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.



In 1716 Edmond Halley, who had visited St Helena in 1677 and 1700, noted that an accurate timing of the transit of Venus would aid the calculation of the distance between the Earth and the Sun.  Although Halley knew he would not live to see the next anticipated Venus transit in 1761, his detailed plans and papers ensured that expeditions were sent out to the furthest reaches of the globe to make observations.  The 1761 transit  observations constituted the largest international scientific undertaking up to that time and despite the fact that it took place during the latter half of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), a worldwide conflict involving the major powers of the time and their colonies, it was to be observed by many astronomers at over one hundred locations involving 170 observers scattered from Peking to Newfoundland though, as we shall see, not always from the location planned.

Janisch records that The Directors of the East India Company in London wrote to The Governor of St Helena (Letters from England, Dec. 31, 1760)

His Majesty having been graciously pleased to encourage the making observations on the transit of the planet Venus over the Sun's disk on the 6th June next and proper persons being engaged by the Royal Society for the purpose two of them, Mr. Charles Mason and Mr. Jeremiah Dixon proceed to Fort Marlborough* on H. M. Ship Seahorse and the other two Revd. Mr. Nevil Maskelyne and Mr. Robert Waddington take passage on the Prince Henry to St. Helena.  As this is done to make some improvements in Astronomy which will be of general utility the two last named gentlemen are upon their arrival and during their stay to be accommodated by you in a suitable manner with diet and apartments at the Company's expense and you are to give them all the assistance as to materials, workmen, and whatsoever else the service they are employed upon may require.

*Fort Marlborough was the EIC base at Bencoolen, a pepper trading centre on the southern part of the west coast of Sumatra.  A garrison had been established there in 1685 and the Fort was built in 1714.  St Helena and Bencoolen were linked both through trade and personnel.

The Governor replied (Letter to England, May 26, 1761)

Rev. Nevil Maskelyne and Mr. Robt. Waddington shall be accommodated in a suitable manner with diet and apartments at the Company's expense. We have already erected an observatory for them in the country and shall furnish whatever else the service may require.

Transit Diagram

A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Maskelyne (1732 - 1811) became assistant to the then Astronomer Royal, Bradley, in 1757.  He left England for St. Helena in January 1761 to observe the June 6th transit, with the aim of using this information to calculate the distance of the Earth from the Sun.  Having set up his observatory on the high ridge behind Alarm House low cloud prevented any useful observations being made, though several people reportedly saw it in Jamestown.  He returned to England in May 1762. 

He evidently had a taste for good living. Chambers Edinburgh Journal for 1848 records the following in regard to his trip. “In a curious estimate which he drew up of his expenses for the voyage and sojourn on the island for one year we find 13 guineas set down for washing, for board 109 guineas, for liquors 141 guineas. 5 shillings per day was reckoned as the charge for drink while on the island and £50 for the same item for the voyage out and home.  Maskelyne was a clergyman but his habits would have ill accorded with our present notions of temperance.”

Mason and Dixon are remembered today primarily for their work between 1763 and 1767 in the resolution of a border dispute between British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania/Delaware in Colonial America. The disputants, the Calverts of Maryland and the Penns of Pennsylvania, engaged the astronomer Mason and surveyor Dixon, to survey what became known as the Mason–Dixon Line, and paid £3,512 to have the 327 miles surveyed.  In popular usage, especially since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Mason Dixon Line symbolises a cultural boundary between the Northeastern United States and the Southern United States (Dixie).

Having been chosen, in 1760, by the Royal Society to go to Bencoolen to observe the 1761 transit Mason suggested that Dixon should go as his assistant.  On January 10th 1761 their ship, the HMS Seahorse, was attacked by L’Grande a 34 gun French frigate and they had to return to Portsmouth with 11 killed and 37 wounded. Wanting to call the expedition off they were threatened with dire personal consequences “they may assure themselves of being treated by the Council with the most inflexible resentment, and prosecuted with the utmost Severity of Law” and were prodded back to sea by the Royal Society. Their second voyage wouldn't have got them to Sumatra in time (and Bencoolen had been captured by the French in August 1760), so they stopped at Cape Town, South Africa, as guests of the local governor and set up their equipment. They obtained several accurate measurements of Venus's position on the solar disc, providing some of the most useful data from the 1761 event, as it was the only successful observation made from the Southern Hemisphere.  On the passage home, they stopped at St Helena in October and, after discussion with Maskelyne, who had failed to observe the transit there, Dixon returned temporarily to the Cape with Maskelyne's clock to carry out gravity experiments.  Returning via St Helena he and Mason reached England in February 1762, each £230 richer. 

Despite being watched by so many observers the results were disappointing.  Bad weather, navigational errors, and difficulty timing Venus's image against the sun, all contributed to the failure and with no method for accurately calculating the longitude of most observation sites, no useful results were obtained.  Venus was expected to transit the Sun again on 3 June 1769, but if this opportunity was also lost, it would be another 105 years before the transit next occurred and another attempt at recording it could be made.

With this in mind, in 1768 the Royal Society sent a petition to King George III requesting assistance to send a scientific expedition to the South Seas to observe the forethcoming transit.  The petition, supported by the Greenwich Observatory, sought the sum of £4,000 to defray the costs of a Pacific expedition which would, it was stressed, enhance Britain’s imperial ambitions and scientific reputation, and improve navigation and trade.  The petition was soon approved.  Maskelyne, by this time Astronomer Royal and fellow of the Royal Society, had calculated that the best possible vantage point south of the equator was between the Marquesas Islands and Tonga.  The Royal Society informed the Admiralty that Tahiti, located almost at the centre of the area calculated by Maskelyne was its desired site for the observation of the Transit and also requested that naturalist Joseph Banks and his party be permitted to join the expedition.  In August 1768 HMS Endeavour left Plymouth on Cook’s first voyage of discovery. Cook had much better weather than Maskelyne had on St. Helena, writing: The Measurements gathered by Cook and others in 1769 were pretty rough but could be used to estimate the distance of the Earth from the Sun and, by extension, the size of the solar system and the universe.

June 3rd 1769. "not a clowd seen the whole day, and air perfectly clear, so we had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole passage of the planet Venus over the suns disk".

Returning to England, Cook and Banks spent from 1st to 4th May 1771 on St Helena.

Maskelyne, later known as "The Seaman's Astronomer" used his journey to St Helena to develop a method of calculating longitude called the lunar distance method and he used this method to establish for the first time the precise longitude of St Helena.  A vested interest in an astronomical solution to the longitude problem could have been seen as a conflict of interest, but this did not stop the Board of Longitude sending Maskelyne to Barbados in 1763 to test Harrison's No. 4 timekeeper.  His advocacy of this method meant that he has gone down in history as the villain of the longitude saga, the man who despised and cheated the self-educated genius John Harrison out of the prize he earned for his brilliant timepieces, which helped fix the exact time at sea and so determine longitude and the position of sailing ships on the ocean.

He was appointed the fifth Astronomer Royal in 1765 and died at the Greenwich observatory, still in office after 46 years, in February 1811.  He is buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, the parish church of the village of Purton Wiltshire where the Maskelynes had lived from the 16th century.

After completing the boundary survey in America, Mason worked under Maskelyne at Greenwich where he contributed to the Nautical Almanac.  In September 1786 he wrote to Benjamin Franklin that he had returned to America with his wife, seven sons, and one daughter.  He provided no explanation for his return and he died on October 26, 1786, in Philadelphia.

On returning to England from America Dixon sailed to Norway in 1769 to observe another transit of Venus after which Dixon resumed his work as a surveyor in Durham.  He died unmarried in January 1779.

Edmund Halley Blog post

http://jcgrimshaw.blogspot.com/2011/04/edmond-halley-1677-and-1700.html

The National Maritime Museum and the Department of history and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, are currently working on a five-year research project on the British Board of Longitude, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/blogs/longitude/

Bencoolen Link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30593522@N05/4941507589/in/set-72157624078044217

Cook on St. Helena

http://jcgrimshaw.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html

The Janisch Memorial

Philip Gosse, already an ”inveterate collector of St. Heleniana” made a six week visit to St. Helena early in 1937 and subsequently published his “permanently valuable, well documented, enthusiastic and easily read book” St. Helena 1502-1938. Trevor Hearl’s introduction to the 1990 reprint describes Gosse’s anger at the apparent indifference of the government and influential settlers towards social distress and environmental decay.....the Island’s historic buildings, its unique flora, its priceless colonial and East India Company records, each telling a tale of shameful neglect.  Following the completion of the book and “in the hope of bettering the condition of these charming, long suffering British subjects” Gosse sent a courteous 3,500 word statement to the Colonial Secretary, Ormsby-Gore, included in which was a photograph of Governor Janisch’s neglected memorial outside  the Baptist Church at Knollcombes.

Janisch Memorial 1937

Hudson Ralph Janisch was Governor from 1873 until he died in office on March 10th 1884 aged 55. He was the second, and last, St Helena-born Governor, the first being John Goodwin from July 1738 to August 1740, but the only Saint to have been Governor after the island came under the Crown in 1834.  He worked hard to counter the colony's economic decline, encouraging the development of the first flax industry in 1874, and compiling a volume of Extracts from the St. Helena Records which was published posthumously in 1885.  Despite prejudice against him as a Baptist lay preacher, he became Colonial Secretary in 1868.  With the recall of Governor Patey in 1873 he was appointed Acting Governor by the Colonial Office and ordered to lease or close Plantation House, the Governor's official residence.  Following a change of government in London, Janisch was confirmed as Governor in 1873 -'the right man in the right place', commented the St Helena Guardian - but on local salary of £900.00 p.a. without accommodation.  Thus he continued to live at Palm Villa, next to the abandoned Botanical Garden in upper Jamestown.

In his book Gosse wrote: “The Governorship of Janisch cannot be passed over without some mention of the present state of the island’s memorial to his pious memory.  It is a tall, handsome obelisk which stands, or totters, in the Baptist Cemetery at Knollcombes.  When I saw it in the spring of the year 1937 it appeared to be on the point of falling over, leaning perilously to one side at an alarming angle.  More than likely by the time these words are printed, it will have crashed to the ground and will be one more historic relic of St. Helena which has been allowed to fall into ruins.  On enquiry I learned that it would cost about thirty pounds to take down and re-erect this monument. And yet so little interest is taken by the authorities or by the St. Helenians themselves to preserve the monuments of the dead or the relics of the past, that nothing was being done, nor was likely to be done, to save this memorial to their island-born Governor, and a man greatly venerated and loved by all during his lifetime”.

I don't know when something was done but the result would, I'm sure, please Gosse.

Janisch Memorial May 2010

In Memoriam Hudson Ralph Janisch CMG FRAS Died March 19th 1884 Aged 59 years

This monument is erected by the inhabitants to commemorate the high respect and esteem in which the late Governor was universally held.

The monument also commemorates Bertram, Hudson’s eldest son who had qualified as a doctor in Edinburgh and practised on the Island who predeceased him in July 1883.



A three-tiered cenotaph each stage having moulded base, recessed panels on all faces and cavetto cornice. The top tier is pierced with a pointed arch and crowned with an urn. The relative crudeness of the detail is explained by the material employed, viz. cement rendering on local stone. 

Information from the text of Gosse St. Helena 1502-1938 and Trevor Hearle’s introduction.

Part 4 of the Land Planning Development and Control Ordinance.