The most remote inhabited island — Napoleon's final exile and Jacob's Ladder at the edge of the Atlantic
Jamestown is the only settlement on Saint Helena, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic that gained an airport in 2016 after 500 years as one of the world's most accessible-only-by-sea islands. It was famously the prison-island where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after Waterloo, dying here in 1821 — his first tomb (he was returned to Paris in 1840) is a short ride from town. The island was a crucial East India Company waystation for two centuries. Jacob's Ladder — 699 steps of near-vertical staircase cut into the cliffs above Jamestown — is both a fitness test and the best view o…
Saint Helena was discovered by the Portuguese in 1502 and first settled as a watering station on the Cape Route to India. The East India Company administered it from 1659, importing enslaved workers from West Africa and Madagascar — the island's diverse population today reflects those layers. Napoleon's six-year exile (1815–1821) at Longwood House turned a remote waystation into a pilgrimage site; French visitors have been arriving ever since. The abolition of slavery ended the island's forced-labour economy; the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) made the Cape Route redundant and began a centu…