![]() Helena exports labor via contract workers. Helena’s population has ancestral roots, while Ascension’s 34 square miles are home to no permanent residents, no farmers, fishermen or private property. Helena is graceful and green, Ascension is stark and volcanic. Helena Island with periodic trips from Cape Town, and usually continued the additional 800 miles northwest to Ascension Island. Other than aboard your own ocean going yacht, at the time of our visit ten years ago, there were only two ways onto and off of Ascension Island: the airbridge, which ran twice weekly charters, and the Royal Mail Ship St. During that conflict Ascension came alive like never before or since, as the UK Ministry of Defense ran a frenetic schedule of flights between the Brize-Norton air base near Oxford, England, and the RAF’s Mount Pleasant airport near Stanley, in the Falklands. With the Suez Canal fifty years in the future, the Admiralty hung on to Ascension as a sea base and it serves now as an airbase shared with the Americans, who built the island’s Wideawake airfield to move troops in WWII.Īscension provided the middle link in an airbridge for the United Kingdom’s 1982 Falkland Islands campaign. So intent were they to avoid a second imperial escape that sailing down, they garrisoned Ascension Island on the way, better to defend St. Helena in 1815 they denied the emperor newspapers, subjected him to curfew, and guarded him with 125 men during the day and 72 at night. This month we continue north to Ascension Island. ![]() Helena Island, 1800 miles from Angola, 1200 from Brazil, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. ![]() In last month’s column we sailed from Walvis Bay, Namibia, to St. Here is this month’s On the Road column, as published Monday at 3 Quarks Daily. ![]()
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