South Atlantic, January 2010
Photos from our South Atlantic voyage on the world's last royal mail ship, the RMS St. Helena, traveling the south Atlantic ocean from the Namibian port of Walvis Bay to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension. St. Helena is among the most remote places on earth, some 1800 miles east of Brazil and 1200 miles west of Angola. Ascension, a dependency of St. Helena (itself a British Overseas Territory), lies some 600 miles further north.
St. Helena was the place of final exile, and death in 1821, of Napoleon. It was remote then and still has no air field. The only scheduled service to St. Helena is via the RMS St. Helena. Ascension, meanwhile, is a communications center, sending out BBC World Service broadcasts, and home to NASA and satellite tracking stations. The RAF used Ascension as a staging area during the Falklands War. (Here's the weekly Ascension newspaper The Islander.)
