Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Last week in the UK the Home Secretary

seemed to suggest that migrants arriving in this country, people seeking asylum,

would be processed on Ascension Island, a small piece of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,

one of the few scraps that remain from Britain's once enormous global empire. Ascension is around

a thousand miles from the coast of Africa and about one half thousand miles from the coast of

Brazil. A hundred miles away from Ascension is another small island, St Helena. It measures about

10 miles by five. It is also a remnant of the British Empire, but the Home Secretary suggested that

either essential Tristan D'Cuna or St Helena might be used to process these migrants. What's

very interesting is St Helena has been used in the past to process or to house a very different

kind of migrants, migrants who were not there through any choice of their own. After the British

abolished the Atlantic slave trade, they used the raw navy to intercept certain ships crossing

the Atlantic. Any enslaved African people they found were not taken back to Africa. They were

dumped on St Helena with little in the way of food, shelter or welfare. The wonderful archaeologist

on St Helena, Annina Van Neel, took me to the valley on St Helena, a brutal, desolate place now,

where these recently liberated Africans were forced to settle. As you'll hear,

some found it so difficult existing there. They actually chose to head to North America to work

on the plantations, effectively volunteering to enslave themselves, so limited and so awful

with the options available to them. This is part of the documentary I made on St Helena. You can

head over to History Hit TV. You can use the code pod1pod1 and you will get a month for free and your

second month is one pound at euro or dollars, so please check out that remarkable landscape and

some of the objects that Annina Van Neel refers to on there. In the meantime, enjoy this podcast

with a peculiar modern echo.

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