The Saint Helena Longhouse - parts 1 and 3
The messages from Saint Helena started in early June.
"I do not know whether I'm hosting a meal like a glorified officers' mess or a peace conference soirée for exceedingly wealthy merchants if not nobles. We'll do what we can, it's what we always do. We will need the help of Fernau and Gambia. We've written to Gambia asking for millet and citrus. From Fernau, please send two ships full of lumber. And strong slaves for quarry work. We have no single building in which we might seat 50 people to eat together, and shall need one quickly...."
They were already balancing reporting on progress and worry by July:
"Thank you for the slaves. They've greatly improved the staircase we've set into the rocky walls of our main valley. A short walk from the top of that staircase, the foundation and walls of our hall are now set. You may know the Portuguese described this island as much greener when they found it. You know we've dealt with the dogs problem they left behind, but over a century of goats running rampant ripped out greenery right down to tree roots - so good soil has washed away. We believe we'll keep the better slaves busy afterward with more tree-planting, and further quarrying and wall-making to help the soils replenish. We may be the colony that didn't get one of your esteemed mother's gardens, but our isolation makes us all conscious of the need for gardening here.
I've placed a Basque man left here by some Portuguese ship, Itzal by name, in charge of our menus. He was apparently a ship's cook before, and he's the island's best cook now. No sailor drinking in our seaside tavern ever complains about their food. He asks for dairy cattle and goats - they must have their milk, and they must be milked on their journey here to keep them with milk for us. We simply need more milk, cream, butter, and yoghurt. If the milk gathered aboard ships can be turned to cheese en route, so much the better. Failing that, distill it. These are still sailors and any alcohol will be we welcome.
Itzal also requests more berries - please send entire bushes already growing fruit! We have citrus on the island, but the fruit is generally not sweet. Same with our raspberries. Bilberries and bananas and olives thrive, if you put them in the right places. It seems bananas don't like our wind. Olives fare well enough where other trees fail. Mynah birds damage our fruit trees, but eat flies that trouble our fruit trees more than the birds do, so on balance they're probably helpful.
Tobago is sending us more ducks. Our flocks will be too depleted by this meal. More chickens! Egg-laying hens and birds for meat. Our habit of buying any living spice plants - always through shady deals - is paying off or us with a diversity of flavours we can add to things. We can grow any vegetable or herb Europe can - please send herbs of every kind. If they're unfamiliar to us, send someone who understands them too! We have a young brother and sister from India who some ship was bringing to Europe to teach them their people's herbs and simpler foods. But he fell too sick on the journey, and both he and the herbs stayed here. We got coffee trees and a grain called teff from other ships, the same way, earlier. The teff fares better than wheat here, even if the animals have more the taste for it than the people. I personally find it makes a fine porridge for the morning. Coffee fruit tastes utterly ghastly, but the medicinal value has won over many of us. Some captains who've traded at Mocha, Tunis, or Constantinople tell us we're preparing it well enough. A tiny bit seems to impart some welcome dark flavour to a stew.
Apologies if I ramble, even in writing. I feel this has been a week of half-conversation after half-conversation, adjusting plans as plans progress. After September, things will surely calm again. Perhaps I will come visit Fernau again! Surely it has changed so much since you've brought so many new people.
Another message was explicitly sent to for Tevel's eyes only:
More pretty girls for the whorehouse, please! At least twenty. Have lost three from circulation to sailors' diseases. Lost another couple to marriage. More of those blue-eyed ones if possible. Baltic men feel a little more at home with blue eyes, you know? Dutchmen, too, I suppose. I know you don't eat pigs, Tevel. You'll learn to love our fish, I'm sure.
- - -
Messages and foodstuffs and labour came from Tobago, Fernau, and the forts taken from Sweden. The Gambia sent all that plus correspondence relayed from Lisbon, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Copenhagen and wherever Jakob was at any given time. Saint Helena got its blue-eyed black girls, their flavouring herbs, dairy cattle and goats, and instructions.
Saint Helena did its best to prepare its welcome. Bechler's enterprise extended not only to the crazy staircase carved into the western side of the valley of their first settlement - seven hundred steps long - but also to a pier reaching north into the ocean. The stairs seemed to all the stranger venture, but it was the more successful. Their narrow valley may have been a thin strip of the only green land reaching down and out to the ocean across the island's otherwise barren, rocky edge; but it was tricky to safely go beyond the valley to the higher land beside the valley, or the greener land deeper into the island. The mad stairs made it easier for the Saints - as they were starting to call themselves - to reach more of their island.
Bechler was going to host this diplomacy on the high bluff - cliff? plateau? - reached by his staircase. The first builders and building materials had to get up there without the stairs, later ones benefited from the roughly-hewn stairs, the last ones had beautifully even, flat stairs to walk upon. It was, in some ways, Saint Helena's welcome mat. Martin had shared in writing his wish for places to have names on the colonial map. Saint Helena's nearly four hundred inhabitants, by the end of summer, had two little neighbourhoods with simple names: Upstairs and Downstairs. Some few Saints, generally those more interested in farming (or solitude) grew things further inland. Most people lived Downstairs. Most people worked Upstairs. And the name for the staircase required no thought at all: Jakob's Ladder.
- - -
A week before the Duke was to arrive - for the first time ever! - it was time to practice. 80 islanders were directly involved in cooking, serving, cleaning or otherwise helping out.
80 other islanders at a time were invited to either a breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Most would climb Jakob's Ladder from Downstairs, admire the view, then enter the great longhouse. The longhouse was adapted from Fernau's, but using stone for more of its height and timber from Fernau only for its tall, pointed roof. The walls weren't quite parallel, widening toward the seaward end of the building. The peak of the roof was also correspondingly higher at the seaward end, like a peculiarly straight drinking horn intent on scooping up the seemingly infinite waters of the South Atlantic.
Around the longhouse, flagstones forming a rough patio. Uneven in shape, but happily flat. A wall or railing before the bluff would be a good idea, but one that would have to be executed later. There had been too little time for too few people who had so much to do already. Other (new, simple) buildings nearby offered places to sleep for overnight visitors. Most had only hammocks or mats - just nice enough to keep a sailor from walking down seven hundred stairs to return to his ship. The nicest of these, with proper beds, was intended for the prettiest and most charming of those rare blue-eyed girls shipped up from the Guinea coast west of Fernau. There could be sleep in those beds, while the Duke was around. After, sleep would hardly seem worth the price.
But on this day, when the Saints entered the building, depending on the time of day, they saw one of four signs:
~~
BREAKFAST
Porridge of oats and teff
Yoghurt with berries, sweetened with sugarcane
Salted chicken eggs
~~
LUNCH
Oat bread with olive oil
Dried salted pork
Saint Helena pepper stew (fish and goat and sweet potato)
Fruit
~~
DINNER
Gambian red pepper rice
Lamb with herbs
Sauerkraut
Tuna and potato cakes
Coffee
Banana cake
Spirits with herbs
~~
DINNER
Tuna with herbs
Millet with chiles, squash and pineapple
Dark Duck broth with potatoes
Oat bread with pear preserves
Spirits with herbs
It didn't much matter which meal one was invited to: the Saints enjoyed the finest meal they'd ever eaten on the island. If anything wasn't in order, well, that's what this practice service was for, anyway. It had a way of motivating the Saints, in a way. This was a fine reward for their labours, a fine one indeed.
When their Duke sailed in, and the Dutch, Danish, British and Portuguese ships came, the island was alive with optimism and effort. Positivity was contagious.
-
When their Duke sailed out, days after the Dutch, Danish, British and Portuguese ships had left, the optimism and effort remained.
And the Saints decided they'd rather like to head Upstairs for such fine communal meals again, both as a reward for their labour and as labour for their reward. When their island had visitors with time and money (and often lust), Saint Helena would send them Upstairs and fulfill its mandate as a place of welcome, trade, and profit for ships and those who sail them. But whether they had visitors or not, the Saint Helena Longhouse served fine meals and memories to the island's own every week thereafter.
