Inside St. Helena's Forgotten World | 4K Travel Documentary

Saint Helena sits in the middle of the South Atlantic, roughly 1,950 kilometers from the nearest continent, and for centuries the only way in or out for its 4,500 people was by ship. This travel documentary goes inside Saint Helena, the volcanic island where Napoleon spent his final years, where a reported 285 million pound airport brought problems of its own, and where a giant tortoise born around 1832 still grazes on the governor's lawn. In this 4K documentary, we trace Saint Helena's story from its birth around 14 million years ago as a volcano rising from the Atlantic seafloor, to its discovery by a Portuguese fleet on May 21, 1502, the feast day of Saint Helena. We follow the English East India Company's takeover in 1659 and the island's rise as a vital stop on the route from Asia, then Napoleon's exile from October 1815 at the Briars and Longwood, his death on May 5, 1821, and the unmarked grave in a willow-shaded valley where he lay for nineteen years until France brought him home in 1840. We also climb Jacob's Ladder, 699 steps rising around 183 meters above Jamestown, and meet Jonathan, the giant tortoise recognized as the oldest known living land animal in the world. We explore the Saints themselves, descendants of English settlers, African and Asian laborers, and sailors who never left, along with the more than twenty thousand liberated Africans brought here between 1840 and 1872, the Boer prisoners of war, the final voyage of the Royal Mail Ship Saint Helena in 2018, and the wind shear that complicated the new airport's first flights. And we ask the harder question: how does an island open its door to the world without losing what makes it home, and why do some Saints who leave eventually come back? If you love travel documentaries about extreme and isolated places, remote islands, and the way people make a home at the very edge of the map, this one's for you. Subscribe to The Far Reaches and join us as we keep discovering extraordinary places most people will never see.