![]() ![]() In 1922, the Ascension island was made a dependency of Saint Helena. In 1899, the Eastern Telegraph Company (now part of Vodafone) installed the first underwater cable from the island, connecting the UK with its colonies in South Africa. By the late 1870s Norfolk pines, eucalyptus, bamboo, and banana trees grew at the highest point of the island, Green Mountain, creating a tropical forest covered with clouds. So, from 1850 and continuing year on year, ships came each with different plants from botanical gardens in Argentina, Europe and South Africa. Four years later, Hooker advised the Royal Navy that with the help of Kew Gardens, they should develop a long-term plan of shipping trees to Ascension. In 1843, botanist and explorer Joseph Hooker visited the island. Sparse vegetation inland supported "about six hundred sheep, many goats, a few cows & horses", and large numbers of guineafowl imported from the Cape Verde islands, as well as rats, mice and land crabs. He described Ascension as an arid treeless island, with nothing growing near the coast. ![]() In 1836, Charles Darwin visited the Saint Helena and Ascension islands during his voyage in the Beagle. Organised settlement of Ascension Island began in 1815, when the British sent soldiers to the island as a precaution after imprisoning Napoleon I on Saint Helena to the southeast. En 1503 when the Portuguese navigator Afonso de Albuquerque saw the island on Ascension Day, in the church calendar, he named it after the feast day. The Galician explorer João da Nova, working for Portugal, saw the Ascension island in the South Atlantic in 1501, when he was going to India named it ilha da Conceição (Conception Island). There is in the island one antenna of the five that assist in the operation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigational system (others are on Kwajalein Island, Diego Garcia, Colorado Springs and Hawaii). The island is the location of a Royal Air Force station with a United States Air Force presence, a European Space Agency station and the BBC World Service Atlantic Relay Station. It is part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, of which the main island is St Helena. The Ascension Island is named after the day of its recorded discovery, Ascension Day. The nearest land is Saint Helena, 1,296 km (805 mi) to the south-east. Ascension Island is an isolated and relatively young volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean, some 100 km (62 mi) west of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, 1,504 km (935 mi) from Liberia (Cape Palmas), and 2,232 km (1,387 mi) from Brazil ( Recife). ![]()
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