Rain, forts, archives and fishcakes on St. Helena

On Wednesday, March 7, we got up early and drove to the northern part of the island, hoping to walk to a lookout point to watch the sun rise.  Instead we found ourselves in cloud and wind-driven rain trying to urge our four wheel drive vehicle up a muddy track on a steep ridge.  This was perhaps the low point of our visit to the island!  We returned to (by then) sunny Jamestown, got the key to the most famous of many forts on the island from the National Trust office (an interesting way to allow access to one of the more prominent tourist sites) and explored the fort, high up on a hill overlooking the island.  The fort is notable for having a 13th century style moat and drawbridge (the moat is now dry and the drawbridge buried), but was mostly built in the 1860s.  What was the builder thinking?  And from whom was he trying to defend the island?  Some have told us the French, but the French were long gone by the 1860s.  On Thursday, March 8, Jack got a haircut.  He waived the arsenic testing!  We went to the government archives . It consists of three rooms on the ground floor of the the government buildings called the "Castle."  The archivist offered to show us some documents.  We looked at handwritten records of government meetings from the 1680s and a newspaper dated 1816?????.  No mention of Napoleon in the 1816 record!  Napoleon and the island's governor were at odds, so maybe it was on purpose.  The documents seem rather too important to be stored in an atmospherically uncontrolled environment about 100 feet from the sea.  We had spicy tuna fishcakes for lunch.  (The 'saint' equivalent of spicy is "bite", e.g. "These fishcakes are made with bite, these ones are without bite.")  Locally caught tuna is the St. Helena equivalent of hamburger! Later in the day we heard about two drinking water problems on St. Helena.  A filter has failed, so the tap water can be a bit brown.  Worse, from some other cause, e. coli has been detected in the drinking water.  Since then we have been boiling all drinking water.  Fortunately, our flat has an English large electric kettle, so it is easy to boil and decant large quantities of water.