Saint Helena's flag follows a template the British Empire stamped across the globe: a Blue Ensign with the Union Jack in the corner and a local badge in the fly. What is in the badge is anything but generic. The shield carries a small brown-and-white plover called the wirebird, which lives on this one island in the middle of the South Atlantic and nowhere else, above a sailing ship of the kind that made the island matter for three centuries. One of the remotest inhabited places on Earth put the two truest things about itself on its flag: isolation so complete it produced a bird of its own, and the ships that were its only link to everywhere else.
A blue ensign, by the book
The flag is a standard British Blue Ensign in 1:2 proportions, the pattern prescribed for colonial governments since the Victorian era. The Union Jack occupies the upper hoist quarter; the shield of Saint Helena's coat of arms sits centered in the fly. The same construction identifies most of the remaining British Overseas Territories, from the Falkland Islands to the Cayman Islands, each distinguished only by its badge.
Saint Helena's version was adopted on October 4, 1984. On the island the Union Flag still flies at government buildings, with the Saint Helena flag brought out for important events and occasions. There is no defaced Red Ensign for civilian ships registered at Saint Helena; they fly the plain British Red Ensign.
The shield: a plover above, a ship below
The shield is split horizontally. The upper third is gold and carries the wirebird, drawn with the black-and-white head pattern that makes the real bird easy to identify. The lower two thirds are the older part of the design: a rocky coastline with a three-masted sailing ship offshore, sails furled, flying the red cross of Saint George. The rocks are said to be Lower and Upper Black Rock on the island's coast, and the ship is an East Indiaman, the armed merchantman of the English East India Company.
The company is the reason the shield looks the way it does. The East India Company claimed the uninhabited island in 1659 and governed it until the Crown took over in 1834, running it as a fortified victualling stop where ships returning from Asia could take on water and fresh food. At the height of the age of sail, hundreds of ships called every year. The island's other famous chapter belongs to the same era of sea power: Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled here in 1815, precisely because the British judged it escape-proof, and he died on the island in 1821.
The full coat of arms, designed at the College of Arms in 1982-83 and registered by command of Queen Elizabeth II on January 30, 1984, adds a crest above the shield: a figure of Saint Helena of Constantinople, the Roman empress the island was named for, holding a cross and a flower. The motto beneath is "Loyal and Unshakeable." Only the shield appears on the flag.
The wirebird
The Saint Helena plover, Charadrius sanctaehelenae, is called the wirebird locally for its thin legs. It is the island's national bird and its only endemic land bird still living; the others, including a giant hoopoe and a flightless rail, went extinct after humans and their animals arrived. The wirebird itself came close. Its population fell to a few hundred in the 2000s before conservation work on the island's pastures pulled the numbers back up, and it remains a bird whose entire world population fits inside 122 square kilometers.
Putting it at the top of the shield in 1984 was the one real change from the old colonial badge, and it shifted the flag's emphasis from what the island was for (shipping) to what the island is (a place with its own, fragile natural history). The bird has since had a second brush with heraldic trouble: over the years, inconsistent renderings of the shield circulated, some showing a bird that looked little like a wirebird, and in 2019 the Saint Helena government released a corrected official version of the arms to settle the matter.
One territory, three flags
Saint Helena proper is one part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a name adopted with the 2009 constitution that put the three island groups on an equal footing. The territory as a whole has no flag; each part flies its own. That is a recent state of affairs. Saint Helena's flag officially doubled as Tristan da Cunha's until 2002, when Tristan, the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world, received its own ensign, and it stood in unofficially for Ascension Island until Ascension's flag was first raised in 2013.
The three islands are scattered across thousands of kilometers of the South Atlantic, and Saint Helena itself sits about 1,950 kilometers from the African coast. Until 2017 the only way to reach it was a five-day voyage on the RMS St Helena from Cape Town. An airport opened in 2016, though notorious wind shear delayed scheduled service; weekly flights from Johannesburg finally began in October 2017, and the ship made its last voyage in 2018. The island's roughly 4,000 residents, who call themselves Saints, still use the Saint Helena pound, pegged one-to-one to sterling.
References
[1] "Flag of Saint Helena," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Saint_Helena
[2] "Coat of arms of Saint Helena," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Saint_Helena
[3] "Our Flag," Saint Helena Island Info. https://sainthelenaisland.info/flag.htm
[4] "Saint Helena," Flags of the World. https://www.fotw.info/flags/sh.html
[5] "Flags of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_Saint_Helena,_Ascension_and_Tristan_da_Cunha