AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 34, 3 November 1928, Page 26

AN ARMCHAIR ESSAY

DEVIL’S ISLAND

THE HORRORS OF A FRENCH PENAL SETTLEMENT

(Written for “The Dominion” by Charles Wilson.)

The cablegram which last Tuesday recorded the escape of Dr. Bougrat. the notorious Marseilles murderer, from Devil’s Island, off the mainland of Guiana, on which the French penal station is stationed,. .will recall memories of the imprisonment and terrible sufferings of Alfred Dreyfus, the Frenelr.militury engineer officer, who was unjustly condemned to life-long imprisonment for alleged high treason, and liberated and honourably reinstated as' the result of an awakened national, conscience, the arousing of which, culminating in a new. trial, was sb largely the work of Emile Zola and Anatole France. Not for many years has Cayenne been much in the public eye. but the successful escape of an international criminal, Eddy Guerin, only to be sent, for a time, to an Eng : lish gaol, as the ■ result. of his murderous: assault in Jmndon upon one of his old associates in crime, aroused tor a time some interest iniFrance’s South American penal.'settlement. Now it is 'the turn of Dr. Bougrat to bring the place once again into prominence. “Condeiimed to Devil’s Island.”

Whether rearrested on or French territory,’ is not very clear, and it will- be Interesting' to know his 1 actual, futifteh It. is probable Hint he ■Was ; neVer..an .the actual Devil’s Island at allf ! but wits confined in the hospital on Royale Island, one of the three islands iytogi’ close th) the mainland.--I have recently'spent hi couple of evenings in ploughing through a very reiniirkable book; ‘'Condemned to Devi l’s island, the Biography of An Unknown Convicts, by Mrs. Niles (Jonathan Cape),' wherein is set forth, partly as fact, and jyirtly in fictional form—to. avbid identification, no doubt, Of Mrs. Niles’s informant—the’ horrible experiences of the French convicts in the Cayenne penal settlement, a veritable hell upon earth, wherever such a terrestrial purgatory may be situated. Part of this dreadful story I will attempt to reproduce here, in highly abbreviated form, of course. The Three Islands. In France the whole penal settlement, iiideed the whole of French Guiana, is commonly styled “Devil’s Island.” But the main "camp de transportation" is on the mainland. The convicts are only sent to the three islands off the const —Devil’s Island, where poor Dreyfus was confined, but where, so I now believe, no prisoners are now confined; Royale ami Joseph, the latter the special terror to the convicts, for there are placed the low white-washed

buildings, with “Reclusion” painted on the walls, the buildings where' dwell—perhaps I ought to say exist—miserable wretches who. as a punish-ment-for offences against discipline on the mainland, are condemned to undergo- that most hateful punishment to -malefactors ■ all the” world over—solitary confinement! Royale lias a fort with a garrison of black soldiers, from Martinique, a hospital, and a prison, Where go the solitary confinement convicts when their term of special penance'is up, before being returned to the main "penal settlement. As for Devil’s Island, it is less than a mile long." Michel, so Mrs. Niles’s real or Imagined' autho’rity Is called in her book, informed her that you could almost walk around it while you smoked a cigarette. Yet, because of Dreyfus having been there, that little bit of an island has given its name to the whole colony. Odd,-when we know that most Of the 50,000 convicts who’ve come out in the last seventy-five years have never even set foot on the place.

Of sinister importance is the fact .that there’s a strong current between Devills Island, and the other two. and between them and the mainland. Also, tlie sea hereabouts swarms witli shark's! ...

Hospital Rather than Reclusion. Solitary, silent, “reclusion” on the island of Joseph is so horrible to some who are sent there that they get desperate, and do almost incredible things. One, Verne tolls how men have lost their eyesight, “because of what they had' done to infect their eyes—dope, deliberately, so as to he sent to the hospital,” Another convict, Basil, said lie knew a man who had dropped a heavy stone on his foot to keep from being sent to the fever-stricken camp at Koroua. And someone else had had a friend who, for the same reason, had cut himself and ■ put class in the wound.” Another ~ “had threaded a needle with a horsehair, and drawn it between the skin and the flesh. The infection had run into tetanus. It would have finished him, but for the doctors getting it in time.” Cases of amputation—and, as a result, relief from forced work, are common enough. Even if men couldn’t get. horsehair, and didn’t have knives, "they could almost always get the seed of tlie castor oil plant, which grows on the Island. If you inserted.” said Verne, “one of these seeds under your skin, it. would form pus in twenty-four hours. And the hospital was sure. It was sure, too that, you ran the risk of amputation; then, powdered quinine rubbed into the

eyes would give you : the look of the insane, and there were things you could do to back up the idea. There were ways of simulating madness, ways that weren't nice to think about. As for that, what was it all but insanity, anyway? Prison itself was insane.” Rotisseuq the Ace. v.

Mrs. Niles, however, tells how one prisoner, tlie notorious anarchist, Rottssenq (said to be in the autumn of last vea'r to be still in solitary confinement) defied the horrors of reclusion. Although forbidden, the keepers, frightened of the poor devil’s attacks of hysteria, winked at the prisoner writing verse on ;bits of paper, for it was -better not’ to rouse the man. The, man, Michel, whose story is told in this book, met Roussenq on Joseph Island. He was nearly six feet tall, yet weighed only a trifle over a hundred pounds, so greatly had he been exhausted by prison. He had been seventeen years a convict, .for ten years eating soup only one day out of three, living for the other two on dry bread alone (this latter, Mrs. Niles tells us, was apunishment since abolished). Just imagine—if you can—what reclusion on Joseph Island means. The cell is window less. What light and ventilation there is drifts down from the space .under the roof, of solid tile, both light and air journeying down from tlie windows of the outer corridor before finally reaching tlie dim, close cell, ■ about 7 feet; wide by 12 high. Down the centre of the building between the cell blocks, on a level with rile top of the walls, ran a narrow elevated platform, perhaps three feet wide, whence the keeper on duty might look down upon the occupant. "Nothing but the human heart was hidden from him.” “The King of the Black Cell.”

Roussenq wts styled by his fellowconvicts as “The Ace,” “The King of the Black Cell.” He had come out originally with a sentence of twenty years, some saying he had been condemned by a Council of War for “setting fire to his mattress” and giving a superior officer a box on the jaw. But his numerous revolts against prison discipline had so added to his sentence that he now had a total of twenty-live years. He had already served fifteen years, and in that time had experienced more than 4000 days of the “black cell.” Still he was ever a “revolte.” On his plank bed in the “Chateau” he had carved the words, “Roussenq spits at humanity.” Good-natured President Poincare, appealed to by Roussenq’s aged mother,

had commuted live years of his sentence, but he had still, in 1926, three years more to serve. He never tried to escape. When Mrs. ■ Niles was in Cayenne lie was writing a poem called “Hell.” He began writing it in 1913. Perhaps that had kept him from insanity. Poor devil, it’s difficult to understand French “military justice” exacting so awful a penalty for “setting lire to a mattress and boxing an officer’s face.”

The Convict’s Life. .. The only relief was the tolling of the village bells, the bells of early Muss, for' the schools, the ■ daily Angelas,* the bells for weddings (for among the liberes those who have served their sentence of imprisonment but cannot leave the settlement' there is even marriage), and a too often tolling bell for the burial of the convict dead. - Tlie whole settlement is fever and other disease-stricken. Fever, of course, exacts the worst toll Oil all, but there are tropical diseases peculiar to the place and the death-roll is frightfully high. . The prisoners expiate crimes of all sorts, from burglary and forgery to murder, to which latter most of the prisoners begin in time to think-it would have been better had they passed under the attention of what tlie French criminal calls la veure—“the widow” —the guillotine! Huge numbers —in one case 700— come out by one ship and on arrival serve a long term of imprisonment in the “Camp of Transportation.” Deprived of liberty, of all - decent pleasures. they soon lose all hope and become mere brutalized human beasts. No wonder so many attempt escape. The Escapees. The fate of the escapee is nearly always a miserable death or recapture. Occasionally they manage to get away into the jungle whence they hope to make their way to Dutch or British or Brazilian territory. Rarely do they succeed. Others, as did Bou--grat, and his friends, have attempted escape by sea. How they get and secrete, in a way at which Mrs. Niles hints in ugly 1 terms, the money given to natives who too often betray them anil send them back to prison misery, no special particulars are given. Mrs. Niles, too. more than merely hints at disgusting immoralities, which also were, as all who remember Marcus Clark’s “For the Term of his Natural Life” will recall, not unknown at Port Arthur. Some of the escapees, Dieudonne and Allut held, J

when Mrs. Niles was at Cayenne, the record. Dieudonne cheated the guillotine in Paris in 1913, when all the surviving members of the Bonnot gang of bandits had been condemned to death. Three of them had gone to the guillotine. But Bonnot made a deathbed statement that Dieudone had not taken part in the last hold-up, and so, nt (lie eleventh, hour, his sentence had been commuted to forced labour-for life in Guiana. Twice he? had tried to escape on a flimsy raft qnade o£ bananas. was recaptured, sent to Joseph for two years’ solitary; and then transferred to Cayenne on the mainland. But soon he had again escaped, this time to Brazil. Then, in July, 1927, he was granted a pardon by the French Government, and has since, says- Mrs. Niles, in a footnote, returned as a free citizen to France to .'begin life anew, at forty-three, after nearly fifteen years of Guiana. Allut’s Wonderful Experiences.

Allut’s experiences had,, said a turnkey, been yet more eventful. “He’s always escaping. ' Never .gives up.” He came out in 1915 with twenty years peine. In 1916 he escaped through Dutch Guiana to Paramaribo, was arrested on a ship bound for Java, was taken back to St. Laurent and got two years added to his sentence. The next year he stole a boat, and got away with seven others. Was recaptured. got three more years added. Two years more and off he managed to get away again, by sea, was recaptured by tlie French mail boat, taken back and got five more years. After a time, he was pronounced tubercular and was placed in hospital. From there, with six others, he bolted yet again, but they ran aground, and five of the seven were drowned. Allut was taken back to St. Laurent, and while waiting trial “sawed his way out” and at the noon siesta, got over to the Chinese village, and stole a boat. One man was reckless enough to join him—the look of the boat was enough, no rudder and the sail had been made out of an old shirt and a pair of trousers. I need not tell further of his quite wonderful experiences. but five days after they capsized off Marowna in British Guiana. Allut saved himself by swimming, but once again had to return to St. Laurent. He was back again for punishment, by this time augmented to thirty years. But, so the French warder told, he was never discouraged.” For, sent to Joseph, he stole three thousand francs, from a keeper, tried to escape, was caught and was being shipped down to St. Laurent, when he managed to snatch n revolver, got ashore, and by some mysterious means, got clear away. As tlie turnkey added: “Nothing lias been heard of him since. Perhaps this time he’s really escaped. Some day, I expect we. shall have the full story of Bougrat’s escape.. Mrs. Niles’s book is full of exciting and wonderful stories, full too of horrible and ugly details, but it reads like the real thing. The wood-cut illustrations by her husband are often very dramatic.