“THE DRY GUILLOTINE”

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 45, 16 November 1929, Page 33

“THE DRY GUILLOTINE”

GRIM PENAL COLONIES OF GUIANA AND DEVIL’S ISLAND

(By Blair Niles in the “New York Tinies” Magazine.)

Once or twice a year the last convict ship afloat leaves France .bound for the most famous penal colony in the world. The head-lines announce its departure: “Passengers for Eternity Board the Martiniere —-Broken Men Sail, for Devil’s Island —Condemned to a Living Death. 0 After this, silence. It is as if the melancholy craft had sailed into the great unknown. No word comes of what happens at the end of the strange voyage. For shipping lists are not concerned with the arrival of such a barque, and in French Guiana there are no newspapers to herald its arrival. A few weeks ago we watched that ship come in. We had made the long journey to South America because we wanted to know what lay behind the silence into which the grim vessel has so often sailed, to learn something of the tragedy that is being played in those black prisons against the background of primeval forest. So we stood on the pier at St. Laurent and watched the Martiniere wind slowly up the broad tropical river. St Laurent is the great distributing centre for the penal colony, and most of its population had assembled with us on the river bank—as if they had gathered to meet friends or to do honour to some arriving celebrity. But there are no passengers on the decks of the Martiniere —only a row of armed keepers waiting at the head of the gangway. And from the shore to that weird ship no greeting passes; the crowd has merely put on ijs best clothes and come down to stare. For this Ship carries convicts only—nearly 700 of them—and save for the faces pressed against-the closed portholes they might all be corpses. Looking into those wan faces which peer so anxiously through the dim glass one suddenly understands that they are passionately eager to look upon the land to which they have been condemned to prison—and to exile. They are puzzled by that crowd on the bank, not knowing that in the monotony of Guiana the arrival of a convict convoy is a Roman holiday. As the ship slowly edges in, broadside to the pier, the men at the portholes begin to distinguish Chinese girls in gay, light dresstes and Martiniquaise women who lift their full sweeping skirts to show a triangle of white embroidered petticoat; with no colour too vivid, no pattern too flowery, for their calico gowns and gorgeous turbans. It is a bizarre panorama for French eyes: the negresses and mnlattoes of Guiana copying the Paris mode in every violent hue; the prison officials on the wharf in white uniforms and white cloche helmets, and, drawn up behind them, keepers in khaki armed with revolvers. Here and there, too, is a French wife with her French children, looking like fashion plates sketched at Deauville or the races. When the ship has made fast the men pour out of the barred cages in her hold, like gray rats, in the thick woollen uniforms of the French prisons. They pour down two gangways and form four abreast on the wharf. In obedience to orders the fours move forward to make room for those who follow, until, four by four, the line soon extends the length of tho pier. There they let slip the canvas bags, containing all they own, from the shoulders to the floor of the dock. And all has been done as silently as if they had really been the rats which their loose grey garb suggests. In silence they wait, blinking in the strong tropic sun, with rivulets of perspiration trickling down their faces.

And then, with the command “March 1” the line passes from the pier into the streets of St. Laurent. In the line are men of all ages and of many nationalities, for France sends to her Guiana penitentiaries criminals from all her colonies. There are Annamites and Chinese from French IndoChina, negroes from Madagascar and Reunion, Arabs from Northern Africa, and occasionally a Spaniard, a Belgian, a Briton or a German, caught somehow in the web of the French convict system.

And all manner of crimes as well as of criminals are represented. Murderers, burglars, forgers, deserters from the army—all bunk together. There is variety, too. in the sentences to which they are condemned. No man sentenced to less than five years is deported to French Guiana, and the terms run from that comparatively brief period to “forced labour for life.” It is the unique feature of this French penal colony that for every sentence up to eight years the convict must serve an equal term as an exile in Guiana; while for every sentence of eight years and over exile for life follows. ' Such are the men who yearly march from the dock at St. Laurent into the prison gates. The streets through which they pass are the work of convicts who have preceded them. The Palais de Justice, bright blue and white in the sun; the keepers’ houses, surrounded by ornamental brick walls; the shrubs and trees which give St. Laurent its air of tropical beauty—all these are the work of condemned men. And condemned men cook and serve their keepers food and wash their keepers’ clothes. The very prison is the work of condemned hands. • French Guiana itself rests upon this drab convict foundation.

The tentacles of the octopus which is the penitentiary system reach out in many directions. ’They include those three famous islands off the coast which are called the Iles du Saint — Devil’s Island, He Royale and He St. Joseph.

Next, to Napoleon’s, St. Helena, Devil’s Island is the most notorious place in the world. There Dreyfus spent the five years of his solitary banishment. Alone, falsely charged with high treason, he broke his heart while the sun beat down on the dangerous seas which swirl about that little island. France has long ago given Dreyfus the justice ho demanded, but she still retains Devil’s Island as her Island of Treason; and to-day nineteen men, convicted of treachery to the nation, watch Ihe ocean foam dash aud break on the rocks of their island prison. Second in interest to Devil’s Island is its neighbour, St. Joseph. This is the island of Solitary confinement and silence, the Island ' of punishment to which all prisons of Guiana send their “incorrigibles.” It is a place of mystery. Men speak of it with a shudder. To the prisons of Royale—the third and largest island of the trio—those men go who have so repeatedly attempted escape that only the heavy seas about these islands ' discourage their restless spirits. They are lonely little islands. No ship flying other than the French flag may pass within a mile and a half. None but those with official authorisation may land eyan on Royale; and

such permission is restricted to officials on business. Ships pause, therefore, merely for transference of mails. When they pull up anchor and go away the only communication with the islands is by the uncertain and antiquated semaphore, a useless method when any haze lies on the coast.

Of the 7000 prisoners now confined in Guiana, the inhabitants of the three islands total about 600, and the rest are housed in the prisons on the mainland. • The mainland of French Guiana is mostly jungle—miles of it unexplored —with only a fringe of habitation along the coast and for a short distance up the main streams. Where there are settlements of any size they have grown up about one of the larger prisons of the great system. There are prisons at Cayenne and at .Kourou, on the north coast; while radiating from St. Laurent, on the Maroni River, is a network of jungle prisons, where every night the men locked in their dormitories hear the wild, free chorus of the howling monkeys. But of the whole intricate organisation St. Laurent is the inexorable heart. All the convicts know it, for its prison was their first experience of Guiana.

Later many of them are distributed to the various other prisons; but in the beginning they must march into the penitentiary of St. Laurent, over whose gates stand the official words, “Camp de la Transportation”—words which the inmates soon interpret to read “The Dry Guillotine,” for imprisonment in French Guiana is to them only a degree less fatal than the descending knife itself.

These prisons are made up of many buildings within one great enclosing wall. The kitchen and the storehouses, the dormitories, the blockhouse, the banks of punishment cells, the infirmary—these are all separate buildings, generally whitewashed, always barred and always plainly labelled in huge black letters. Sometimes there are breadfruit or mango trees in the space between the rows of buildings. Black vultures sit in silent rows on the top of the wall or on the roofs of the houses. There is no sanitation; but then there is none in all of French Guiana. At a tank in the yard the men wash their clothes or themselves. There are no public rooms, no chapels, no din-ing-rooms, no gathering places. Between the hours of work the men are ■ locked in their dormitories, for within the gray and salmon-colour walls routine is inflexible. From the moment the new arrival’s fingerprints are registered at St. Laurent and he is assigned a number he is no longer a man J he has scarcely the individuality of a number. He has become merely a Guiana convict. Nearly 50,000 have preceded him and only the future knows how many will follow. Perhaps he may be one of the many who die during their first year of adjustment to prison in the Guiana climate. Across his record card the authorities will then write “DCD”—the French abbreviation of “Deceased.”

But should he live, the passenger on that convict ship bound for Guiana soon realises that he has lost everything but his tortured physical body and his troubled spirit. He has lost the right to send or receive a letter that has not been read by some employee of the Administration, and he suspects that much of the prison correspondence ends in the waste basket. He has lost, also, his right to handle as he pleases what money he may happen to have. He may not wear a moustache or beard. He must dress in prison clothes. Nothing of the little he owns Is free from prying eyes. And so faint, so uncertain is his contact with the world that he wonders which it is that has died—himself or the world. But such life as remains to him is lived with desperate intensity. His wits are now te be pitted against an armed and organised Administration. The convicts who have gone before him have left a legacy of devious devices for beating the system; devices more ingenious than anything ever invented by the American “bootlegger.” For the convict in Guiana inherits elaborately worked out subterfuges. He is instructed in the simulation of various diseases; he is initiated into the extraordinary prison method of secreting money; he Is informed who may be bribed and how; there are at his disposal hand-traced maps on which are indicated all the tried routes of escape by sea dr land, with advice about winds, currents and trails. But all this is a story in itself and sometimes not a story for overfastidous ears. But however groat the Ingenuity born of their extremity, in the end, almost without exception, the system “gets” the Guiana convict. Eventually the vitality of the prisoner fades until there is no fight left and ho submits like an automaton to the routine laid down in Article Number This and Decree Number That to the regulations of ordinance and proclamation in which interministerial commissions, chiefs of bureau, governors and directors regulate the penal colony of Guiana. There is no incentive to work under the blistering sun. Outwardly the convict moves through the routine —rising at 5.30. coffee at 5.45, leaving the prison with his work squad at 6, returning at 10.30 for the main meal of a chunk of meat, a slab of bread and the water in which the meat has been eookedj working again from 2 to 5, returning for supper of a cup of rice, plus the water in which it is boiled; and, finally, being locked into the dormitory for the night at 5.30. There he will sleep on a plank or strip of canvas, according to his grade as a prisoner. It. is a continuous round of being counted aud searched, searched and counted again, locked up and unlocked. This tedious job is, as a rule, allotted to hardened old Arab convicts who know scarcely a word of the prisoner's beloved French. This is the outward rhythm of a prisoner’s existence. Inwardly he will live I lie life of an agonised human being. Usually his mind is upon the everlasting problem of how to add enough to the prison fare to keep the heart beating In bis body. For the red tape Which Ims measured his days, defined his status and set boundaries to the punishments which may be inflicted on him has neglected to count the calories of his daily ration. Due to the effort of two French journalists —Londres and Le Fevre —the black cell has been abolished and the use of irons, except for “strictly necessary restraint,” has been suppressed. But what matters more to the convict than degrees of punishment—more even than the scorching sun. the mosquitoes or the vermin of the old wooden prisons—is the fact that night aud day he must fight the gnawing craving of semi-starvation. Therefore the perpetual struggle to add, by any means.

whatever, to the prison ration. Because the authorities, so adept at formulating decrees, are ignorant of the necessity of vitamins, acids and potash salts, many of the convicts suffer from scurvy. All the elements to produce it flourish in the Guiana prisons: exposure to torrid sun and to rain measured in feet instead of inches; dark, damp punishment cells; distress of mind; insufficient food; lack of fresh vegetables and fruits. And all the effects inevitably follow: exhaustion, susceptibility to a complication of diseases, loosening and falling of the teeth. Guiana is full of toothless young men.

Because of the discomfort of the wooden sabots provided by the authorities, most of the men prefer to go barefoot; and since there is no sanitation, all of them have hookworm, with its resulting anemia. With their lowered physical resistance and with mosquitoes prevalent, every one is, of course, infected with malaria. One never sees a fat man in the prisons of Guiana. And to illness is added a brooding sorrow. I know the inside of those prisons and I know what the men on the convict ship are coming to. They are entering a world where a laugh or a song is as rare as a meteor passing across the sky. Occasionally, but not often, a man will make for himself a guitar and strum for himself a tune. Others will gamble in as deadly earnest over their sous as though millions were at stake. Some will read, renting books from the limited number accumulated by vanished predecessors. Many occupy their locked-in hours with making boxes, paper knives, tiny model guillotines to be used as cigar cutters, etc., in the hope of making a sale when the cargo steamer or the monthly courier comes in. But whatever alleviation there is must come from within themselves.

An these outcasts learn to hide every fine feeling. They would have no one guess that they are withered by the contempt in the voice of every free man, by the fact that no free man will ever offer them his hand, and that they never receive a kind smile. They face ten, twenty, forty years, perhaps a lifetime of this. They are lonely and ill and hopeless. They reason that they might as well be as wholly evil as they are thought. Before they reach the dull resignation point they have many such fits of brooding in which they realise the length of their sentence, speaking of it always as their “peine.” What does it matter what they do, they who have so little to lose? If they live through their imprisonment, which they know is a faint hope, why, then, what will become of them in the exile years which follow on their “pain.” They are now condemned to Guiana, and in Guiana there is not enough work properly to sustain life. They have known too many of the socalled “free” convicts who,, having survived their “pain,” failed to survive their freedom. They have known them to steal to get back to the half-starva-tion of prison. In the street it is not uncommon to hear one man say casually to another, “You know, I haven’t had a thing to eat for two days.” And they have also seen men' with enough energy left after prison to take up an agricultural concession. They have seen them vanquished by ants; or, having vanquished the ants, obliged to buy a pig to eat up the produce grown with such patient toil. For who is there in Guiana to buy their produce? The penitentiary staff use convicts to grow their vegetables, and the Creole population retains a primitive food standard, preferring to spend its money on the toys of life.

When all this overwhelms the prisoner he has reached the despair point at which he attempts escape, fully realising that half of those who do so pay with their lives at the hands of sea or jungle—that one perhaps succeeds and that the rest are captured and sent back for punishment. But at the despair point none of them counts risks or costs. . Thus only attempted escape, punishment and occasionally a few weeks in the hospital break the 'relentless routine. Until at last the Dry Guillotine has done its work und the blue pencil scrawls across another card the final “DCD.”