TO DEVIL’S ISLAND

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 166, 10 April 1931, Page 2

TO DEVIL’S ISLAND

Horrors of Convict Ship LAST DAYS IN FRANCE The war-grey convict sUtP Da Martiniere rests at anchor in the placid wateis of St. Martiu-de-Rc, near La Rochelle, and soon will sail carrying 673 convicts to a living death on Devil s I«Dnd, Tiro< the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Express” on February lb. *The steel cages in the hold, which an escaped man once described as not nt for wild beasts, are ready. The miles of pipes which pass and repass along the walls, ready to spit out scalding, trickling steam on to any man who gives trouble or tries to raise a mutiny, have been tested and found not there will start , the three weeks’ hell for 673 men who whatever crime they may have committed, aie to be subjected to a torment which wi 1 turn them from human beings to. anima “A man who has passed through the three weeks’ voyage to Devil s Island,„ it has been said, “can stand anythin The French authorities know this, and so for the past two weeks the convicts have not been forced to work. They have been allowed a ration of wmc every day, and they have been allowed meat in their rations three times a week. Each inau has bad to go through a rigorous medical examination in order to prove that he will be able to stand the voyage, and even then some will arrive at their life’s prison with only a few short weeks to run before they die. During the last hours impatience has driven fear away from those who are to go, and a growing numbness has crept 2ver the minds of those relatives and friends who, forgetting pride and then disgrace, have come down to this, grey and threatening island of St. M: rtin-de-Re to say a last farewell. . But directly the La Martimere has been boarded it becomes a different story. Men have been known, suddenly realising that their worst nightmare has come true, to make’a last pathetic and futile struggle for freedom. They have temporarily gone mad, struggled, fought and screamed in yam, and then they have been pushed into their barred cages until exhaustion overcame their fears. • . , It is not a particularly notorious collection that is leaving—petty criminals, victims of a moment’s passion, or professional thieves, who have used violence in a moment of fear. Twenty of them are those whose death sentence has been commuted to life on Devil’s Island. Soon they will be wishing they had not been spared.