DEVIL'S ISLAND

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 125, 29 May 1928, Page 9

DEVIL'S ISLAND

THE HOME OF LOST SOULS .France adopted deportation for criminals as far back as 1763, when a penal colony waß first founded in .French Guiana, but failed disastrously. An expedition was sent there composed of the, most evil elements of the Paris population, and numbering 14,000, all of whom died. The attempt was repeated in 1766 with the same miserable result. Other failures are recorded, the' worst being the scheme of the philanthropist Baron Milius, who in 1523 planned to form a community on the banks of the Mana (French Guiana) by the marriage of exiled convicts and degraded .women, which resulted in the most ghastly horrors. The principle of deportation was then formally condemned by all, until suddenly in 1854 it was reintroduced into the French penal codo with many (highsounding phrases. Splendid results were to be achieved in the creation of rich colonies afar, and tho regeneration of the criminal by new openings in a new land. The only outlet available at tho moment beyond the : sea was French Guiana, and it was again to be utilised, despite its pestilential climate. Thousands were exiled,i more than half to find certain death—but none of the penal settlements prospered. No return was madt by agricultural developments, farms and plantations proved a dead loss under tho unfavourable conditions of labour enforced in a malarious climate and unkindly soil, and it was acknowledged by French officials that the attempt to establish a penal colony on the equator was utterly futile.. Deportation to Guiana was not abandoned, but instead of native-born French exiles, convicts of subject races, Arabs, Anamites, and Asiatic blacks, were sent exclusively, with no better success as regards colonisation. DIVERTING THE STREAM. In 1864, however, it was possible to divert the stream elsewhere. New Caledonia in the Australian Pacific was annexed to Franco in 1853. .Ten years later it became a new settlement for convict emigrants. A first shipload was disembarked in 1864 at Noumea, and the foundations of the city laid. Prison buildings were the first erected and were planted upon the island of Nou, a small breakwater to the Bay of Noumea. Outwardly all went well 'under the fostering care of the authorities. The population steadily increased; an average total of 600 in 1867 rose in the following year to 1554. In 1874 the convict population exceeded 5000; in 1880 it had risen to 8000; tho total reached 9608 at tKe end of December, 1883. But from that time forward the numbers transported annually fell, for it was found that tftis South Pacific island, with its fertilo soil and fairly temperate climate, by no means intimidated tho dangerous classes; and the French Administration therefore resumed deportation of tlio French-born whites to Guiana, which was known as notoriously unhealthy and was likely to'act as a more positive deterrent. The authorites divided their exiles between tho two outlets, choosing Now Caledonia for the convicts who gave some promise of regeneration, and sending criminals with' the worst antecedents and those presumably incorrigible to tho settlements on tho Equator. This was in effect to hand over a fertile colony entirely to criminals. Free immigration to New Caledonia was checked, and the colony became almost exclusively penal. Tho natural growth of a rjrosperous colonial community made no advance, and convict labour did little to stimulate it, the public works, essential for develop-, ment, and'construction of roads were neglected; there was, .no extensive clearance of lands, and no steady development of agriculture. From 1898 simple deportation practically ceased, but the islands were full of convicts already, sent, and they still received tho product of the latest invention in the criminal code known as "relegation," a punishment directed against the recidivist or incorrigible criminal whom no penal retribution had hitherto touched and whom the French law felt justified in banishing for ever to the "back of beyond." A certain period of time spent in a hard labour prison preceded relegation, but the convicts on arrival were generally unfitted to assist in colonisation. They were for the most part decadent, morally and physically; their labour was of no substantial value to the colonists or to themselves, and there was small hope of a profitable result when they gained liberation, with a concession of colonial land and a possibility of rehabilitation by their own efforts abroad, for by their sentence they were forbidden to hope for return to France. The, punishment of relegation was not long in favour, the number of sentences to it falling year after year, and it has now been practically abandoned. ' GUERIN'S ESCAPE. Eddie Guerin is one of the best known of international criminals. He escaped from Devil's Island during the war years, but at the time very little was known of how he did it, and since then his adventure has been told in a more or less exaggerated form. That he escaped by toiling through the forests and swimming the alligator-infest-ed rivers of the island, finally reaching the mainland and being helped by some residents, is fairly well known, but like all such happenings the tale of. his adventures is now so closely allied with fiction that it is impossible to separate the true and the untrue. Returning to Europe, Guerin, or Garen, as he was known by in London, has been in and out of the hands of the English police, ' but it does not seem that the French authorities have troubled to recapture, him and return him to Devil's Island. Guerin is sow an old man verging on seventy yews of age, but he still seems to live by his wits.