THE CONVICT SHIP STEAMS TO DEVIL'S ISLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 145, 16 December 1933, Page 23

THE CONVICT SHIP STEAMS TO DEVIL'S ISLAND

Once more the grim old French convict ship La Martiuiere has steamed slowly out of the harbour of the lie clv, Ke with a full cargo of 073 prisoners bound for St. Laurent de Maroni, in .French • Guiana, writes .Herbert Matthews in the "New York Times." She is a ship well qualified to carry a cargo of desperate criminals. Every cell can be flooded with steam in case of necessity; armed guards are on patrol day and night, and the -prisoner, in his solitary, dark, and' malodorous cell, knows that whatever his chances of ultimately escaping from the penal colony in Guiana (and they are fairly good, on the whole) he has no hope of leaving La Martiniere before she docks. But some of these 6731 are certainly going to get away. Those, who are reading about them now. may once again —two, five, or perhaps ton years from today—see their names in print as having successfully achieved the hazardous feat of reaching a freer and safer, if hardly more hospitable land: The French authorities have no illusions about it. They know that some of these men have already hidden in their bodies the famous "plan," or metal tube with money and delicate tools, which will make their getaway possible. The newspapers have been full of "stories of escapes; statistic* show a surprising number of prisoners who got away in the last year—a list mounting into dozens. Everywhere one hears demands for stricter supervision, or for the abolition of "transportation," as the sentence to Guiana is called: Among those reported in August aa having escaped were some "lifers"— Louis Dasle, for instance, who was condemned as long ago as ■ 1911, and Fasseth ben Mathali, an Arab, who was sent to Guiana two and a half ye'ar3 before Dasle. The will to escape had never left them. They may be dead now, or safe and sound (at best they

have about one chance in ten to succeed), but to a man for whom/ life means the misery of French Guiana, one chance in ten, or even one in a • hundred, is worth taking. .. There are legendary stories of escapes in enflliis, a la Count of M-nnte Cristo, for the dead are always consigned ta the sea, and there arc sarcastic journalistic • references to the ease - ( with which prisoners'get away. The end of that ghastly ocean voyage is the dock at St. Laurent on thp Maroni Eiver, which forms the northwestern boundary of French Guiana. On landing, the condemned are temporarily herded in the central' prison, but they aro soon distributed to other prison buildings or camps at Cayenne, Kourou, along the Maroni Eiver, or, worst of all, one of three tiny islands ironically named lies dv Salut (Safety Isles). From them there is no escape. The shark-infested sea is rough, currents are swift and treacherous, and the" islands are so small there is no chance for the privacy that preparations for escape require. One of them—Devil's Island—has such evil fame that it stands for the entire penal colony. There Captain ■ Dreyfus spent five interminable years waiting for a divided France to do him justice. Now some twenty-five or thirty traitors and political prisoners people the island —they cannot escape. The other-two islands are much more terrible in their way—St.. Joseph, the isle of silence and solitary confinement where incorrigibles aro kept, and Eoyale, where tremendous waves beat against the shores, delivering their incessant warning to those- who attempt to escape and fail. However, on these two islands all is not quite hopeless, for the prisoners—some 500 of them —know that some day they will be sent back to the mainland and perhaps have the opportunity for another dash for free-: dom.