HORRORS OF DEVIL’S ISLAND

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 May 1936, Page 10

HORRORS OF DEVIL’S ISLAND

MORASS OF MISERY EXPOSED.

Five men in an open boat were towed into the Caribbean Sea, on March 27 last, and cut adrift by the Government of Trinidad which refused them sanctuary. If they reach Haiti, 1000 miles away and are permitted to land they will be among the few convicts from Devil’s Island, giuesome penal colony in French Guiana. to escape alive. Generally, those who flee the horrors of the “Dry Guillotine,” as the prison camp is called, drown in shark-infested waters, or perish in the jungle of- the mainland. Nearly every prisoner, at one time or another. plans an escape. But only the most valiant and indestructible succeed.

What life in the tropical hell of Devil's Island means is depicted by two powerful new books: “Not Too Narrow, Not Too Deep.” a novel by Richard Sale: and “Hell Beyond the Seas.” a convict's own experiences, .retold by Aage Krarnp-Nielsen, a Copenhagen scholar. Devil’s Island, as the latter book points out, is only a small portion of the penal colony. Though the healthiest and most desirable speck in this morass of misery, it. is best known because its first prisoner was Captain Allied Dreyfus, of the sensational Dreyfus treason case that rocked France forty years ago. More dismal, and much more populated, is the prison village at St. Laurent, on the South American mainland. Here, in bleak barracks, with irons welded on their ankles, the prey of disease, vice, and vermin, several thousand men drag out an anguished existence. Few ever see their homes again. Starved and broken, they end up “under the bamboos,” as they call the cemetery. Those pardoned or freed must pass one year in Guiana for every year in prison, before they may return to France. Unable to earn a living in these jungle villages, those who survive are apt to succumb in “freedom.”

HUMAN LIFE PER YARD

In prison, the convicts cheat, lie, steal, graft, and stab one another with home-made knives. Fed on a gruel of beans and rice, tortured by swarms of mosquitoes, they quickly wilt under a regime of relentless labour. Most fearful of all tasks is “Route Zero,” a highway to be hacked through 155 miles of untrod jungle.

“Work on this road,” writes Mr Ki arup-Nielsen. “has been going on for over fifty years, and so far only the first fifteen miles have been completed. Twenty-four thousand convicts have died during the work—roughly a human life for each yard. Convoy after convoy of prisoners have dragged themselves to death along this road.

“Worn out by starvation and toil, drained of blood by mosquitoes and intestinal worms, they have collapsed at last, and been buried under a number plate. The starving may beg for food, the sick for medicine, but in Guiana food and quinine are more costly than human lives.” Mr Krarup-Nielsen’s convict, a deserter from the Foreign Legion, charges that the “whole system” in the penal colony was “riddled with corruption and thieving. A prisoner who does not know how to steal, is'

obliged Io learn it for sheer selfpi eseryation."

Oilicials, he reports, “stole shamelessly from the frugal rations allowed liie prhbners. They kept the bare necessities of pfe from us poor wretches who were defenceless and helpless.” Articles by a prominent French journalist exposing the awful conditions under which they exist, have since rectified some abtjses —among other things, work on “Route Zero” has been discontinued, but, according to the author, most of the major indignities are still practised on Devil’s Island prisoners.

The most painful, though not the most piolo’nged of these, is described in the following brutal paragraphs: “I struggled, but at last, they had me down on my back. My legs were pit on the anvil, am 1 two red hot bands of iron were closed around them just above the ankle and welded together. “I could hear the red-hot iron sizzling and smelled the odour of my own burning flesh. The moments which passed before they poured cold voter over it seemed an eternity . . . (The blacksmith) said with a scornful chuckle: ‘Those will last until you lie under the bamboos.’ ” These two books have aroused the attention of the civilised world, because they have shocked all enlightened peoples, and strong influences are being marshalled in support of movements designed to impress upon official France the urgency of applying more humane treatment to the imprisoned criminals of the French Republic.