GRIM PENAL COLONIES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXIII, Issue 3092, 14 December 1929, Page 3

GRIM PENAL COLONIES.

GUIANA AND DEVIL’S ISLAND. (By Blair Niles in the New* York Times 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: “Pusengers for Eternity Board the Martini ere—Broken Men Sail for Devil’s Island—Condemned to a Living Death.” a 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 ot jiuch 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 wo 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. bt. Laurent and watched the Martimere wind slowly up the broad tropical river. St. Laurent is the great distributing centre for the penal colony ,and most of it,s population had assembled with us on the river bank —as if they had gathered to meet friends or do honour to some arriving celebrity. But tjiere are no passengers on the decks of the Martiniere— only a row of armed keepers waiting,’ at the he.n of the gangway. And from the shore to that weird ship no greet; ig passes, the crowd has merely put on its best clothes and come down to stare. For this ship carries convicts only-' nearly 700 of them—and save for tin faces pressed against the closen portholes they might all be corpses. Looking into those wan faces which peer so anxiously through the dim glass one suddenly understands that they arc passionately eager to look upon the land to which they have beep condemned to prison—and to exile, they are puzzled, by that crowd on the bank, noil knowing -that in the monotony of Guiana the arrival of a convict convoy is a Roman holiday. As the ship slowly edges m broadside to the pier, the men at the portholes begin to distinguish Chinese girls in gay, light dresses, and Mariniquaise women who lift their full sweping skirts to show a triangle ot whine embroidered petticoat ; with no colour too vivid, no pattern too flowery, for their calico gowns and gorgeous turbans. It is a bizarre panorama for breach eyes ;the negresses and niulattoes or Guiana copying the Paris mode in every violent hue; 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. AVhen the ship has made fast tho men pour out of the barred cages m her hold, like gray’ rats, in the thick woollen, uniforms of the lu-ench prisons. They pour down two gangways and form four abreast! on the whait. 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 ot the pier. There they slip the canvas bags, containing all they own, from t te shoulders to tJhe floor of the dock. And all has been done as silently as it they had really been the rats which thenloose grey garb suggests. In silence they wait, blinking in the strong tropic sun, with rivulets oj perspiration trickling down their laces. 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 H’ ol * l French Indo-China, negroes from Madagascar and Reunion, Arabs ftom 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. Murtljerers, burglars, forgers, desertci s 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 com para-

tively 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 do Justice, bright blue and .white in the suit; 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 the 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 Isles du Saint—Devil’s Island, He Royale, and He St. Joseph. Next to Napoleon’s St. Helena, Devils’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 tho justice he 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 the ocean foam 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 ,tho 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 tho 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 even on Royale; and such perimssion is restricted to officials on business. Ships pause, therefore, merely for transference of mails. When they pull up anchor and go away the onJy 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. Wliero 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 convictß know it ,for its prison was their first experience of Guiana.

Later many of them are distributed to tho 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, tho 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 tho roofs of the houses. Between Die hours of work the men are locked in their dormitories, for within the gray and sal mon-coloured walls routine is inflexible.

A father had been in the habit of warning his litle daughter regarding her conduc during the day as he left home each morning. One morning, as he left, he kissed the little girl and said: “Now be a good little girl.” Wit han expectant smile she added: “And don’t what?”

' ‘'l should have thought,” he said grumpily, “that as this is my birthday you would consider my wishes and have lemon pudding.” “I’m sorry, dear,” replied his wife, “but your birthday falls on the day w© have the charwoman, and she prefers tapioca.”