LIVING TOMB OF MEN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21984, 20 June 1933, Page 7

LIVING TOMB OF MEN

DEVIL’S ISLAND MISSION SALVATION ARMY CRUSADE. LONDON, June 3. Devil’s Island, the prison tomb of France’s criminals, is to be invaded by the Salvation Army, in an effort to give spiritual and other consolation to its inmates. Commissioner Albin Peyron, head of the Army in France, will himself lead the little band of humanitarians.

Commissioner Peyron, who is now in London, is white-haired, white-bearded, but his eyes sparkled with the ardour of a crusader as he told the Daily Mail of his plans. He says he knows to what he is going. The latest reports from Salvation Army investigators describe how 40 convicts on Devil’s Island, herded in a cell throughout the night, stabbed new arrivals to death.

Escapes, it is said, are seldom tried seriously. Around the island, which rises 200 feet from the sea, prowl France’s time-proven 4 warders —the sharks. But frequently prisoners do attempt the swim to the coast of French Guiana, not so much in hope of freedom, but because the sharks are quicker than the law.

“ There is no pain when one is dead,” writes the investigator. “ The few that may manage to elude sharks generally die in the fever-haunted jungles of the mainland^”

On He Royale, the administrative headquarters, are workshops for convict labour, an immense hospital, a coaling station, and a brickyard. To the seaward is Devil’s Island, where Dreyfus, the French soldier of Jewish parentage, wrongfully convicted of treason and afterwards vindicated, spent five years. For Devil’s Island two Salvation Army officers will leave in July. Commissioner Peyron will follow them a little later. With him will go a strange company for such a place, for the mission will consist also of his eldest daughter, and a newly-married couple. The party will investigate the possibility of taking prisoners’ wives from France. A thousand convicts arrive yearly at the islands, and the mission will attempt to save them and others from the infamy and corruption that stamp the island worse than any plague. Commissioner Peyron and his little band will prepare the prisoners for a new life, and when they are liberated they will be allowed to sleep and eat at the mission hut, while seeking work to enable them to earn the £2O necessary for their passage home. It is the difficulty of earning such a sum in such surroundings that has kept hundreds of prisoners imprisoned on the island long after their sentence has expired.