CONVICT SHIP SAILS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18807, 20 February 1931, Page 9

CONVICT SHIP SAILS.

Tragic Human Freight. INHUMANE TREATMENT OF “BAD ANIMATS.” United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, February 17. TJie Paris correspondent of “The Times” states that the convict ship La Martiniere sailed for Cayenne with 673 prisoners, including 60 murderers, one of whom is aged sixteen. The comments in the French Press leave no doubt that few of these will ever see France again. The men will be herded below decks in groups of 70 in iron cages. Insubordination is punishable by confinement in a narrow cell, which is entirely dark, with the wrists and ankles chained. The “bad animal” stays there until cured, the captain of the ship allegedly stated. When a man comes out he is a human rag. The vessel is equipped with steam hoses for quelling dangerous outbreaks. Devil’s Island, the lie du Diable, is situated off Cayenne, in French Guiana, and Guiana has always had a bad name from the terrible disasters which attended early attempts at settlement. It is an unhealthy, feverstricken region, and Cayenne, which was made a convict settlement during the French Revolution, is still used for that purpose. At the Devil’s Island, lying off the mouth of the Amazon, hundreds of convicts are suffering a living death. In these times one looks back on the dark days of the early convict settlements in Australia with a feeling of horror, but it is said that the Devil’s Island to-day rivals the worst days of Port Arthur, Port Macquarrle or Norfolk Island.

An American writer recently described his visit to the penal colony of Cayenne, but he was not allowed to land at the Devil’s Island. No one, excepting prison officials and convicts, ever goes there, and the convicts seldom leave it once they get there. “The ship that carried me was from France,” says the writer, “though I had picked it up the day before in Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, and it was a convict ship, too, though much less so than La Martiniere, the ship that carried 340 convicts. For we had only eight prisoners, pastywhite, tougki-faced apaches from Paris, and even these we landed at Cayenne, not at Devil’s Island. We stopped there, however, just as the three isolated granite rocks that make up the group were emerging from the tropical night. They stand in deep water. Two boats rowed by sun-browned white prisoners in garments that seemed to be made of poor sail-cloth, came off to us, tumbled a few passengers and their baggage aboard, and rowed away again with the commandant of the isles and his relatives, who make the arrival of the French mail steamer the occasion for their monthly excursion to the outside world.” It was at the Devil’s Island that Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery captain, was confined in 1894, for “betraying France.” The efforts of his wife and friends to prove him the innocent victim of malice and forgery plunged France into a chaos of militarism and anti-Semitism. He was brought back to France in 1899, retried at Rennes, re-convicted and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, but immediately pardoned. The proceedings against him were finally quashed in July, 1906, and he was reinstated in the army as major, and awarded the Legion of Honour in 1919.