DEVIL’S ISLAND

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1608, 17 February 1925, Page 2

DEVIL’S ISLAND

HOW FRANCE WAS SHOCKED. “ A.u Bagne,” a collection of articles describing his visit to French Guiana for the Petit Parisien last year, tore like a keen blade through the veil of distance that hid from the French nation the horrors of its convict settlements over-seas. It has roused the French Government to action, and now, after 50,000 transported criminals have endured the sufferings of which the outside world first heard when Dreyfus came back from Devil’s Island, the whole system is to be swept away. And what ghastly scenes there are that Londres describes in French Guiana! Leprosy, madness, fever, cruelty, solitude; a climate of the damned; dense bush with swamps to swallow men alive with snakes to poison them, with alligator-haunted rivers in which they yet plunge desperately to escape the horrors of a detention that is literally for life—the shades in Hell said no more bitter things to Dante than these French convict pariahs said to Londres. Tattooed on their very skins are the mottoes of despair; on one bare chest he read: “The Past betrayed me; the Present torments me; the Future appals me.”

Here misery is everywhere, all the day long. You see it pass like the daily traffic of a town. “My misery,” “ our misery,”—the word is uttered as commonly as we say “ Good morning” or “How hot it is?” The convict ship that brings 600 fresh felons to French Guiana twice a year is the last descendant of the old-time prison hulks. The hold forms the courtyard, and round it, weighed down by a low roof, are cages. They are dark and gloomy. I could see the convicts who were gripping the bars, but not the others at the back, except as a confused mass. All were dressed in blue worsted, with shorn heads, shaven, troubled faces. “ Would you like to go in?” the commandant asked me.

It was like being asked to enter a sardine tin with the sardines inside. Against possible mutinies steam pipes are fitted up in the cages. Discipline or scalding—they have the choice. Escape from the penal settlement is a science—so an oft-recaptured convict told the civilian visitor. One man got himself nailed up in a packing case marked with the inscription of “Rare Plants. Keep away from the boilers and water frequently.” Another stabbed himself in the shoulder and was carried to the dissection table as dead. Next morning he had disappeared. So also had the operating table, which he used as a raft to cross the rivers on the way to Venezuela. Convict orderlies at the hospital have pushed off from shore in stolen cofiins. The alligators of the streams and the sharks of the sea take regular toll of such fugitives.