COFFIN USED AS A BOAT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2146, 1 July 1920, Page 4

COFFIN USED AS A BOAT.

FRENCH PRISONER’S ADVENTURE.

Paris, June 25

After twelve years’ liberty, Albert Juge, who escarped from the penal settlement at Cayenne, has been recaptured. He was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1907, and escaped in circumstances recalling the story of Monte Cristo. He went to a cemetery during’ the night, disinterred a coffin, which he used as a canoe, and escaped to French Guiana, thence to Brazil, where he made a competence by honest toil. Homesickness made him attempt to visit his mother in Paris. After a fortnight a neighbour denounced Juge, and he was sent back to Cayenne to complete his sentence.

[ln the novel “Monte Cristo,” written by Alexander Dumas, the hero (Edmund Dantes) was imprisoned wrongfully in a French island prison, the Chateau d’lf. He burrowed through the wall of his veil into that of another prisoner, a man afflicted with a mortal illness. This man left his groat wealth to Dantes, who escaped from the prison by an ingenious trick. His fellow prisoner died, and Dantes removed the body, after it was prepared for burial in the sea, to his own cell, and fastened himself up in the wrappings on the corpse. He was duly thrown into the sea, and escaped. His subsequent career was chiefly occupied Cl securing an elaborate revenge upon those who had been responsible for his imprisonment.]