DEVIL'S ISLAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 874, 18 January 1930, Page 26

DEVIL'S ISLAND

SALVATION ARMY AT WORK IN PRISONS AIDING THE CONDEMNED “And why, then, mon colonel, do they all say that Devil's Island is such a terrible place?" The governor of the G,OOO convicts sent out to a living death in French Guiana shrugged his shoulders. He was a keen, blue-eyed old soldier, covered with many battle ribbons; he had a kindly face. “The name, you know,” he answered, “the Island of the Devil—that is a name that would impress all the world; and then at the time of Captain Dreyfus there was so much talk about the place.” IVe were standing on the quay at St. Laurent du Maroni (writes Arthur Mills, in the "Daily Express”), the headquarters of “Le Bagne,” as France’s penal colony in French Guiana is called. We had just been over the largest of the prison camps, and I do not mind admitting I was feeling mentally and physically sick. The Isle du Diable, together with the isles Royale and St. Joseph, lay many hundreds of kilometres away, some four hours’ sailing from Cayenne. We -went later to the Isle du Diable, stopping only for an hour; but, as the commandant said, it is not on Devil’s Island that the horrors of this convict camp are to be found. There are only 15 prisoners on the Isle du Diable. The full ghastliness of this shameful place is to be found rather on the mainland at St. Laurent du Maroni and Cayenne, and it is to these two places that the Salvation Army is bravely setting forth. Commissioner Peyron, speaking of the project to the Press in Paris, j said:—“There appears to be no kind i of spiritual life there at all, and there is no chaplain.” Doctors With Revolvers No chaplain! There certainly is not. Why, there is not even medical attention that could be called by that name. The doctors, such as they are out there, carry revolvers and go in fear of their lives, for the convicts, left to rot of fevers without blankets or quinine, would tear them to pieces if they could. At sunset a prison doctor came on board the Biskra, an old tub in which I was drifting down this awful coast. He had just come back from visiting a prison camp about ten miles in the interior of the forest. It is a.t this camp that they have what they call the “relegues.” A relegue is an habitual thief, whom the French authorities have got tired of the expense of keeping in the prisons of France. Nothing can be simpler than to send him out to work in the forests of French Guiana. I have been room mate with two men —both gold prospectors—who had been out-in the forests; one was taken off the Biskra in a dying condition at Martinique. A gold prospector goes into the forest for just as long as it suits him; a convict goes for a term of years, and he has to work without boots or socks, for these are not supplied, and very often without a shirt. What he suffers from the mosquitoes and other poisonous insects can be imagined. Men In Cages The first task of the Salvation Army will be, then, to try to rescue those wretched men from being made to live under the same conditions as wild beasts. I said, as I stood talking to the commandant on the quay of St. Laudent du Maroni, I felt physically and mentally sick. Well, we had just come from going through tho “cages.” In these cages—veritable black holes of Calcutta— the convicts are confined when they are not out. at u-ork.

Forty are thrown into a cage, jammed in as tightly as they can be put. Of course, the men sent out to “Le Bagne” have not very nice characters as a rule—indeed, for the most part they are murderers, apaches, and desperadoes of the worst descriptions, and the faces of some of these gentry that I saw were a study. Actually some bared their teeth and snarled at us. But imagine what those cages must be like at night! Imagine the feelings of a man not quite as bad as the others, who is shut up in them. When night falls, and the warders have purposely gone out of earshot, might becomes right in those infernos, and the things that happen are indescribable. The good wishes of every thinking man will go out to those gallant soldiers of the Salvation Army who are going to work in the prison cages of French Guiana. Last, and perhaps most pitiful of all. are the liberes. A libere is a man who has served his sentence in the prisons, and must notv do an equal number of years in the colony. Work! There is no work in French Guiana! A few of these liberes—white men —are employed in what is practically a state of slavery by the better-to-do half-castes, who have shops and offices in Cayenne. I say slavery, because the libere, forbidden to leave the colony, is utterly at his employ’er’s mercy, to get his bare food, and has to accept whatever wages the latter may- choose to give him. The employers’ union of Cayenne is the strongest in the world. Every member of it is sworn to one object—to see that no libere shall ever earn enough money to pay liis passage back to France, for cheap labour is so convenient. But many liberes can get no work at all, except once or twice a month there may be a steamer to unload. I can picture now that pathetic gang of liberes waiting for the Biskra to come alongside the quay at St. Lau!rent du Maroni. There were some bales of goods for them to handle. The poor devils were so weak from semi-starvation—they-are grateful for such scraps of food as even the convicts can contrive to slip them —that they had barely the strength to lift the bales. And (he look in their eyes—the look of hopeless misery of these men left out there to die. One cannot forget it once one has seen it, ever. Throughout the ages men, in tlie name of God. have gone out into the world to right wrongs and help their fellows. Missionaries may be found in every land —a thousand years ago Norman kings set out to Palestine. This work the Salvation Army has undertaken at Devil’s Island is the greatest crusade of all.