By Simon Lee
A Saturday morning of enervating humidity on the banks of the
Kourou River, French Guiana. A party of weekend vacationers toting
fishing rods, baguettes, coolers and beat boxes rushes the ramp
leading to the express catamaran Soleil Royale, ready for the one
hour voyage which will carry them 15km out across the mud flats, into
the green Atlantic waters to the infamous Devil's Islands.
Soon I can distinguish individual coconut trees on Ile Royale, the
largest of the three black volcanic rock islands in the archipelago.
Even the after effects of the previous night's carousing in the
English Pub in Cayenne, cannot prevent my mind wandering back a
century to March 1895 and wondering what Alfred Dreyfus,
Artillery Captain in the French army must have been feeling as he
crossed these purple and green swathes and caught his first glimpse
of 'Le Bagne' the place of exile.
Although these islands entered the popular imagination of the
twentieth century courtesy Hollywood's version of the largely
fabricated escape story of Papillon, small time pimp Henri
Charriere convicted of murder in 1931, it was the Dreyfus Affair
which first focused international attention on this 'Hell in
Paradise'.
Son of a wealthy Jewish industrial family from Mulhouse, Dreyfus was
falsely charged with passing information to the Germans and convicted
on the flimsiest of evidence, damned by a wave of anti-semitism and
xenophobia. Stripped of his rank and disgraced, his sword broken
across the knee of a seven foot tall sergeant of dragoons, Dreyfus
was banished indefinitely to Devil's Island.
The smallest island in the archipelago, separated by a shark infested
sound from Ile Royale and Ile St Joseph, Ile du Diable or 'the Black
Rock' had been reserved for political prisoners since the
establishment of a penal colony in French Guiana, under Napoleon in
1852. When Dreyfus arrived the island had last seen service as a
leper colony. He was held here incommunicado, under constant
surveillance, shackled hand and foot to his bed between sunset and
dawn at one point for four months, until July 1899.
Following the suicide of the colonel who had helped frame him, the
one man campaign of Emile Zola whose article 'J'accuse' brought the
affair to international attention and the flight of the real traitor
Captain Esterhazy, Dreyfus was liberated although not officially
pardoned until 1906!
Although all three islands have now become confused with Devil's
Island, they were originally known in the days before colonisation as
'The Triangle Islands' and then the 'Devil's Islands' on account of
the problems they presented shipping. Later after the disastrous 1763
colonising Kourou expedition ended in disease and mass death, the
survivors took refuge on the islands, where trade winds create a
healthier climate. Thereafter the islands became known as 'The
Islands of Salvation".
Unlike today's passengers aboard Soleil Royale, most of the arrivals
during the nineteenth century would have been wearing the red and
white striped uniform of the bagnard. Convicts and
transportees from the transportation camp at St Laurent on the
Surinamese border, who were convicted of further offenses were
shipped out here, along with political prisoners, until the Bagne was
officially closed in 1946, the last prisoners leaving in 1952.
As we berth at Royale, I'm met by an East German French Foreign
legionnaire. Shaven headed Karl is part of the detachment which
guards the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, site of the Ariane rocket
launches. Since 1971 the Space Centre has owned the islands, which
are strategically placed in the rockets' flight path. It's one of
those strange ironic quirks of fate that St Joseph, known during the
Bagne days as 'the man eater' the punishment island for failed
escapees, where solitary confinement and silence ruled, should now
become a leisure destination for the Foreign Legion.
In moments we've sped across to St Joseph and I'm clambering up the
stone steps to the abandoned 'seclusion cells'. The jungle has
largely reclaimed the whole block, thick sinuous roots growing down
the haunted corridors. At one corner wedged between wall and root, a
three foot albinoesque iguana with black and white striped tail
sleeps oblivious to the horror that lingers in this heart of
darkness.
The cells are windowless, an iron grid forming the ceiling, which
allowed the guards to keep prisoners under constant watch from the
walkway above. Sentences here ranged from 6 months to 5 interminable
accursed years. On each block are two 'cachots' or black holes,
solitary confinement cells, with domed roofs, allowing no light,
confining the prisoner to total sensory deprivation.
Although the maximum sentence was 30 days in the cachot, a new
offence meant an extension and 'King of the Dark Cells' the
incorrigible Roussenq, spent a record 3,779 days here. On one
occasion Roussenq received 30 days for yelling at the guards "Another
punishment if you please!"
It is not surprising that by the 1930s an international press
campaign was launched to abolish the Bagne. Venezuela, Brazil and
Colombia had long become tired of escapees from penal camps on the
mainland
and possibly a few from the islands. These fugitives found their way
into the underworld, forming narcotics and prostitution gangs.
A 1932 editorial in the Colombian paper El Tiempo de Barranquilla
railed "This penal colony is a disaster which dishonours both France
and the Americas, French Guiana is a horrible cancer which requires
urgent surgical intervention for the sake of international hygiene
and for the honour of the Americas, which have been soiled by this
survival of slavery in its most intolerable form, state slavery."
Many escapees made their way to Trinidad, where the colonial
authorities refused to return prisoners to French Guiana. In April
1931 Trinidad officials announced all convicts arriving from Guiana
would be given supplies to continue their escape! By 1937 the number
of escapees became an embarrassment and new regulations were
introduced, which meant nationals apart from Frenchmen would be
returned to their own countries. Trinidad still maintained that
"under no circumstance will Trinidad return them (French nationals)
to Cayenne."
Infinitely depressed by the seclusion cells, I set off round St
Joseph, accompanied by a bounding spaniel which had thrown itself
into the water from Karl's speeding dinghy. Turning a corner on the
coconut tree lined track I catch my first glimpse of Devil's Island
across the spray soaked sound, Dreyfus' first small house clearly
visible close to the shore. The Space Centre has placed the island
strictly off limits and although I'd suggested to Karl I might swim
across he reminded me of sharks and then I saw a sign "Swimming
forbidden, violent currents."
We make our way to the cemetery reserved for guards and their wives,
separated only by a low dry stone wall from picnicking families on
the black rock beach. Many of the graves are unmarked their brick
surrounds crumbling but I do manage to find one with a headstone
which bears the stark message:
(Here rests Mrs Colonna born in Balogna Corsic January 2 1870,
deceased on Ile Royale 20 December 1899 Pray for her). Another sad
story of a young Corsican woman who died here far from home only days
before the end of the nineteenth century.
In the afternoon Karl speeds me across to Royale and I make my way to
my room in what used to be the guards married quarters. The Auberge
Iles du Salut now runs a dubious and expensive monopoly on
accommodation on the islands.
There are camping facilities for state employees or military families
and if you bring your own hammock you can sleep relatively cheaply in
one of the old communal dormitories but the unsuspecting tourist who
has paid nearly US$40 for the ferry from Kourou will be faced by
expensive rooms and meals.
The next morning I set out to tour Royale which during the Bagne days
was a thriving community with workshops, prisoners and guards
quarters, hospital, church, school and lunatic asylum. In the 1890s a
death row of condemned cells was constructed, leading out to the
execution yard where the guillotine would be erected the night before
an execution.
An almond tree now stands over the spot where the guillotine once
stood and while almost tame agoutis wander the grounds, Carlo my
guide muses aloud "How many heads has this tree watched roll?"
Inexplicably many of the buildings are locked including the church
which has ben a listed historical building for some time. This is a
great shame as the walls are decorated by the master art forger and
counterfeiter Francis Legrange whose series of paintings so
dramatically captures the life of the Bagne.
The beautifully restored pink and blue presbytery in high French
colonial style is an indication of what could be if a serious
restoration project was undertaken. Many of the buildings however
like the cells on St Joseph are being reclaimed by the jungle and are
hung with warnings about the danger of collapse.
Wildlife and the jungle now rule Royale. Small grey sapajou monkeys
with orange glove paws and white ringed eyes make bacchanal in the
trees. Peacocks strut unconcerned while down by the beach a wild pig
and a cock scrabble over foodscraps. Agoutis collect food and rest
back on their hind legs to nibble, only feet from curious tourists.
Down by the landing stage a magnificent red and blue Ara macaw peers
down from a coconut branch at the lunch party below.
When I board the ferry back to Kourou to effect my own escape from
Devil's Islands, I reflect on the 60,000 convicts who came so far to
die and who failed utterly in the attempt to develop French Guiana.
Now with the highest standard of living in South America, since the
days of the Bagne, Guyane survives only by massive subsidies from
Paris.
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