Newspapers / Zebulon Record (Zebulon, N.C.) / July 9, 1937, edition 1 / Page 13
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Dead 7 ' About Devil’s Island which has circled the world. It has become synonymous, in “ion, penal servitude. Erroneously, it has come to mean the 'hich holds forth on the mainland of South America (French hree small islands known as the lies de Salut' (Islands of r off the mainland. It is but a small part of the French penal for trailers. But it was given deathless notoriety by tire four pt. Alfred Dreyfus on an unfounded charge of treason of Aft*- his departure, in 1899, the island was empty for years. Now it is languishing again. < 5 * A : •:>: , I ' » | i I fltpi. r’l • n l/il i II .— irgfi h I^A-Jr^r A K / v & lif iW I i . I jji g ' 'I -Jr ■ ./ fj; : ! jj Prisoners embarking in tenders at a French port for transfer to the notorious prison ship, La Martiniere. running it. The wealth is still there, and still untapped. It will never be tapped, observers declare, as long as the penal colony is the agency that is expected to produce this wealth. Louis XV having once and for all proved that the scheme wouldn’t work, France was still continuing it 170-odd years later. There has almost always been a “bagne.” Why shouldn’t there al ways be one? That is the idea which Premier Leon Blum is up against in try ing to abolish it. The next philanthropist to cast an eager eye on that Guiana was a certain Baron Milius, in 1823. He un proved on the earlier notion. He sent not only exiled convicts out there, but “de graded women” to marry them on the banks of the Maroni. This expedition, the historians declare, “resulted in the most ghastly horrors.” It remained for Napoleon 111 to revive the whole idea again. Between 1852 and 1854 he announced the resumption of the filial colony in a public statement filled with high-sounding phrases. Os the thou sands who were then dispatched to Cayenne, “more than half were to find certain death.” There was no profit in agricultural or mineral or other develop ment. There was practically no develop ment of any kind, which is almost the case today. “It was then acknowledged by officials that the attempt to establish a penal colony on the Equator was ut terly futile,” says a historian. That didn’t bother Napoleon 111. It was found that whites fared much worse in that climate than Arabs or blacks. So, in 1864, the white criminals sent out annually from France were di verted to the Pacific, to New Caledonia and other French possessions. The Arab and black criminals had Guiana to die in practically all to themselves. But, it is recorded, about 1883 public officials in France discovered that white criminals sent to the Pacific were thriv ing and happy in the mild climate and the good natural conditions. Public offi cials then concluded that there wasn’t any punishment in such deportation. So they began sending white criminals to Guiana again. And that has been the practice in re gard to French criminals ever since that unhappy discovery. • 'T'AKE a country of 35,000 square miles, A within five degrees of the Equator. Fill it with impenetrable forest, moun taih, and swamp, so that only on the water-logged rim can white men get a foothold, and the whole interior is a dark and furtive and sinister region impass able save for a few primitive native tribes. Set over all a wet heat that beats with fury, and, for seven months of the year, a rain that drenches. Cram the land with plagues of mosquitoes, snakes, venomous jTtIJXTIC OcE/)i H g devil's -- r ILE «£ 'St-ANO ile 'Pf^ / ife, -.ffflrb. ST. JOSEPH S T. LAURENT CAYENNE^IQ^x CAP£ ORMGB 21PJVCM Jggg^ This map shows the relation of Devil’s Island to the penal colony as a whole. Inset, the colony’s situation in South America “spider” crabs, vultures, pumas, wild pig. scorpions, sloths, vermin. Rim it with a shark-infested sea. Set down on that coast the human dregs of Europe—hardy, vicious, crafty criminals, murderers, rippers, violators. Add a mixture of madmen, crazed souls on the verge of screaming idiocy or worse. Add, too, a sprinkling of innocent men, wrongly convicted. Douse all this with disease. The dis ■Kß v * jlfi'-'&'jfry King Louis XV of France—the “well-beloved” king who originat ed the Guiana prison. eases brought from the ghettos, the gut ters, the leaping-houses of urbane Eu rope, these are bad enough. Include also the local diseases which take their fero cious toll and breed mightily First, ma laria. Then dysentery. Then tuberculosis. Ankylostomiasis, which preys like the hook-worm. Cachexy Elephantiasis. And leprosy. Cover all with an inadequacy of medi cal, spiritual, social aid, so that hospitals recently lacked the simplest necessities such as thermometers, iodine, quinine (which was for years considered a lux ury, though it would have eradicated malaria there if taken preventively). JAIVIDE up this unholy mess into nu merous compartments the general prisons holding 50 prisoners in one bar rack. The camps where futile efforts are made to attack the pristine might of the great forest. The camps for the incor rigibles. The island prisons for special categories (including the world-famous “Devil’s Island,” reserved for traitors and given a deathless notoriety by the so journ there, four decades ago, of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in solitary confinement plus persecution). The camps for the “pieds de biche”— the “repeaters.” who by an accumulation of minor convictions have at last achieved the penalty of deportation. The punish ment camps The leper colony. And the central ganglion of the system, the town of St. Laurent-de-Maroni, in fested with indigent, thieving men who have been liberated from their sentences but can’t go home and are very gen erally close to starving to death from lack- of work. Stir this all together and you have the Bagne—the French penal colony of Gui ana, a celebrated and ghastly survival of medieval penology Out of 800 annual arrivals at Saint Laurent du Maroni, 200 should be dead in six months, writes Marius Larique. French investigator, in a series of articles published recently In a year, they will all be victims of malaria. The new ship ment replaces the old. That is the saying on the coast. It means that the population of prisoners never rises In fact, until very recent years when the devotion of medical men and the impact of the situation on the conscience of France have begun to take bffect, the population of the Bagne has steadily diminished. In 1901 there were 6290 inhabitants ol the penal colony. In 1915 it was 6415 More than 10,000 prisoners had arrived there from France during those 14 years Today there are approximately 4500 prisoners in the Guiana penal colony Yet shipments to Guiana have not notice ably lessened in quantity. The toll has been more exacting. Os late the death rate has diminished, thanks mostly to the tenacious work of the medical unit. But it is still enor mously high. NEXT WEEK: The cruelty of prisoner to prisoner in the "Bagne." How a bi cycle thief can suffer a worse late than a murderer.
Zebulon Record (Zebulon, N.C.)
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July 9, 1937, edition 1
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