Part II

_PRISON LAND_

A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON CONVICTS AND COLONISTS

There are not many portions of the sea-realm of Oceania, or, indeed,

of the whole Southern Hemisphere, of which the name is so well and

the history so little known as New Caledonia. Throughout Europe, not

excepting even France, it has for fifty years been the name of a convict

station. To the _forçat_ and the _relégué_ its name meant something even

worse than the traditions of the old galleys could tell of. It meant

banishment over an illimitable stretch of ocean; and, through the hazes

of distance, the French criminal, caged in the penal transport, saw

horrors unspeakable. To him it was the Land of the Chain, of the Lash,

and the Guillotine, a hell upon earth, a paradise of Nature transformed

by despotism into an inferno of crime and cruelty, and, above all, it was

the Land of Banishment. In earlier times it really was something like

what the _evadés_ who had reached Australia, through a thousand miles of

sea-peril and starvation, described it to be. It will be seen from the

chapters which follow that all this has long ago been done away with, but

even now the commandants of the various camps are careful to remind the

visitor from the other ends of the earth, that not the least part of the

punishment of transportation to New Caledonia consists in the fact of

banishment for many years, perhaps for ever from France.

That is one of the reasons why France will never make a real living

colony out of New Caledonia until its present criminal and semi-criminal

population has utterly died out—a contingency which is not likely to come

to pass while French rule in the Pacific endures. The Frenchman cannot

colonise, although, curiously enough, under another flag he can become

a most excellent colonist. Take him away from France and plant him, as

in New Caledonia, under the tricolour and under the care of his all too

paternal, perhaps it would be more correct to say maternal government,

and, whether bond or free, he begins to get homesick, and a homesick man

is the last person on earth to begin colony-making.

Of course, if you take him out in a convict transport and plant him on

an island as a prisoner you can make a colonist of a sort out of him,

and that is the sort you find in New Caledonia, a human machine whose

initiative, if he ever had any, has been ground out of him, not so

much by prison discipline, for that, as I shall show, is indulgent to

a degree that would be quite incomprehensible in England; but, rather,

by a rigid system of supervision which permits him to do nothing for

himself, which provides everything for him from the plough with which

he breaks the virgin soil of his concession to the prize which he gets

for a well-raised crop. Such a man walks on crutches all his life, and a

colonist on crutches is an entirely hopeless, if not a quite impossible,

person.

An experience of something over forty years has convinced all the most

intelligent students of the question, that the convict civilisation of

New Caledonia is a dream the realisation of which is made impossible by

the conditions of the system itself.

During my last conversation with the Director of the Penal

Administration, he asked me what I thought of the social conditions of

the island, and the possibility of sometime transforming it from a

penal settlement into a free colony? He was intensely in earnest on the

subject. He believed, or at least he did his best to believe, in the

future of that beautiful native land of his, and I would have encouraged

him in his loyal belief if I could have done so; but I had seen too much

of real colonisation in many lands to be able to do that honestly, and so

what I told him was this:

“Noumea is the heart of New Caledonia, as Paris is the heart of France.

The greater part of it is founded upon what was once a miasmatic swamp,

and, no matter what you do, the poison-germs will find their way to the

surface, and pollute the atmosphere that you breathe. That is a concrete

likeness of your society. It is based on a substratum of crime. For

forty years the poison-germs of the mental disease which is called crime

have been rising from your lowest social stratum and permeating all the

others.”

[Illustration: A Lake in the interior of New Caledonia.]

He saw the justice of the parallel, and he tacitly admitted that the

source of moral contagion was every whit as deeply rooted and as

irremovable as the buried swamp that lies deep down beneath the palms

and the flamboyants which shade the squares and the gardens of Noumea.

In Australia the matter was different. In the bad, old days men and

women were shipped over seas for offences which would not earn fourteen

days’ hard labour now, and the majority of them were morally and

physically sound. Moreover, they were Anglo-Saxons. They knew how to

tackle the wilderness and subdue it, and when they won their freedom

they mixed freely with freemen, and, in due course, the wilderness got

subdued, and the new nations got started. That was because there was a

maximum of individual initiative, and a minimum of government control

which made it possible for the man to work out his own moral and social

redemption, and at the same time to shape a country for his children to

dwell in. When I first went to Australia as a lad in the deck-house of a

limejuicer, the letters M.L.A. didn’t only mean Member of the Legislative

Assembly. Sometimes they meant Mustn’t Leave Australia; but to-day the

penal settlements of fifty years ago are federated nations. Caledonia

is still a convict settlement, and such it must remain until the last

drop of convict blood within its confines solidifies in the veins of its

last dead criminal, or until its moral and social swamp is drained and

purified by more drastic measures than its present rulers appear to have

dreamt of.

For the last decade or so the French Government has been doing its

best to induce French peasants, artisans, and small tradesmen and

manufacturers to go out to New Caledonia as agricultural and industrial

colonists. It has given them free passages, land for nothing, free mining

concessions, and even capital to start on, but, in spite all of these

advantages and, perhaps, partly because of them, free colonisation has

not been a success in New Caledonia. The causes of this failure are not

very far to seek, and some of them are exactly the same as those which

operate against the success of German colonies.

The first of them is the Functionary. New Caledonia is perhaps the most

over-governed place in the whole world. The Australian colonies are

beginning to suffer from over-government, the natural result of a too

triumphant democracy, but there, as elsewhere under the British flag, it

is still possible for the pioneer to fight his own battle for home and

fortune against the Spirit of the Wilderness with no more governmental

interference than is necessary to enforce obedience to the law. It

doesn’t matter of what nationality he is, he succeeds or fails by his own

strength or weakness.

In a later chapter I shall describe the most marvellously successful

piece of cosmopolitan colonisation that has ever been accomplished, an

experiment, the success of which completely bears out all that I am

reluctantly obliged to say here against the French system.

From the moment that the Frenchman, whether peasant or artisan, leaves

his native land to become a colonist in an oversea French possession he

has a functionary in front of him, one on each hand, and one behind him.

This is to ensure that he shall go along the dead straight line which

governmental wisdom has drawn for him. The man in front prevents him

going too fast, and the one behind sees that his footsteps to fortune

do not fall behind the regulation pace. When he lands in the colony,

his first task is to master more or less imperfectly the vast mass of

regulations by which all his comings and goings are ordered. Within the

sphere of action allotted to him everything is already cut and dried. To

be original is to transgress the code and to trample on the official

corns of a functionary. Wherefore, he very soon finds that originality

is at a heavy discount, and a colonist without originality is of about

as much use in a new country as a baby in long clothes. In fact the baby

is a more valuable citizen, for he may grow into something which the

officially conducted colonist never will.

Then there is that fatal convict question. In the following pages I

have shown that in New Caledonia there are three classes into which the

criminal population of New Caledonia is rigidly divided. First, there

is the _forçat_, or convict proper, the man who has been sentenced to

a definite term of transportation, ranging from eight years to life.

The second class is composed of _relégués_ who have been banished to

New Caledonia for life, not for any particular crime, but because, by

an accumulation of offences, they have proved themselves to be hopeless

criminals, and therefore unfit for civilised society and incapable of

bearing the burden of responsibility which is inseparable from freedom.

The third class is composed of the _libérés_. We have no counterpart to

the _libéré_ in our criminal system. The nearest English analogue to him

is the convict released on license, but the only real likeness between

them is the fact that they are both responsible for their movements to

the police.

In New Caledonia the _forçat_ may become a concessionaire and after that

a _libéré_, or he may become first a collective and then an individual

_libéré_. In the former case he is free to hire himself out for work

during the day, but he must return to sleep in barracks. In the latter

he is absolutely free within the limits of the colony. Subject to the

sanction of the Administration he may engage in any business he pleases.

Many men in this class have done exceedingly well for themselves. Others

again have returned to France, of course under government sanction, to

present their petition for “rehabilitation.” If this is granted they

become freemen, their civil rights are restored to them, and they can

either settle down in France or return to the colony. As a rule they

choose the latter alternative. The keeper of the canteen where I lived at

Prony had done this, and had won his way back not only to citizenship,

but to universal respect.

The _relégué_ has no such hope. He is banished for life and remains a

well-cared-for slave of the government for the rest of his days. In some

rare cases he may regain his freedom as a special act of grace, but his

civil rights are never restored to him.

These three classes form the real substrata upon which the whole social

and official fabric of New Caledonian society rests, and it is into such

a soil, supersaturated with crime, that the French Government proposes to

transplant freemen and women, and make colonists of them. In other words

the free emigrant to New Caledonia must take his wife and children across

thirteen thousand miles of ocean and make a home for them in a land where

they will inhale the poison-germs of villainy with every breath they

breathe. Their servants and their labourers, if they can afford them,

will be thieves, swindlers, and assassins. Their sons and daughters will

have to work with them, grow up with their children, sit beside them at

school, and perhaps some day intermarry with them, for all children of

convicts born in New Caledonia are free before the law, and the legal

equals of all other children. It is obvious that under such conditions,

healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical life in a

colony of lepers.

Many have tried the experiment and have gone back to France richer in

experience and poorer in pocket, and with such tales in their mouths

as have justly persuaded their fellow-peasants and artisans that their

hard, clean, thrifty life in France is infinitely better than State-aided

contamination in New Caledonia.

Lastly, there is what I may call the commercial reason for failure, which

is of course closely connected with the others. Officialism has strangled

initiative, and crime has poisoned the sources of social prosperity;

wherefore in New Caledonia the French govern, but they do not develop.

Nine-tenths of the capital invested in the island is in the hands of

British and Australian firms, or is owned by foreigners who have become

naturalised French subjects. The French have had possession for half

a century of one of the richest islands in the world, yet I am only

telling the bare truth when I say that a withdrawal of foreign capital

would promptly bring the colony to bankruptcy, and that the stoppage of

the Australian carrying trade would starve it out in a month. This was

clearly proved by the extremities to which nearly all the outlying camps

were reduced by the interruption of the Coast Service during the plague

epidemic.

Here, for instance, is one example out of many which might be quoted of

the extraordinary ineptitude of the French colonial official in matters

of business. An Anglo-French firm located in Sydney obtained a concession

for a term of years to import corn, grind it, and sell the flour at a

given price, which was about eight shillings per sack higher than the

average of Australian prices. The government objected to the price, but

yielded on condition that the firm would buy and grind all the corn

raised in the colonies. The firm knew perfectly well that all Caledonia

would not raise fifty bushels of wheat in as many years, so, of course,

they consented, and for the next ten years or so the astute partners will

go on selling flour to the government and the citizens at a much higher

price than they could import it for themselves from Australia.

The whole trade of Noumea, which is the one trading centre of the island,

is practically in English or Australian hands, although several large

firms trade under French styles. The first essential of a commercial

education in New Caledonia is a sojourn in Australia, and no French

youth has a chance of a good start in a New Caledonian business house

unless he can speak and write English. In fact the only people in the

colony who do not speak English are the officials of the Administration

and the military officers.

During the whole of my wanderings through the convict camps from end

to end of the island, I only found one official who could converse

intelligently in English, and that was the Director himself; and yet you

can go into almost any store or office in Noumea and get what you want by

asking for it in English.

New Caledonia may, in short, be fairly described as a French penal colony

and a commercial dependency of Australia.

I

_SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS_

After a flying visit to Auckland, our old steam-roller staggered through

a southerly buster into Sydney Heads on Christmas Eve, and it was then

that I began to make acquaintance with the Microbe of the Black Death.

We had got alongside the wharf at Circular Quay. On the other side of

the jetty a white-painted Messageries mail-boat was being moored. If

Sydney had only known the terrible cargo which she carried, Sydney would

have seen her sunk a thousand fathoms deep rather than let her touch

Australian soil. She was the _Pacifique_, the ship I was to cross to New

Caledonia in, and the Black Death was a passenger on board her. It was

many days more before I learnt the how and the why of this—after I had

walked in the same streets, lived in the same houses, and sat at the same

table with the Spectre. I had also seen his material reality. This was

what it looked like.

A lot of little circular globules, flattened in the centre, some red and

some white, were floating in a greyish-white liquid under the microscope.

Among them were some tiny dark, wriggling things swimming in the fluid

and running their heads against the edges of the white globules. They

were plague-microbes in blood-serum. If they got inside the white

corpuscles the person to whom that blood belonged would have a very good

chance of dying the Black Death. If not, he would be very ill, but would

probably live, as I did.

The newspapers had come on board, and I was having a farewell cocktail in

the Doctor’s cabin, a cosy little snuggery, which by this time contained

many pleasant memories for me.

“There’s bubonic plague at Noumea,” said he; “and they seem to have it

pretty bad, too. Of course you won’t think of going while anything like

that’s messing around?”

Now I loved the Doctor because, in addition to his social qualities and

medical skill, he possessed the art of making a cocktail which was an

entirely delightful antidote to his medicine.

I confess that I didn’t like the news, but I made bold to reply:

“Of course I shall. Do you suppose I’ve come fifteen thousand miles to

get into that place to be scared by——? Anyhow, I suppose it’s only among

the Kanakas?”

“My dear fellow, bubonic plague’s a mighty good thing to stop away from,”

he said, with unwonted seriousness.

“And therefore all the more interesting.”

“Well, if you will go, so-long, and don’t get it. If you do, in a place

like that you’ll have about one chance in five of getting back.”

Ten days afterwards I steamed into the lovely harbour of Noumea, the

Malta of the Pacific, which England lost by about three hours one morning

nearly fifty years ago. But the adventures of H.M.S. _Dodderer_ will be a

twist in another yarn.

Even if we had not known that the terrible Black Death had come to

Noumea, the least observant of us would have asked:

“What is the matter with this place?”

A couple of dozen steamers and sailing-ships were laid up, and a ship out

of work is about as forlorn a spectacle as a deserted workhouse.

The ships that were in work were all flying Yellow Jack—that spectre in

bunting which followed me across the world till I bade it, I hope, a last

farewell on the quay at Marseilles. Steam-launches, too, were flying it,

dodging backwards and forwards between the ships and the shore. They

were patrolling to stop all unauthorised communication. One of them ran

alongside. Other boats, containing friends of passengers, kept at a very

respectful distance.

“Five fresh cases to-day; two deaths, one a white man,” were almost the

first words I heard at the gangway. Then the Doctor’s words came home to

me in a somewhat chill fashion. At Sydney it was only the news. This was

the ugly reality. We began to look at each other, and especially at the

people from the shore.

Which of us would be first? You could see the unspoken question in every

one’s eyes. People who had been friends on the passage didn’t care to

shake hands now. We looked at the lovely landscape in front of us, the

white-walled, grey-roofed town, nestling under tall, feathery palms, and

the flamboyants blazing with crimson blossom, at the foot of the densely

wooded mountains, and it seemed strangely out of the order of things

that this demon which has devastated the world for ages should have

chosen so fair a spot from which to send that dread message forth to men

and doctors:

“I am here, in spite of all your science. Kill me if you can. Meanwhile,

pay me my toll of life.”

It was dark before we had passed the doctor and got ashore. The first

visible sign of the terrible presence was a long wall of corrugated iron

cutting off that portion of the town which lies along the wharves from

the rest. There were openings in this, and each was guarded by a sentry

with fixed bayonet, but more than twenty days before the Spectre had

slipped past the sentries and slain a white man. Even now it was standing

by the bedside of two white girls.

The Kanakas and Tonkinois didn’t seem to matter so much. But white

people—that was a family matter to all of us. This seems uncharitable,

but it is none the less true.

[Illustration: The Plague Area at Noumea. Offices of the Messageries

Maritimes, with Sentries in front.]

When I found the place that I was to sleep in, I began to see, or,

rather, to smell, the reason why the Spectre had crossed the barriers.

Noumea has a magnificent water-supply. Fresh water flows constantly

from the mountains down through the stone channels on each side of the

streets; but its sanitation is about as rudimentary as that of a Kaffir

village.

When I went to bed I shut the long windows opening on to the balcony to

keep the smell out. I also shut in the heat and some odd millions of

mosquitos, any of which, according to popular belief, might have had

thousands of microbes concealed about its person. As a matter of fact

they hadn’t; but they got their own work in all the same.

I stood it for nearly an hour, and then I concluded that even the smell

was preferable to suffocation, so I opened the windows and went out on

the balcony to scratch and say things to the accompaniment of the song of

many vocal insects. The next morning I went down into the yard to cool my

wounds in a corrugated iron bathroom, which, with true French colonial

forethought, had been built within two yards of an open cesspool. A

shower-bath in tropical countries is usually a luxury as well as a

necessity. In Noumea it was only a necessity.

When I set out for my first stroll round Noumea the morning after my

arrival the sun was shining out of a sky of unflecked blue. A delicious

breeze was flowing down the mountain-sides. The scent of fruit and

flowers was everywhere atoning for the stench of that backyard. I took

in long breaths of the sweet, soft air, and began to wonder whether that

black Spectre really was haunting such a paradise as this.

Then I turned into the Place des Cocotiers, which is to Noumea what the

Champs Elysées are to Paris—a broad square shaded by blazing flamboyants

and flanked by rows of coco-palms. The next moment I saw a long,

four-wheeled, white-curtained vehicle being driven rapidly through it. It

was the ambulance, and inside it lay some stricken wretch. Who—yes, who

was it? A question of some significance to one who might have had to say

“here!” to the dread summons before the next sun rose.

I went under the verandah of the Hotel de France, which fronts the

square, and ordered a _limonade_, so that I might ask the news. Yes, it

was the ambulance, and its occupant was one of the white girls. In three

days she was to be the first white bride of the Black Death. It was

rumoured that there were six new cases that morning, but the Sanitary

Commission very wisely only reported two “suspected” cases and one death.

If they had told the truth for a few days more there would have been

panic, and panic is the best—or worst—helpmeet of disease, especially in

a place like Noumea.

From the hotel I wandered along the shady sidewalks of the broad streets,

and presently found myself in a quarter of the town which looked as if it

had been bombarded. The houses were wrecked and roofless. Some of them

were smouldering still, and some were cold, skeleton ruins. It was here

that the Black Death had found its first victims. They were only Kanakas

and Tonkinois, so their families had been cleared out, and their houses

and belongings burnt.

Farther on up the hill leading to the military reservation I saw all

that was left of what had once been a pretty villa standing in its own

grounds, a garden such as one sees only in the tropics. This had been the

house of the first white victim, a young fellow of splendid physique, who

had fought the Demon through three weeks of torture, dying by inches in

multiplying horrors unspeakable.

Later on the Demon was more merciful, because he struck harder and killed

quicker. In a few weeks it was to be a matter of hours rather than of

days.

I learnt afterwards that, although the Sanitary Commission had burnt the

house down, they had allowed the furniture to be sold by public auction.

The same authority permitted the traveller by sea to take any sort of

luggage he liked on board the steamer, but would not allow even a package

of clean linen to be forwarded from one port to another unless it was in

the possession of its owner. Nail it up in a box and it could go, but

as personal effects—no. Later on the Demon took his revenge for this

foolishness. He laid his hands on the Chief of the Commission, and killed

him in thirty-six hours.

That night I dined at the club, the Cercle de Noumea, an institution

which is devoted to eating and drinking during the day, and to poker and

baccarat during the night.

There was only one subject of conversation among the Frenchmen round the

long table—_la Peste_.

During the plague-time in Bombay it cost drinks round to mention the

word in white society, but in Noumea every one, doctors and laymen

alike, talked unrestrainedly of it. The doctors told of the new “cases,”

enlarged on symptoms, and described experiments in detail which made the

laymen mostly sick, and nearly all frightened. Which is one point of

difference between English and French ways of looking at ugly things.

A day or two after, when the name of the Demon had become familiar to my

ears, and had, therefore, lost some of its terrors—I suppose I really

was quite as frightened as anybody else—I noticed that a man feeling

furtively under his armpits was looked at with suspicion, and a man seen

limping in the street was left to walk alone.

One morning I got up feeling rather seedy. It may have been the

mosquitos, or the heat, or the last French cigar overnight. It is a true

saying that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client, and

that a man who is his own doctor has a still bigger fool for a patient;

but by this time I had heard enough of _la Peste_ in Noumea to convince

me that I had to take the latter risk into my own hands. If I had

described my symptoms to a doctor I should have been “under observation”

in the hospital within an hour. After that the date of my coming out

would have been a very uncertain one, so I smoked the mosquitos out of

my bedroom, took some chlorodyne, and went to bed. It is bad to take

opiates, but it is a great deal worse to lie awake in a plague-smitten

town and wonder whether or not you’ve got it.

The next day I saw a coffin carried out of a house. That night the house

was pulled down, and the ruins burnt, but the day after that, as though

in mockery of every precaution taken, the Demon showed himself in a new

and deadlier form.

A great cleaning-up had been going on all this time, just as it was in

Sydney later on. The filth-accumulations of years were being cleared out.

A white man, very much down on his luck, took a job with the Kanakas and

convicts who were cleaning out the basement of a store in which dead rats

had been found. The others had their mouths and noses covered with cloths

steeped in corrosive sublimate, but he wasn’t afraid of any blanked

plague, and so he went in without.

He happened to stir up some dust out of which he disinterred the corpse

of a rat. He inhaled some of the dust. The little black wriggly thing

that I had seen under the microscope got into his lungs, and assisted

in the change of the venous into the arterial blood. In six hours that

man was dead. The pulmonary form of the Black Death is perhaps the most

swiftly killing of all diseases.

After this the corrugated iron fence round the wharves came down, and

the sentries went back to barracks. The enemy had passed them, unseen

and unchallenged. Every gust of wind which raised a cloud of dust in the

street might carry death, and sometimes did.

You might, for example, walk through one of these clouds on your way to

dinner. Your appetite would not be quite as good as usual. After dinner

you would feel headachy and sick, and, being disinclined to walk home,—a

very bad symptom, by the way,—you would call a cab and be driven there.

The next day you would have a drive in the ambulance, after which your

fate lay on the knees of the gods. In the particular case here referred

to the matter was decided in four days.

It was little wonder that the microbe was thriving apace in this

outwardly lovely place, for dirt, disease, and death are a trinity found

ever hand in hand. Just _en passant_, I may say here that my excellent

landlady who, I am sorry to say, died of the plague soon after I left her

hospitable roof, subsequently confided to me that among her guests there

were some who had not had a bath for three weeks. Of course there was no

law to make them wash, but I think that in a tropical country in which

the Black Death has taken up its abode the penalty for not bathing, at

least once a day, should be delivery to the tender mercies of the local

fire brigade, with permission to squirt to taste.

II

_SOME SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS_

My first official business in the colony was, of course, to write to the

Governor acquainting him with the fact of my arrival. I did this with

considerable misgivings, for both at Sydney and on the boat, I had heard

the evil rumour that in consequence of the plague the Government of New

Caledonia had decided to close the prisons. This meant that the convicts

who had been hired out to work in the mines and elsewhere would be

recalled to the prisons and the camps, and that all communication would

be severed between them and the outer world until the epidemic was over.

Now I carried credentials from the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris,

which is to New Caledonia what the Russian Ministry of Justice was to

Siberia, and these, under ordinary circumstances, authorised me to have

every prison door in the island opened to me. But M. Albert Décrais knew

nothing about the coming visitation when he gave them to me, and the

Governor would have been well within his powers if he had answered my

letter by expressing “his infinite regret that exceptional circumstances

made it impossible for him to act under the instructions of the Ministry

during the present disastrous epidemic, etc.”

In this case my mission would have been brought to nought, and I should

have travelled fifteen thousand miles for the privilege of sojourning an

indefinite time in a plague-stricken town. It was three days before I got

an answer, and during that time I allayed my anxieties by making a closer

acquaintance with Noumea.

Through the kindness of the Earl of Dunmore, who was then acting as

Administrator of one of the greatest mining enterprises in New Caledonia,

and a member of the Municipal Council with whom I had travelled from

Sydney, I was made a guest of the Cercle. Only the most exclusive

aristocracy of Noumea breakfast and dine at home. The rest—officials,

merchants, and professional men—knock off work at eleven, having begun

about six, breakfast at half-past, and then play or sleep till three.

At six everything, except the hotels and cafés, shut up; then comes a

drive or a ride, tennis or a sail in the bay, then dinner, followed by

cards and drinks till midnight—and of such is the daily life of the

capital of New Caledonia. I learnt afterwards that this delightfully

situated little town is also one of the wickedest spots on earth, but of

that I shall have more to say hereafter.

Socially, Noumea struck me as being somewhat cramped. Its society is

composed of educated, highly trained, and, in the main, well-mannered

men, living a little life among themselves, and being crushed into

smallness by the very narrowness of their environment. They were a

thousand miles from anywhere. Their only immediate connection with the

outer world was the cable to Sydney, controlled by the all-powerful

Administration, which published and suppressed whatever it pleased.

There were the monthly Messagerie mails, and a few odd traders, now

mostly laid up in the harbour flying the Yellow Jack. Every night the

same men met and discussed the same subjects, the chief of which was _la

Peste_. Every day the same men went to the same duties, the same women

discussed the same gossip and the same scandal. Every night the same men

and women met in the Place des Cocotiers, under its swaying palms and

flaming flamboyants, and listened to the same music—which, by the way,

they will never listen to again.

I had gone to Noumea full up to the roots of my hair with the utterly

erroneous notions which I had picked up from books and conversations.

The books appear to have been written mostly by returned _déportés_ or

_communards_ who had been banished in ’71 and ’72, and allowed to return

to France after the general amnesty. The people with whom I had conversed

had apparently got their knowledge from somewhat similar sources, but all

agreed in representing New Caledonia as a second Tasmania, or Norfolk

Island, where all the uncivilised barbarities of our own transportation

system had been prolonged to the end of the nineteenth century.

Its population consisted of a vast horde of convicts, the most abandoned

and bloodthirsty wretches on earth, ground down into hopeless slavery

by the irresistible and unpitying strength of an official engine called

the Penitentiary Administration. The officials were a set of soulless

gaolers in whose natures every spark of humanity had been quenched by

the performance of their pitiless task. The surplus of the population

consisted of half-tamed natives and a few thousand _libérés_, or

ticket-of-leave men, any one of whom would knock you on the head or stick

a knife into you for a couple of francs.

Finally I was regarded in Paris as rather madder than the average

Englishman for wanting to go to such a God-forsaken place, being neither

a convict who had to go nor an official who wanted to earn a comfortable

_retraite_ and save up the wherewithal to purchase rentes on which to

spend the balance of his days in that peace and quiet which is the

domestic heaven to which all good Frenchmen look forward.

Now this is what I actually saw of convict-life in Noumea before I had

passed the prison gates for the first time. I had eaten my second dinner

at the Cercle, and Lord Dunmore, taking pity on my isolation, said:

“The convict-band is playing in the square to-night, suppose we go and

get some seats?”

“The convict what?” I said, harking back mentally to the rigid English

system, and trying to picture to myself an English convict blowing a

cornet.

“It’s what they call here the Musique de la Transportation. It’s quite an

institution in Noumea. I don’t suppose there’s anything like it anywhere

else.”

So I went, feeling verily a stranger in a strange land.

It was an absolutely perfect tropical night. The moon was getting up over

the eastern end of the Chaine Centrale, a ridge of mountains which runs

through Caledonia from north-east to south-west; the cafés along the top

of the square were glittering with light; a deliciously cool breeze was

blowing down from the mountains through the trees.

Little groups of people, mostly clad in white, were sitting on chairs

about the lawns, and others were strolling slowly round and round the

square and across the paths which radiated from the big kiosk in the

centre. There were pretty costumes and brilliant uniforms, stars and

medals and all the rest of it, and the one finishing tropical touch that

was needful was added by wandering bands of laughing Kanakas with gaudy

waistcloths and fantastic headgear, big, luminous eyes, and teeth that

gleamed whitely as they laughed.

Saving these last there was nothing that would have been incongruous with

one of those delightful portions of outdoor Paris where “l’on s’amuse.”

The shadow of the Black Death seemed to have been lifted for the time,

and as for crime and convicts—well, presently up one of the avenues

through the flamboyants there appeared a line of grey-clad figures

carrying musical instruments. There were twenty-five of them all told.

They sauntered up to the band-stand laughing and chatting as though

they hadn’t a care in the wide world. Possibly they had very few; fewer

certainly than the peasant toiling his sixteen hours a day for a bare

living in far-away France.

They were guarded by a very bored-looking surveillant, who carried in

a sling a revolver which he was not allowed to use unless one of his

charges struck him first!

The gentlemen of the orchestra took their places, and a short, thick-set

man, with a clever, but most unpleasant face, went into the middle and

looked around with an air of command, which reminded me oddly of the

preliminary gestures of other conductors of very different orchestras.

There was a little tuning-up, then the conductor tapped his music-stand,

waved his baton of authority, and forthwith the sweet strains of the

Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana” began to float out through the

drowsy hush of the tropical evening.

There is really only one word which could describe the scene, and that

is bizarre. Take five-and-twenty musically inclined convicts out of an

English prison, put them into the Western Gardens at Earl’s Court on a

warm July evening and you would have something like it, but not quite.

At Earl’s Court the convict-band would be stared at as a curiosity, but

people would probably keep at a respectful distance from the band-stand,

especially if there was only one tired-looking warder to keep guard over

the musical criminals.

[Illustration: The Convict Band playing in the Kiosk in the Place des

Cocotiers, Noumea.]

But in Noumea no one, save, perhaps, myself, looked twice at the

enclosure which contained an amount of assorted villainy and potential

violence, rapine, and sudden death as you could find the wide world over

in a similar space. There were men from every station of life—soldiers,

priests, lawyers, politicians, financiers, and men who had once belonged

to the Golden Youth of France—inside the kiosk of the Musique de la

Transportation.

Collectively they had committed every crime, from forgery to outrages for

which civilised speech has no name. The _chef d’orchestre_, for example,

was the man who, a few years ago, sent a thrill of horror through the

world by cutting the heart out of a man whom he believed to be his rival

in his wife’s affections, getting her to cook it as a sheep’s heart,

dining off it with her, and then telling her what she had been eating. In

addition to being a talented musician he was also a very clever painter

who has won quite a reputation in the island.

And yet, while this unspeakable scoundrel was controlling with his baton

the flood of sweet sounds which flowed out from the kiosk over the

moonlight-spangled lawns, the most respectable people in Noumea were

sitting about in chairs smoking and chatting; young men and maidens were

wandering about among the trees; and little children were playing round

the grassy slope on which the band-stand stood, taking no more notice of

these human hyenas than if they had been the most respectable musicians

that ever wore long hair and swallow-tailed coats.

The performance finished, as usual, with “La Marseillaise.” I stood up

and took off my helmet. Then I put it on again and sat down somewhat

suddenly. Not another person rose; not another head was uncovered. For

all the notice that was taken of it, the National Hymn of the Republic

might as well have been “Mrs. ’Enery ’Awkins,”—which did not strike me as

a particularly good thing for France generally.

When the performance was over the artists gathered up their instruments,

lolled out on to the path in front of the kiosk, and shuffled into a

sort of double line. The weary warder counted them in a languid fashion,

right-about-faced them, and gave the order to march. They shambled away

through the gaily dressed crowds in the square. No one even turned to

look at them, and I, who had seen a party of English convicts on their

way to work through a public road, ranged up with their faces to the wall

because a break-load of excursionists was passing by, wondered greatly.

The Musique de la Transportation is now, happily for the credit of

Noumea, a thing of the past. The pampered artists got to think themselves

indispensable to the gaiety of the town. So one night, having collected

more surreptitious coppers than usual, they halted on their way to

barracks, bought wine and brandy, and told the warder to go and report

them if he dared. He did dare, and the next day the Director of the

Administration published a brief edict which abolished them as musicians

for ever.

The next morning, soon after coffee, a white-helmeted, gorgeously

uniformed gendarme presented himself at the door of the Hotel Gaquon with

a request to see “Monsieur Griffitte.” An Englishman or German official

would have saluted. He took his helmet off, bowed, and handed me a letter

from the Governor appointing an interview for the next day. I went to

breakfast at the club as usual, and before the meal was over I found that

everybody knew of the sending of that letter. I had been an interloper

before, and an Englishman at that. Now I was a guest, the guest of

the omnipotent Ministry upon whose will the fate of every official in

Caledonia depended.

That was a morning of introductions, and I was surprised to find how

many friends I had in Noumea.

The Governor’s offices at Noumea are in a corner of the lovely grounds

in the midst of which his official residence stands. It was a little,

unpretentious, two-storey building, wooden built, and with a verandah

giving on to the street.

I gave my card to a collarless clerk, who appeared to be getting very hot

over the task of sorting a few papers. He sent it up to His Excellency,

and asked me “to give myself the trouble to sit down,” which I did.

Soldiers, civilians, gendarmes, and convict messengers kept dropping in

every now and then to deliver messages or letters, or have a chat with

somebody by way of beguiling the tedium of official hours, and then a

half-caste boy came down with my card and requested me to give myself the

further trouble of going upstairs. I don’t know whether this was another

official, but if he was his uniform consisted of a pair of trousers and a

shirt, a linen jacket which hadn’t seen the laundry for some time, and a

pair of canvas deck-shoes.

[Illustration: The Town and Harbour of Noumea. Across the bay are the

Barracks and the Military Reservation, which no civilian may enter

without authority. On the peninsula to the right are the stations of the

_libérés collectifs_.]

I followed him upstairs. He opened the door without any ceremony, and

I found myself in the presence of the Governor—a man of medium French

height, with a square, close-cropped head, moustache, and close-clipped

beard. If the chin had matched the forehead it would have been a strong

face, but it did not.

I learnt afterwards that his Excellency Monsieur Feuillet is a man

of decided anti-English tastes; but for all that he received me very

cordially. He had already received notice of my coming from the French

Government, and expressed himself as willing to do anything to further my

mission. As a matter of fact, this came to countersigning my credentials

from the Minister of Colonies and writing a letter to the Director of the

Administration. I then shook hands, and saw Monsieur Paul Feuillet no

more save from a distance.

Then I went to the Direction, and in a few minutes I was sitting in a

half-darkened, comfortable room, with double doors, through which no

sound could penetrate. This room is the centre of the system which really

controls the destinies of bond and free throughout New Caledonia. On the

other side of an ample writing-table sat a square-headed, strong-jawed

man of about five-and-thirty, with close-cropped hair, and moustache and

shaven chin _à l’Anglais_.

This was M. Edouard Telle, Director of the Penitentiary Administration

for New Caledonia and Dependencies, the strongest, politest, and most

friendly Frenchman I have ever met.

He is supreme chief of an army of commandants, surveillants, and jailors,

whose duty it is to keep watch and ward over between ten thousand and

twelve thousand convicts, _relégues_ and _libérés_—terms which I have

already explained.

He is absolutely independent of the Governor, who cannot even employ

convicts on public works without his permission. He is responsible to

no one but the Minister of Colonies and the President of the Republic,

and they are many a long thousand miles away. With the stroke of a pen

he could instantly stop all convict labour throughout the colony, and so

bring its principal industries to a standstill. It was he, too, and not

the Governor, who could have issued that ukase which would have closed

the prisons and turned my long journey into a wild-goose chase.

[Illustration: In the Harbour, Noumea.]

But, instead of this, he took quite as much trouble with me as if I had

been an inspector sent out by the French Government, rather than a

wandering Englishman who was only there on sufferance. He took the utmost

pains to find out exactly what I wanted; he mapped out my journeys for

me; gave me special passes authorising me to inspect all the prisons and

camps _en détail_—which is a very different thing to the ordinary, but

still rarely bestowed, visitor’s pass.

He addressed a circular letter to the commandants, enjoining them to do

everything to help me; and, not content with this, he telegraphed to each

prison and camp so that conveyances might be ready for me. At the same

time, when I suggested fixing dates, he replied:

“No, Mr. Griffith, go when you please. I wish you to see the

establishments exactly as they are always, and not as they might be if

they were got ready for you. When you have seen them come back and tell

me what you think of them. From what you have told me of your English

prisons”—this was at the end of a somewhat long conversation—“your

opinion will be most valuable to me.”

Then I thanked him, and mentioned the delicate subject of photographs,

and his good nature and indulgence once move proved equal to the strain.

“Photograph anything you please,” he said, “inside or outside the

prisons; but I shall ask you to remember that good English rule of yours

about photographing individual prisoners.”

Of course, I agreed to this, and left the Direction well at ease and

wondering more than ever at the misconceptions I had managed to form of

the Caledonian prison system. I frankly admit that I had expected to be

received with suspicion and reserve, perhaps even with hostility.

Instead of this the most powerful man in the colony had greeted me with

perfect cordiality and frankness, and had taken more trouble to make my

tour a success than I should certainly have expected a good many English

officials to take.

During another interview with M. Telle, before I had yet seen the inside

of a Caledonian prison, we both managed to astonish each other not a

little. The Director is a criminologist and the son of a criminologist,

who was Director before him, but he was sufficiently French only to have

studied the continental systems.

Therefore he was about as much surprised when I told him that the

cat and the birch were still used in English prisons; that English

prisoners ate and slept in absolute solitude and worked in silence, as

I was when he told me that, in this land of supposed horrors not only

had all corporal punishment been abolished, but that the surveillants

were not permitted even to lay a hand upon a prisoner, except in actual

self-defence; that cells and silence were only used as punishments; and

when he added that the better-behaved prisoners might smoke and drink

wine, I confess that I was almost shocked. All this, however, with other

strange things, I was soon to see for myself.

I dined that night, as usual, at the club, in a more contented frame of

mind than heretofore, for now the omnipotent Administration had spoken,

and I was free of the colony—free to go where I pleased, to see what I

liked, and, within the limits of the law, do as I liked.

No man might say me nay. All the prison-houses in the land must give up

their secrets to me. In short, I had in my pocket the keys of every cell

door in New Caledonia.

Under these circumstances I naturally found things much pleasanter than

before. I listened with equanimity to a local editor’s remarks on the

war news—which he had been spending the day in mangling—and even the

military doctors’ descriptions of the new plague cases and the ghastly

operations which they had just been performing with those nail-stained

hands of theirs did not seem quite so loathsome as before.

There was, by the way, another peculiarity of New Caledonian social life

to which I was already becoming accustomed. There are practically no

free servants in the colony. Male or female, they are either convicts or

ex-convicts, and it was no uncommon thing to have your knife and fork

laid for you at breakfast or dinner by a hand which had stuck a knife

into somebody else, or to take your food from hands that had poisoned.

I admit that I did not like the idea at first, but in time I got

accustomed to it, just as I did later on to being shaved by a most

amiable and accomplished murderer, and having my bed made up by a lady

who had cut her child’s throat. It is, in fact, the fashion in New

Caledonia to have murderers for servants. As a distinguished resident

said to me:

“You see, the assassins are reliable. They are the aristocrats of the

place. They don’t condescend to smaller crimes. In fact, they would be

absolutely insulted if they were accused of a theft, at least, the good

murderers would, and as for killing you, they would never dream of it.

Why should they? Besides, they know perfectly well that there wouldn’t be

the remotest chance of escape for them.”

This I found afterwards to be the cold-drawn truth. Fewer after-crimes

are committed in New Caledonia by those who are sent there for

assassination than by minor criminals. Later on I shall have some curious

information to give on this subject.

III

_ILE NOU_

Half-past five on a glorious tropical morning. The sun was still hidden

behind the green, rugged mountains which gained its name for New

Caledonia; but it was still high enough for the shadows to be melting

out of the valleys; for the grey roofs and white walls of the town to be

glimmering among the dark masses of foliage; and for the smooth waters of

the lovely harbour to light up with foregleams of the glory of sunrise.

A little beyond the northern end of the plague-infected area, with its

corrugated iron walls and its white-clad sentries, I found a collection

of pretty buildings, with neat little gardens round them. They were

the offices of the executive police, and when I had passed through

them I found myself on a short, board, wooden, T-shaped quay—the Quai

de la Transportation—which is used solely for the purposes of the

Administration.

Leading down to this is one of the only two railways of New Caledonia on

which a locomotive travels. It is quite a toy affair, with a gauge of

about twenty inches, and a length of perhaps five hundred yards; but the

engine puffed around just as busily, and seemed just as proud of itself,

as if it had been hauling the Empire State Express. It runs from the

wharves to the head of the quay, and its function just then was carrying

ballast for a new road.

It is a curious fact that the French have had possession of New Caledonia

for nearly half a century, and yet the only railway by which passengers

can travel is one on which the cars are drawn by convicts, concerning

which more hereafter.

I presented my credentials at the _douanerie_, where my cameras were

viewed with considerable suspicion until the all-compelling documents had

been read. After that, I suppose, they would have almost let me take a

Maxim gun on to the island. Then they were noted and handed back to me

with a polite “_Très bien, monsieur._ The _canot_ will start in a quarter

of an hour. If you will give your apparatus to this officer he will see

it safe in the boat.”

A polite surveillant stepped up, touched his helmet, and took them from

me. Then I lit a pipe and strolled up and down the quay to enjoy my

strange surroundings.

I had seen hundreds of convicts in England working both within and

without the prison walls; working in grim, joyless silence, surrounded by

equally silent, rifle-armed warders, and never a prisoner moving without

one of these at his heels. Here it was difficult to believe that I was in

Prisonland at all save that the other occupants of the quay were wearing

two very different uniforms, and that I was the only one _en civile_.

The surveillants were dressed in spotless white—the official washing-bill

of New Caledonia must be something enormous—their white helmets bore a

silver badge, the chief figure in which was a glorified representation

of the now forbidden rod, with the letters “A. P.” (Administration

Pénitentiare). Their rank was shown by _galons_, a sort of stripe worn on

the cuff of the left sleeve. This was of blue cloth with silver braid—the

lines of braid served the same purpose as stripes do with us. For

instance, the French equivalent for “two stripes” is “_à deux galons_.”

The uniform of the others was chiefly conspicuous for its ugliness and

utility—a pair of trousers and a jumper of light grey canvas cloth, with

a vest underneath, and a very broad-brimmed straw hat, without a ribbon.

No convict in Caledonia is allowed a ribbon on his hat. Some had stout,

undressed brogues, and some were barefoot. They were without exception

extremely ugly and fairly hearty.

A good many of them were smoking, and this rather got on my nerves, for

I kept on asking myself what would happen to an English prison official

if he saw a convict take out a cigarette and go and ask another one

for a light? But here surveillants strolled about puffing their own

cigarettes—making me wonder again what would happen to an English warder

smoking on duty?—and not worrying particularly over anything.

At the same time, there was no lack of discipline of its kind, though it

was not what we should call discipline in England. Still, the convicts

worked hard and regularly; harder, indeed, than I have ever seen English

convicts work.

Their task was loading the _canots_ and the steam-launch with provisions

for the great prison on the other side of the harbour; and they went

at it steadily and in excellent order until it was finished, scarcely

needing a word of direction from the surveillants.

As I watched them I thought of the quiet-spoken, square-headed despot

with whom I had been talking a day or two before. These men, like

hundreds of others that I saw, evidently knew him, if only by repute.

Presently the surveillant who had taken my cameras came and saluted and

told me that the _canot_ was ready. I got in, and found it manned by

twelve convicts, who were protected by an awning stretched from stem to

stern. They were chatting and smoking when we got in, and my conductor,

thinking perhaps to impress the Englishman with a sense of French

discipline, ordered them to be silent.

They stopped talking for five minutes while they got under weigh, then,

like a lot of school-boys, they began again, whereupon the surveillant

rebuked them again. “_Silence, je vous dis!_” said he in his most

authoritative tone; and they obliged him more or less for the rest of the

passage.

I must say that they rowed very well, and with a vigour which betokened

good nourishment. They looked at me with smiling curiosity. They

evidently knew pretty well all about me by this time—Heaven and the

mysterious “_loi du bagne_” only know how; and I daresay they wondered

why any one should have taken the trouble to come across the world just

to make their acquaintance.

I was received on the quay at Ile Nou by an officer—a chief warder, as

we should call him in England—who took me to the Commandant’s house.

_En route_ I found that Ile Nou, about which I had read such terrible

stories, is a very pleasant little settlement, composed of white houses

and shady streets, at the foot of a hill on which the great prison

buildings stand.

In a few minutes another illusion was shattered. I admit that I

expected to find the Commandant of the greatest prison in Caledonia a

semi-military despot in a braided uniform, boots and spurs, with a sword,

and, possibly, a revolver, to say nothing of fiercely waxed moustache and

imperial.

Instead of this I found a mild-mannered, grey-haired gentleman of about

sixty, clad in a _négligé_ white suit, with no sign of official rank

about him save a silver-embroidered blue band round the left cuff of

his coat, which reminded me rather oddly of the band that a British

policeman wears when he is on duty.

He was drinking his early coffee and receiving reports, which were noted

by a convict clerk at another table. He gave me a cup of coffee, and

ordered the carriage to be got ready. Meanwhile, he dropped his reports

and began to ask me about my journey, my impressions of New Caledonia,

and so on.

Presently a surveillant came in to say that the carriage was ready. We

got in, and a couple of well-bred, well-fed horses pulled us at a good

pace up the winding road, until our convict driver halted in front of a

big black iron door in a long white-washed wall. As the Chief Surveillant

put his key into the lock the Commandant said to me, with a smile:

“You will be the first Englishman who has ever passed this gate.”

“_Mais pardon, Commandant_,” said the surveillant, as he threw the door

open. “There have been two others, but they did not come across the world

to see the prison, and they stayed a good deal longer than monsieur would

care to do.”

“No doubt,” said I; and with that we crossed the Threshold of Lost

Footsteps.

As the door swung to behind me I found myself in a long rectangular

courtyard, one side of which was almost filled by a row of long, white

buildings fronting endways on to the court, with a door at the end and

small windows along the side.

At the further end, to the right hand, there was another door in the

high, white wall, of which I was to learn the use later on, for the

quadrangle which we were crossing is to the convicts of Ile Nou what the

Place de la Roquette was lately to the Parisians—the Field of Blood, the

Place of Execution.

The Commandant apologised for not being able to invite me to assist at

the spectacle, as there was no patient available. I should see shortly a

_forçat_ awaiting trial for murder, but it would be some time before he

could be tried, and then there would be the ratification of the sentence.

I should, of course, have assisted at such a spectacle if it had been

possible; but I had the advantage of hearing a simple, but none the less

graphic, description of an execution at Ile Nou from the lips of one who

had more than once been an eye-witness of the dread ceremony; and this

I will reproduce hereafter not only because of its dramatic interest,

but because it is so absolutely different from anything ever heard of in

England.

After we had inspected the _cases_, or dormitories, where the convicts

of the third, or lowest, class sleep on sloping wooden shelves, with one

foot manacled to an iron bar running the whole length of the long room,

we went through other gates and walls into the central prison—the Prison

Cellulaire—the heart and centre of the vast organisation.

Here I might have fancied myself in a somewhat old-fashioned English

prison. Here there were no convicts smoking cigarettes or chatting at

their work while their guardians smoked theirs and chatted also. The

chill of silence cut down through the warmth of the tropic morning as the

iron gates clashed to, and the heavy bolts shot back. Underfoot, black

stone or cement pavement; around, white walls and two tiers of little

black doors, the upper fronted by stone balconies and iron rails.

[Illustration: The Inner Court of the Central Prison, Ile Nou. The

Cachots Noirs are to the right. The Condemned Cells are in the Upper

Gallery above the Archway.]

On the ground floor we went through several cells into which light

as well as air was admitted, and here I found convicts who had been

sentenced to various terms of hard labour with solitary confinement.

This, with reduction of diet, is the first degree of punishment

inflicted on an idle or disorderly prisoner. It was about equal to the

ordinary hard labour of English prisons.

Then, after a look into the two little exercise-yards, we mounted to

the second storey. Here I noticed that the cells had no windows and no

gratings in the doors. Some of them had little cards affixed to them.

I went and read a couple of these; they contained the names of the

prisoners, their first sentence, their subsequent offences, and their

present sentences.

In these two cases it was “ten years’ solitary confinement in the dark.”

Then I knew that I was standing in front of the terrible Cachot Noir,

or Black Cell—that engine of mental murder which the sentimentalism of

French deputies, some of them amnestied _communards_, has substituted for

the infinitely more merciful lash.

I asked for the doors to be opened. My polite Commandant demurred for

a moment. It was not _réglementaire_. The Cachots Noirs were never

opened except at stated intervals,—once every thirty days, for an hour’s

exercise and medical inspection,—but the wording of my credentials was

explicit, and so the doors were opened.

Out of the corner of one came something in human shape, crouching

forward, rubbing its eyes and blinking at the unaccustomed light. It had

been three and a half years in that horrible hole, about three yards

long, by one and a half broad. I gave him a feast of sunshine and outer

air by taking his place for a few minutes.

After the first two or three the minutes lengthened out into hours. I had

absolutely no sense of sight. I was as blind as though I had been born

without eyes. The blackness seemed to come down on me like some solid

thing and drive my straining eyes back into my head. It was literally

darkness that could be felt, for I felt it, and the silence was like the

silence of upper space.

When the double doors opened again the rays of light seemed to strike my

eyes like daggers. The criminal whose place I had taken had a record of

infamy which no printable words could describe, and yet I confess that I

pitied him as he went back into that living death of darkness and silence.

We went along the galleries, looking into other cells and at other

prisoners, some of whom I was surprised to find quite cheerful, but they

were new-comers, and perhaps liked the idleness and the sleep. Then we

came to a corridor cut off by a heavy iron gate. There were six ordinary

cells in this, the cells of the condemned, and it is here that the last

tragedy of the convict’s life on Ile Nou begins.

Let us suppose that, as often happens, there are four or five men lying

in these cells under sentence of death. The English murderer knows the

day and hour of his doom. These men do not. Every night they go to sleep

not knowing whether or not it is their last sleep on earth. All they know

is that they are doomed. Then the fiat goes forth that “_Un nommé D._” is

to make the final expiation of his crimes.

That night, when the prison doors are locked, the parts of the guillotine

are brought in through the door at the end of the great courtyard,

and set up on a platform supported on a stone foundation, under the

supervision of “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” who is always a convict released

from his other duties in consideration of performing the last functions

of the law on his colleagues.

Soon after three the next morning, accompanied by the Chaplain and the

Chief Surveillant, the Commandant mounts the little hill on which the

central prison stands. The black doors open, and they ascend to the

corridor of the condemned; a key clicks in the lock, and the bolts rattle

back.

You can, perhaps, imagine what that sound means to A., B., C., and D.

Men in their position do not take much awakening. Perhaps they have been

waiting for this for weeks.

They hear the footsteps coming along the stone-paved corridor. Which door

will they stop at? Think of the agony of apprehension that is compressed

into those few seconds!

Then the footsteps stop. Three men wipe the sweat from their brows, and

fall back on their plank-beds. They at least will not die for a day or

two yet. The fourth hears a key rattle into the lock of his cell door.

The door swings open, and the early morning flows in. “_L’un nommé D._”

has already accepted his fate. He is already off his bed and standing

to attention as steadily as he can. The Commandant says kindly, and,

perhaps, with a check in his voice:

“_C’est pour ce matin!_”

Then he steps back, and the priest takes his place. The door is not

closed, but the Commandant and his assistants retire a little out of

respect for the last confidences of the condemned.

Meanwhile “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou” has been summoned, and, in due course,

he takes the chaplain’s place. He binds his patient’s hands behind his

back, ties his legs so that he can only just walk, and cuts away the

collar of his shirt.

At the same time, other and more picturesque preparations have been made

in the great courtyard. A company of infantry with loaded rifles and

fixed bayonets have been marched in and surround the scaffold in hollow

square. Almost at the same time come the Director of the Administration,

the Procurator-General, the Clerk of the Marine Tribunal, the Court which

holds the power of life and death over the convicts, and a few other

officials.

The swift tropical dawn is approaching by this time. The gates and doors

of the prison are thrown open, and columns of convicts file into the

yard, guarded by surveillants, revolver on hip. They take their places in

ranks inside the hollow square of soldiers.

The door at the end of the courtyard opens last of all, and through

it comes a little procession composed of the Commandant, the Chief

Surveillant, the priest, and “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” escorting the

principal actor in the scene. The priest mounts the scaffold with the

victim, followed by the executioner and his assistant; the clerk of the

court reads the verdict and sentence, the Commandant hands his warrant to

the Director and then he gives the order:

“Uncover and kneel!”

The broad-brimmed hats come off and the grey-clad ranks sink on their

knees around the Altar of Justice. The living sacrifice is asked if

he has anything to say. He usually makes a short speech either of

exhortation or bravado.

Then, with the assistance of the executioners, he takes his place on a

sloping plank. A roll of drums rumbles echoing round the white walls. The

plank swings into a horizontal position, the body is thrust forward till

the neck is imprisoned in the lunette—the little window through which

those who die by French law take their last look at the world. “Monsieur

de l’Ile Nou” touches a button; then comes the “skirr” of the falling

knife, a sharp thud, and there is one scoundrel the less on Ile Nou.

After which the comrades of the deceased are marched back to breakfast,

and thence to their daily tasks.

[Illustration: The Central Prison, Ile Nou. In front is the Execution

Ground. The Quadrangle is enclosed by a high whitewashed stone wall. To

the left is the Chapel in which the condemned may, if they choose, attend

Mass for the last time.]

IV

_MEASUREMENT AND MANIA_

I left the central prison breathing the soft, sweet air, and looking up

at the deep blue sky with a sudden sensation of thankfulness which I had

never experienced before. In a sense I was like a man who had been blind

and had had his sight given back to him; and I thought of the wretches I

had left behind me in that high-walled enclosure and those little black

holes built away into the thick walls which, for so many of them, were to

be tombs of mental death.

We came down the hill to the Pretoire, the Bureau of Anthropometry. This

is the ante-chamber through which every prisoner must pass who enters

the Prisonland of the South. On the way the Commandant and I discussed a

topic which I found a favourite one with all the officials whom I met in

Caledonia—the differences between the French system and our own.

They were quite as much surprised at the rigours of our system as I at

first was at the leniency of theirs—always saving that horrible Cachot

Noir.

We went then, as I did many times afterwards, with other officials, into

matters of diet, hours, and kinds of labour, detentions, and punishments,

and I succeeded in showing him that the Caledonian convict was to be

envied in every particular by the English convict, until he came to the

threshold of the dark cell. With us, three days’ dark cell and bread and

water is the maximum punishment. There it is five years, and sentences

may run consecutively. When the discussion was over the commandant added

an entirely French rider to it:

“But, monsieur, you must remember that this is not only imprisonment—it

is exile. How many of these poor wretches will ever see France again?

Whereas your criminals, when their sentence is done, are set free in

their native land.”

To which I replied:

“Quite so, and more’s the pity! Every avenue of honest life is closed

to them, and they are released only to commit more crimes and deserve

another sentence. There your system is better. You exile them really,

but you give them another home where they have hope. We only exile them

socially, and give them no hope.”

And this brought us to the door of the Pretoire.

It consisted of three apartments, the middle one was the examination

room. To the right hand was a larger chamber, sometimes used as a

judgment room. To the left was a smaller one, the walls of which were

covered with cabinets containing the records in duplicate of every

criminal that had landed on Ile Nou. Beyond this there was a dark-room.

When I had had a general look round and a chat with the Officer who

operated the Bertillon system, the Commandant asked me if I would care

to go through the mill. To which, not having been found out so far, I

consented.

Thereupon I was delivered over into the hands of a functionary who had a

pair of eyes like visual gimlets. They bored clean through me every time

he looked at me. I was no longer the favoured guest of the all-powerful

Administration; I was simply a subject, a thing to be measured, and

weighed, and examined in the most minute detail, and to have my most

trivial characteristics noted and put down under their proper categories.

He told me to take off my boots and coat. By rights my socks should have

come off also, but that, although I offered to do it, was dispensed with.

He put me up against a wall, fixed my head with one hand and pushed my

stomach in with the other, saw that my knees were properly back against

the wall, and lowered the bar on to my head. Then he moved my head a

little to right and left, and said to the clerk:

“One metre, 816.”

When this was noted down he sat me in a chair. The seat was

longitudinally divided by a ridge; the back was a measuring scale. Again

he took means to satisfy himself that I was sitting perfectly straight,

and so my sitting height was taken.

Then he got a pair of callipers, and measured my head in two directions,

from back to front and across, all the time calling out the fatal figures

which, in case of need, would have identified me among ten million men.

[Illustration: The Bureau of Anthropometry, Ile Nou.]

After this he descended to minor matters, ears, nose, lips, thumb- and

finger-joints, eyelids, and so on. Then he stood me on a box on which was

rudely outlined a human foot. I put my right foot on this, bent forward,

and rested my right hand on a table, using my left leg and foot to keep

my balance. When I was steady my foot was measured.

Then I rested my right arm on a table, standing on one leg the while. It

was measured from the elbow to the point of the middle finger. After this

the prints of my thumb and three fingers were taken, and duly impressed

on the _fiche_, or identification card.

Then came the most trying part of the ordeal, the general observation. I

stood to attention in the middle of the floor. The gimlet-eyed official

walked round me, and looked through and through me, what time the clerk

at the table asked questions from the schedule he was filling up.

No detail was so minute as to escape those all-searching eyes. A scar

which I had got twenty years before in a football match, though half

hidden under an eyebrow, was detected, measured, and noted. The scars

of a couple of old knife-stabs in my left hand, and the trace of a

parrot-bite on one of my fingers—nothing escaped. The colour of my hair

and moustache fell into a certain category. My eyes were examined, and

the colours of the iris duly placed in their proper category.

By this time I began to feel as though I were being taken to pieces and

examined bit by bit. It was a sort of mental and physical vivisection

without the knife and the chloroform. Finally, the gentleman at the desk

asked the question, “Intellectuality?”

“Mediocre,” replied Mr. Gimlet-eyes, with brutal frankness. Then I

laughed, and the Commandant suggested that I should be photographed.

“_Pas artistique, mais exact_,” he said, as we went into the other room.

“And, therefore,” I said, “it will resemble the remarks of your

anthropometric expert. I never had such an exact account of myself

before. Anthropometry strikes me as being a pretty good medicine for

human vanity.”

[Illustration: An Arab Type of Convict. A combination of Ideality and

Homicidal Mania.]

Out of the depth and width of his experience the Commandant agreed with

me, and then I was photographed. There was no artistic posing or anything

of that sort. I was planted on a chair with my back straightened up and

my head in a vice such as other photographers were once wont to torture

their victims with. The camera was brought within three feet of me. I was

taken full face, staring straight into the lens, and then I was taken

_en profile_. When, many weeks afterwards, I showed the result to my

wife, she was sorry I ever went; but for all that it’s a good likeness.

By the time the negatives were developed, and I had satisfied the

Commandant that certain black spots which the pitiless lens had detected

under my skin were the result of a disease I had contracted years before

in South America, and not premonitory symptoms of the plague, it was

breakfast-time, and I went down to the canteen, where I found convicts

buying wine and cigarettes, and generally conducting themselves like

gentlemen at large.

I did not see the Commandant again that day, save for a few minutes after

lunch, when he told me that he had an appointment at the Direction in

Noumea, and placed me in charge of his lieutenant, the Chief Surveillant.

The _Chef_ was a very jolly fellow, as, indeed, I found most of these

officials to be, and during our drives about the island, we chatted

with the utmost freedom. As a matter of fact, it was he who gave me the

description of the execution which I reproduced in the last chapter.

He, too, was entirely of the same opinion as myself as to the pitiless

iniquity of the dark cell; but he took some pains to point out that

it was not the fault either of the French Government or of the

Administration, but simply of certain politicians in France who wanted

a “cry,” and got up a crusade among the sentimentalists against “the

brutality of flogging bound and helpless prisoners far away from all

civilised criticism in New Caledonia.” Some of these men, too, as I have

said, were _déportés_, or exiled _communards_ who had been forgiven, and

had brought back batches of stories with them as blood-curdling as they

were mendacious.

“_Bien, monsieur_,” he said. “You have seen the Cachot Noir. Now we

will go to the Disciplinary Camp first, because it is on the road, and

then—well, you shall see what the _cachot_ does, and when you see that I

think you will say the lash is kinder.”

The Disciplinary Camps in New Caledonia have no counterpart in the

English penal system. “Incorrigibles,” who won’t work, who are

insubordinate, or have a bad influence on their comrades of the Bagne,

are sent into them partly for punishment and partly for seclusion.

[Illustration: The Courtyard of a Disciplinary Camp, Ile Nou. Inspection

at 5 a.m. after breakfast, and before hard labour. To the right is a

Kanaka “Policeman.” The average physique of the Criminals may be seen by

comparison with myself, standing in front of the Kanaka.]

They have poorer food and harder work, no “gratifications” in the way

of wine or tobacco, or other little luxuries. They sleep on plank-beds

with their feet in anklets, and, if they don’t behave themselves, they

are promptly clapped into a cell for so many days’ solitary confinement

on bread and water. For graver offences they are, of course, sent back

to the central prison as hopeless cases, after which their own case is

usually hopeless for life.

I found several of the men in this camp working in chains. This was

another subject about which the sentimentalists made a good deal of fuss

in France, but when I saw what the alleged chains really were, I laughed,

and said to my friend the _Chef_:

“So that is what you call chains in New Caledonia, is it? May I have a

look at one?”

He beckoned to one of the men to come up, and this is what I found: There

was an iron band riveted round his right ankle, and to this was attached

a chain which, as nearly as I could calculate with my hands, weighed

about six pounds. It was as absolutely no inconvenience to its wearer,

when he was either sitting or lying down. When he was walking or working

he tucked the end in under his belt, and, as far as I could see, it

didn’t make any difference to his walk, save a little dragging of the

foot. In fact, when I asked him whether it was any trouble to him, he

said:

“No, not after a few days. One gets accustomed to it.”

“Very likely!” I said. “If you got the chains in an English prison, you

would have them on both legs and arms, and you wouldn’t be able to take

more than a half-stride.”

“Ah, they are brutal, those English!” said the scoundrel, with a shrug

of his shoulders, as he tucked the end of his chain round his belt and

sauntered away.

The chain is usually a punishment for gross insubordination or attempted

escape. This man, the _Chef_ told me, had tried three times with the

chain on, and once had used the loose end to hammer a warder with, for

which he got twelve months’ Cachot Noir and the chain for life—and a

little more, since he would be buried in it.[2]

Then, after I had made the round of the cells, I was taken to a very

curious punishment-chamber which is in great vogue in New Caledonia. In

one sense it reminded me of our treadwheel, though it is not by any means

so severe. I have seen a strong man reduced almost to fainting by fifteen

minutes on a treadwheel. Nothing like this could happen in the Salle des

Pas Perdus, as I christened the place when its use had been explained to

me.

Here, after a brief and scanty meal at 4.30 a.m., the convicts are lined

up in a big room, or, rather, shed, about sixty feet long by forty feet

broad. There is absolutely no furniture in the place, with the exception

of a dozen flat-topped pyramids of stone placed in straight lines about

ten feet from each side.

If there are twenty-four convicts condemned to this particular kind

of weariness, twenty-four are taken in, in single file. Then the

word “March!” is given, and they begin. Hour after hour the dreary

round-and-round is continued in absolute silence. Every half-hour they

are allowed to sit on the pyramids for a couple of minutes, and then

on again. At eleven the bell rings for _soupe_, which, in the Camp

Disciplinaire, resolves itself into hot water and fat with a piece of

bread. In the other camps the bell doesn’t go again till one, but these

have only their half-hour, and then the promenade begins again, and

continues till sunset.

I was assured that those who could stand a week of this with the chain

_did_ feel its weight, and I don’t wonder at it, for a more miserable,

weary, limping, draggle-footed crowd of scoundrels I never saw in all

my life than I watched that day perambulating round the Hall of Lost

Footsteps.

From here we drove across to the western side of the island, and

presently came to a magnificent sloping avenue of palm-trees.

“The avenue of the hospital,” said the _Chef_. “Now you will see the best

and the worst of Ile Nou.”

And so it was. We drove down the avenue to a white, heavy stone arch,

which reminded me somewhat quaintly of the entrance gates of some of the

old Spanish haciendas I had seen up-country in Peru. Inside was a vast,

shady garden, brilliant with flowers whose heavy scent was pleasantly

tempered by the sweet, cool breeze from the Pacific; for the eastern

wall of the whole enclosure was washed by the emerald waters of the

Lagoon.

[Illustration: The Avenue of Palms, leading to the Hospital, Ile Nou.]

In the midst of this garden stood the hospital, built in quadrangular

form, but with one side of each “quad” open to the garden. The houses

were raised on stone platforms something like the stoep of a Dutch house,

and over these the roofs came down in broad verandahs. Grey-clad figures

were sitting or lying about on the flags underneath, a few reading or

doing some trifling work, and others were wandering about the garden or

sleeping in some shady nook. It was, in short, very different from the

central prison and the disciplinary camp.

I was introduced to the Medical Director, and he showed me round,

omitting one wing, in which he told me there were a couple of cases of

plague. I happened to know that there were really about a dozen, so I

readily agreed that that part should be left out.

As prison hospital, it differed very little from others that I had

seen in England. There was the same neatness and exquisite cleanliness

everywhere, though the wards were somewhat darker, and therefore

cooler, which, with the midday sun at 106° in the shade, was not a bad

thing. All the nurses were, of course, Sisters of Mercy.[3] In fact,

practically all the nursing in New Caledonia is done by Sisters, and not

a few of these heroic women had become brides of the Black Death before I

left.

Here, as in all other prison hospitals I have visited, diet, stimulants,

and medicine are absolutely at the discretion of the Director. No matter

what the cost, the spark of life must be kept alive as long as possible

in the breast of the murderer, the forger, and the thief, or the criminal

whose light of reason has already been quenched in the darkness of the

Black Cell.

In fact, so careful are the authorities of their patients’ general health

that they give them nothing in the way of meat but the best beef and

mutton that can be imported from Australia; Caledonian fed meat is not

considered nourishing enough. In normal times the death-rate of Ile Nou,

which is wholly given over to convict camps, is two or three per cent.

lower than that of the town of Noumea.

[Illustration: Part of the Hospital Buildings, Ile Nou. The

roofed-terrace in front is where the patients take their siesta in

the middle of the day. One of these is attached to each court of the

Hospital. Some of the mattresses may be seen to the right.]

Then from this little flowery paradise of rest and quietness we went

across the road to another enclosure in which there were two long, white

buildings, a prison and a row of offices, at right angles to each other.

This was the “bad” side. On the other there had been invalids and invalid

lunatics; here there were only lunatics, and mostly dangerous at that—men

who, after being criminals, had become madmen; not like the dwellers in

Broadmoor, who are only criminal because they are mad.

I once paid a visit to the worst part of the men’s side at Broadmoor, but

I don’t think it was quite as bad as the long corridor which led through

that gruesome home of madness. On either hand were heavy black-painted,

iron doors, and inside these a hinged grating through which the prisoner

could be fed.

The cells were about nine feet by six feet. They had neither furniture

nor bedclothes in them. The furniture would have been smashed up either

in sheer wanton destruction or for use as missiles to hurl through the

grating, and the bedclothes would have been torn up into strips for

hanging or strangling purposes.

It has been my good or bad luck to see poor humanity in a good many

shapes and guises, but I never saw such a series of pitiful parodies of

manhood as I saw when those cell doors were opened.

Some were crouched down in the corners of their cells, muttering to

themselves and picking the sacking in which they were clothed to pieces,

thread by thread. It was no use giving them regular prison clothing, for

they would pick themselves naked in a couple of days. Others were walking

up and down the narrow limits of their cells, staring with horribly

vacant eyes at the roof or the floor, and not taking the slightest notice

of us.

One man was lying down scraping with bleeding fingers at the black

asphalted floor under the impression that he was burrowing his way to

freedom; others were sitting or lying on the floor motionless as death;

and others sprang at the bars like wild beasts the moment the door was

opened.

But the most horrible sight I saw during that very bad quarter of an hour

was a gaunt-faced, square-built man of middle-height who got up out of a

corner as his cell door opened, and stood in the middle facing us.

He never moved a muscle, or winked an eyelid. His eyes looked at us with

the steady, burning stare of hate and ferocity. His lips were drawn back

from his teeth like the lips of an ape in a rage, and his hands were

half clenched like claws. The man was simply the incarnation of madness,

savagery, and despair. He had gone mad in the Black Cell, and the form

that his madness had taken was the belief that nothing would nourish him

but human flesh. Of course he had to be fed by force.

When we got outside a big warder pulled up his jumper and showed me the

marks of two rows of human teeth in his side. If another man hadn’t

stunned the poor wretch with the butt of his revolver he would have

bitten the piece clean out—after which I was glad when the Doctor

suggested that I should go to his quarters and have a drink with him.

V

_A CONVICT ARCADIA_

I visited two or three other industrial camps and the farm-settlements

before I left Ile Nou, but as I had yet to go through the agricultural

portions of the colony it would be no use taking up space in describing

them here.

There are practically no roads to speak of in New Caledonia outside a

short strip of the south-western coast. In September, 1863, Napoleon

the Little signed the decree which converted the virgin paradise of

New Caledonia into a hell of vice and misery—a description which is

perhaps somewhat strong, but which history has amply justified. In the

following year the transport _Iphigénie_ took a cargo of two hundred

and forty-eight galley-slaves from Toulon and landed them where the

town of Noumea now stands. This consignment was added to by rapidly

following transports, and for thirty years at least the administration

of New Caledonia has had at its disposal an average of from seven to

ten thousand able-bodied criminals for purposes of general improvement,

and more especially for the preparation of the colony for that free

colonisation which has been the dream of so many ministers and governors.

Now the area of New Caledonia is, roughly speaking, between six thousand

and seven thousand square miles, and after an occupation of nearly forty

years it has barely fifty miles of roads over which a two-wheeled vehicle

can be driven, and these are only on the south-western side of the island.

The only one of any consequence is that running from Noumea to

Bouloupari, a distance of about thirty miles. At Bourail, which is the

great agricultural settlement, there are about twelve miles of road and

a long ago abandoned railway bed. Between La Foa and Moindou there is

another road about as long; but both are isolated by miles of mountain

and bush from each other and are therefore of very little general use.

One has only to contrast them with the magnificent coach roads made in a

much shorter space of time through the far more difficult Blue Mountain

district in New South Wales to see the tremendous difference between

the British and the French ideas of colonisation, to say nothing of the

railways—two thousand seven hundred miles—and thirty-three thousand miles

of telegraph lines.

The result of this scarcity of roads and absolute absence of railways is

that when you want to go from anywhere to anywhere else in New Caledonia

you have to take the Service des Côtes, which for dirt, discomfort,

slowness, and total disregard of the convenience of passengers I can only

compare to the Amalgamated Crawlers presently known as the South-Eastern

and Chatham Railways. Like them, it is, of course, a monopoly, wherefore

if you don’t like to go by the boats you can either swim or walk.

[Illustration: The Island of “Le Sphinx,” one of the tying-up places on

the south-west coast of New Caledonia.]

The whole of New Caledonia is surrounded by a double line of exceedingly

dangerous reefs, cut here and there by “passes,” one of which Captain

Cook failed to find, and so lost us one of the richest islands in

the world. The navigable water both inside and outside the reefs is

plentifully dotted with tiny coral islands and sunken reefs a yard or so

below the surface and always growing, hence navigation is only possible

between sunrise and sunset. There is only one lighthouse in all Caledonia.

Thus, when I began to make my arrangements for going to Bourail, I found

that I should have to be on the wharf at the unholy hour of 4.30 a.m. I

packed my scanty belongings overnight. At 4.15 the cab was at the door.

The _cochers_ of Noumea either work in relays or never go to sleep. I

was just getting awake, and the gorged mosquitoes were still sleeping. I

dressed and drank my coffee to the accompaniment of considerable language

which greatly amused the copper-skinned damsel who brought the coffee up.

She also never seemed to sleep.

Somehow I got down to the wharf, and presented myself at the _douannerie_

with my “_Certificat de Santé_,” which I had got from the hospital

the previous evening. The doctor in charge gave me a look over, and

countersigned it. Then I went with my luggage into an outer chamber. My

bag and camera-cases were squirted with phenic acid from a machine which

looked like a cross between a garden hose and a bicycle foot-pump. Then I

had to unbutton my jacket, and go through the same process. The rest of

the passengers did the same, and then we started in a strongly smelling

line for the steamer.

As we went on board we gave up our bills of health, after which we were

not permitted to land again under penalty of forfeiting the passage and

being disinfected again. Our luggage now bore yellow labels bearing the

legend, “_colis désinfecté_,” signed by the medical inspector. These were

passed on to the ships by Kanakas, who freely went and came, and passed

things to and from the ship without hindrance. As Kanakas are generally

supposed to be much better carriers of the plague than white people, our

own examination and squirting seemed a trifle superfluous.

The steamer was the _St. Antoine_, which may be described as the

Campania of the Service des Côtes. Until I made passages on one of her

sister-ships—to be hereafter anathematised—I didn’t know how bad a French

colonial passenger-boat could be. Afterwards I looked back to her with

profound regret and a certain amount of respect; wherefore I will not

say all that I thought of her during the eleven hours that she took to

struggle over the sixty-odd miles from Noumea to Bourail.

There is no landing-place at the port of Bourail, save for boats, so,

after the usual medical inspection was over and I had made myself known

to the doctor, I went ashore in his boat. The Commandant was waiting on

the shore with his carriage. I presented my credentials, and then came

the usual _consommations_, which, being literally interpreted, is French

for mixed drinks, after which we drove off to the town of Bourail, eight

kilometres away. As we were driving down the tree-arched road I noticed

half a dozen horsewomen seated astride _à la Mexicaine_, with gaily

coloured skirts flowing behind.

“Ah,” I said, “do your ladies here ride South American fashion?”

“My dear sir,” he replied, “those are not ladies. They are daughters of

convicts, born here in Bourail, and reared under the care of our paternal

government! But that is all stopped now, later on you will see why.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have heard that you have given up trying to make good

colonists out of convict stock.”

“Yes,” he replied; “and none too soon, as you will see.”

From which remark I saw that I had to do with a sensible man, so I

straightway began to win his good graces by telling him stories of

distant lands, for he was more of a Fleming than a Frenchman, and was

therefore able to rise to the conception that there are other countries

in the world besides France.

I found Bourail a pretty little township, consisting of one street and

a square, in the midst of which stood the church, and by dinner-time I

found myself installed in a little hotel which was far cleaner and more

comfortable than anything I had seen in Noumea, except the club. When I

said good-night to the Commandant, he replied:

“Good-night, and sleep well. You needn’t trouble to lock your door. We

are all criminals here, but there is no crime.”

Which I subsequently found to be perfectly true.

Everything in New Caledonia begins between five and half-past, unless

you happen to be starting by a steamer, and then it’s earlier. My visit

to Bourail happened to coincide with a governmental inspection, and

early coffee was ordered for five o’clock. That meant that one had to

get tubbed, shaved, and dressed, and find one’s boots a little before

five. Bar the Black Death, I disliked New Caledonia mostly on account of

its early hours. No civilised persons, with the exception of milkmen and

criminals under sentence of death, ought to be obliged to get up before

nine.

Still, there was only one bath in the place, and I wanted to be first at

it, so I left my blind up, and the sun awoke me.

I got out of bed and went on to the balcony, and well was I rewarded even

for getting up at such an unrighteous hour. The night before it had been

cloudy and misty, but now I discovered with my first glance from the

verandah that I had wandered into something very like a paradise.

I saw that Bourail stood on the slope of a range of hills, and looked out

over a fertile valley which was dominated by a much higher range to the

north-east. The sun wasn’t quite up, and neither were the officers of the

Commission, so I went for my bath. There were no mosquitos in Bourail

just then, and I had enjoyed for once the luxury of an undisturbed sleep.

The water, coming from the hills, was delightfully cool, and I came back

feeling, as they say between New York and San Francisco, real good.

The Commission, for some reason or other, did not get up before

breakfast-time (11.30), and so we got a good start of them. The

Commandant had the carriage round by six o’clock, and, after the usual

_consommations_, we got away. It was a lovely morning, the only one of

the sort I saw in Bourail, for the next day the clouds gathered and the

heavens opened, and down came the floods and made everything but wading

and swimming impossible; but this was a day of sheer delight and great

interest.

We drove over the scene of a great experiment which, I fear, is destined

to fail badly. The province of Bourail is the most fertile in all

Caledonia, wherefore in the year 1869 it was chosen by the paternal

French Government as the Arcadia of the Redeemed Criminal. The Arcadia is

undoubtedly there, the existence of the redeemed criminal struck me as a

little doubtful.

As soon as we got under way I reverted to the young ladies we had seen on

horseback the evening before.

[Illustration: A Native Temple, New Caledonia.]

“You shall see the houses of their parents,” said the Commandant; “and

afterwards you will see the school where the younger ones are being

educated. For example,” he went on, pointing down the street we were

just crossing, “all those shops and little stores are kept by people who

have been convicts, and most of them are doing a thriving trade. Yonder,”

he said, waving his hand to the right, “is the convicts’ general store,

the Syndicat de Bourail. It was founded by a convict, the staff are

convicts, and the customers must be convicts. It is what you would call

in English a Convict Co-operative Store. It is managed by scoundrels of

all kinds, assassins, thieves, forgers, and others. I have to examine

the books every three months, and there is never a centime wrong. That

is more than most of the great establishments in Sydney could say, is it

not?”

I made a non-committal reply, and said:

“Set a thief to catch a thief, or watch him.”

“Exactly! There is no other business concern in Caledonia which is

managed with such absolute honesty as this is. I should be sorry for the

man who tried to cheat the management.”

I knew enough of Caledonian society by this time to see that it would

not be good manners to press the question any further. Afterwards I

had an interview with the manager of the syndicate, an estimable and

excellently conducted forger, who had gained his _rémission_ and was

doing exceedingly well for himself and his wife, who, I believe, had

blinded somebody with vitriol, and was suspected of dropping her child

into the Seine.

He presented me with a prospectus of the company, which showed that it

had started with a government loan of a few hundred francs, and now

had a reserve fund of nearly forty thousand francs. He was a patient,

quiet-spoken, hard-working man who never let a centime go wrong, and

increased his personal profits by selling liquors at the back door.

Our route lay across the broad valley which is watered by the River

Nera. On either side the ground rose gently into little hillocks

better described by the French word _collines_ and on each of these,

usually surrounded by a grove of young palms and a dozen acres or

so of vineyards, orchards, manioc, plantain, or maize, stood a low,

broad-verandahed house, the residence of the redeemed criminal.

I could well have imagined myself driving through a thriving little

colony of freemen in some pleasant tropical island upon which the curse

of crime had never descended, and I said so to the Commandant.

“Yes,” he said, “it looks so, doesn’t it? Now, you see that house up

there to the left, with the pretty garden in front. The man who owns

that concession was a hopeless scoundrel in France. He finished up by

murdering his wife after he had lived for years on the wages of her

shame. Of course, the jury found extenuating circumstances. He was

transported for life, behaved himself excellently, and in about seven

years became a concessionnaire.

“He married a woman who had poisoned her husband. They have lived quite

happily together, and bring up their children most respectably.”

I was too busy thinking to reply, and he went on, pointing to the right:

“Then, again, up there to the right—that pretty house on the hill

surrounded by palms. The man who owns that was once a cashier at the Bank

of France. He was a ‘_faussaire de première classe_,’ and he swindled the

bank out of three millions of francs before they found him out. He was

sent here for twenty years. After eight he was given a concession and

his wife and family voluntarily came out to him. You see, nothing was

possible for the wife and children of a convict forger in Paris. Here

they live happily on their little estate. No one can throw stones at

them, and when they die the estate will belong to their children.”

“That certainly seems an improvement on our own system,” I said,

remembering the piteous stories I had heard of the wives and families of

English convicts, ruined through no fault of their own, and with nothing

to hope for save the return of a felon husband and father into a world

where it was almost impossible for him to live honestly.

“Yes,” he said; “I think so. Now, as we turn the corner you will see the

house of one of our most successful colonists. There,” he said, as the

wagonette swung round into a delightful little valley, “that house on the

hillside, with the white fence round it, and the other buildings to the

side. The owner of that place was a thief, a forger, and an assassin in

Paris. He stole some bonds, and forged the coupons. He gave some of the

money to his mistress, and found her giving it to some one else, so he

stabbed her, and was sent here for life.

“He got his concession, and married a woman who had been sent out for

infanticide, as most of them are here. If not that, it is generally

poison. Well, now he is a respectable colonist and a prosperous farmer.

He has about forty acres of ground well cultivated, as you see. He has

thirty head of cattle and a dozen horses, mares, and foals, to say

nothing of his cocks and hens and pigs. He supplies nearly the whole of

the district with milk, butter, and eggs, and makes a profit of several

thousand francs a year. I wish they were all like that!” he concluded,

with a little sigh which meant a good deal.

“I wish we could do something like that with our hard cases,” I replied,

“instead of turning them out into the streets to commit more crimes and

beget more criminals. We know that crime is a contagious as well as an

hereditary disease, and we not only allow it to spread, but we even

encourage it as if we liked it.”

“It is a pity,” he said sympathetically, “for you have plenty of islands

where you might have colonies like this. You do not need to punish them.

Remove them, as you would remove a cancer or a tumour, and see that they

do not come back. That is all. Society would be better, and so would

they.”

I could not but agree with this since every turn of the road brought us

to fresh proofs of the present success of the system, and then I asked

again:

“But how do these people get their first start? One can’t begin farming

like this without capital.”

“Oh no,” he said, “the Government does that. For the first few years,

according to the industry and ability of the settler, these people cost

us about forty pounds a year each, about what you told me it costs you

to keep a criminal in prison. We give them materials for building their

houses, tools, and agricultural implements, six months’ provisions, and

seed for their first harvest. After that they are left to themselves.

“If they cannot make their farm pay within five years or so they lose

everything; the children are sent to the convent, and the husband and

wife must hire themselves out as servants either to other settlers or to

free people. If they do succeed the land becomes absolutely theirs in

ten years. If they have children they can leave it to them, or, if they

prefer, they can sell it.

“Some, for instance, have got their rehabilitation, their pardon, and

restoration of civil rights. They have sold their farms and stock and

gone back to France to live comfortably. Their children are, of course,

free, though the parents may not leave the colony without rehabilitation.

After breakfast I will take you down the street of Bourail, and introduce

you to some who have done well in trade, and to-morrow or next day you

can see what we do with the children.”

VI

_SOME HUMAN DOCUMENTS_

Society in Bourail, although in one sense fairly homogeneous, is from

another point of view distinctly mixed. Here, for example, are a few

personal items which I picked up during our stroll down the main and one

street of the village.

First we turned into a little saddler’s shop, the owner of which once

boasted the privilege of making the harness for Victor Emmanuel’s horses.

Unfortunately his exuberant abilities were not content even with such

distinction as this, and so he deviated into coining, with the result of

hard labour for life. After a few years his good conduct gained him a

remission of his sentence, and in due course he became a concessionnaire.

His wife, who joined him after his release, is one of the aristocrats of

this stratum of Bourailian society.

[Illustration: Permit to visit a Prison or Penitentiary Camp _en détail_.

This is the ordinary form; but the Author is the only Englishman for whom

the words in the left-hand corner were crossed out.]

There is quite a little romance connected with this estimable family.

When Madame came out she brought her two daughters with her. Now the

elder of these had been engaged to a young man employed at the Ministry

of Colonies, and he entered the colonial service by accepting a clerkship

at Noumea. The result was naturally a meeting, and the fulfilment of the

proverb which says that an old coal is easily rekindled. The engagement

broken off by the conviction was renewed, and the wedding followed in due

course. The second daughter married a prosperous concessionnaire, and the

ex-coiner, well established, and making plenty of properly minted money,

has the satisfaction of seeing the second generation of his blood growing

up in peace and plenty about him. Imagine such a story as this being true

of an English coiner!

A little further on, on the left hand side, is a little lending

library, and _cabinet de lecture_. This is kept by a very grave and

dignified-looking man, clean-shaven, and keen-featured, and with the

manners of a French Chesterfield. “That man’s a lawyer,” I said to the

Commandant, as we left the library. “What is he doing here?”

“You are right. At least, he was a lawyer once, doing well, and married

to a very nice woman; but he chose to make himself a widower, and that’s

why he’s here. The old story, you know.”

Next door was a barber’s shop kept by a most gentle-handed housebreaker.

He calls himself a “capillary artist,” shaves the officials and

gendarmerie, cuts the hair of the concessionnaires, and sells perfumes

and soaps to their wives and daughters. He also is doing well.

A few doors away from him a _liberé_ has an establishment which in a way

represents the art and literature of Bourail. He began with ten years

for forgery and embezzlement. Now he takes photographs and edits, and,

I believe, also writes the _Bourail Indépendent_. As a newspaper for

ex-convicts and their keepers, the title struck me as somewhat humorous.

Nearly all branches of trade were represented in that little street. But

these may be taken as fairly representative samples of the life-history

of those who run them. First, crime at home; then transportation and

punishment; and then the effort to redeem, made in perfect good faith by

the Government, and, so far as these particular camps and settlements are

concerned, with distinct success in the present.