Unhappily, however, the Government is finding out already that free

and bond colonists will not mix. They will not even live side by side,

wherefore either the whole system of concessions must be given up, or the

idea of colonising one of the richest islands in the world with French

peasants, artisans, and tradesmen must be abandoned.

Later on in the afternoon we visited the Convent, which is now simply a

girls’-school under the charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny. A

few years ago this convent was perhaps the most extraordinary matrimonial

agency that ever existed on the face of the earth. In those days it was

officially styled, “House of Correction for Females.” The sisters had

charge of between seventy and eighty female convicts, to some of whom

I shall be able to introduce you later on in the Isle of Pines, and

from among these the bachelor or widower convict, who had obtained his

provisional release and a concession, was entitled to choose a bride to

be his helpmeet on his new start in life. The method of courtship was

not exactly what we are accustomed to consider as the fruition of love’s

young or even middle-aged dream.

[Illustration: The Kiosk in which the Convict Courtships were conducted

at Bourail.]

After Mass on a particular Sunday the prospective bridegroom was

introduced to a selection of marriageable ladies, young and otherwise.

Of beauty there was not much, nor did it count for much. What the

convict-cultivator wanted, as a rule, was someone who could help him to

till his fields, look after live-stock, and get in his harvests.

When he had made his first selection the lady was asked if she was

agreeable to make his further acquaintance. As a rule, she consented,

because marriage meant release from durance vile. After that came the

queerest courtship imaginable.

About fifty feet away from the postern door at the side of the Convent

there still stands a little octagonal kiosk of open trellis-work, which

is completely overlooked by the window of the Mother Superior’s room.

Here each Sunday afternoon the pair met to get acquainted with each other

and discuss prospects.

Meanwhile the Mother Superior sat at her window, too far away to be able

to hear the soft nothings which might or might not pass between the

lovers, but near enough to see that both behaved themselves. Along a

path, which cuts the only approach to the kiosk, a surveillant marched,

revolver on hip and eye on the kiosk ready to respond to any warning

signal from the Mother Superior.

As a rule three Sundays sufficed to bring matters to a happy

consummation. The high contracting parties declared themselves satisfied

with each other, and the wedding day was fixed, not by themselves, but by

arrangement between those who had charge of them.

Sometimes as many as a dozen couples would be turned off together at the

_mairie_, and then in the little church at the top of the market-place

touching homilies would be delivered by the good old _curé_ on the

obvious subject of repentance and reform. A sort of general wedding feast

was arranged at the expense of the paternal Government, and then the

wedded assassins, forgers, coiners, poisoners, and child-murderers went

to the homes in which their new life was to begin.

This is perhaps the most daring experiment in criminology that has ever

been made. The Administration claimed success for it on the ground

that none of the children of such marriages have ever been convicted

of an offence against the law. Nevertheless, the Government have most

wisely put a stop to this revolting parody on the most sacred of human

institutions, and now wife-murderers may no longer marry poisoners or

infanticides with full liberty to reproduce their species and have them

educated by the State, to afterwards take their place as free citizens of

the colony.

The next day we drove out to the College of the Marist Brothers. It is

really a sort of agricultural school, in which from seventy to eighty

sons of convict parents are taught the rudiments of learning and religion

and the elements of agriculture.

During a conversation with the Brother Superior I stumbled upon a very

curious and entirely French contradiction. I had noticed that families in

New Caledonia were, as a rule, much larger than in France, and I asked if

these were all the boys belonging to the concessionnaires of Bourail.

“Oh no!” he replied; “but, then, you see, we have no power to compel

their attendance here. We can only persuade the parents to let them come.”

“But,” I said, “I understood that primary education was compulsory here

as it is in France.”

“For the children of free people, yes,” he replied regretfully, and with

a very soft touch of sarcasm, “but for these, no. The Administration has

too much regard for the sanctity of parental authority.”

When the boys were lined up before us in the playground I saw about

seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the abolition of convict

marriages. On every face and form were stamped the unmistakable brands of

criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness, and general degeneration, not

all on each one, but there were none without some.

Later on I started them racing and wrestling, scrambling and

tree-climbing for pennies. They behaved just like monkeys with a dash of

tiger in them, and I came away more convinced than ever that crime is

a hereditary disease which can finally be cured only by the perpetual

celibacy of the criminal. Yet in Bourail it is held for a good thing

and an example of official wisdom that the children of convicts and of

freemen shall sit side by side in the schools and play together in the

playgrounds.

[Illustration: Berezowski, the Polish Anarchist who attempted to murder

Napoleon III. and the Tsar Alexander II. in the Champs Elysées. All

Criminals in New Caledonia are photographed in every possible hirsute

disguise; and finally cropped and clean shaven.

_By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd._]

On our way home I was introduced to one of the most picturesque and

interesting characters that I met in the colony. We pulled up at the

top of a hill. On the right hand stood a rude cabin of mud and wattles

thatched with palm-leaves, and out of this came to greet us a strange,

half-savage figure, long-haired, long-bearded, hairy almost as a monkey

on arms and legs and breast, but still with mild and intelligent

features, and rather soft brown eyes, in which I soon found the shifting

light of insanity.

Acting on a hint the Commandant had already given me, I got out and shook

hands with this ragged, shaggy creature, who looked much more like a man

who had been marooned for years on a far-away Pacific Island, than an

inhabitant of this trim, orderly Penal Settlement. I introduced myself as

a messenger from the Queen of England, who had come out for the purpose

of presenting her compliments and inquiring after his health.

This was the Pole Berezowski, who more than thirty years ago fired a

couple of shots into the carriage in which Napoleon III. and Alexander

II. were driving up the Champs Elysées. He is perfectly harmless and

well-behaved; quite contented, too, living on his little patch and in a

world of dreams, believing that every foreigner who comes to Bourail is a

messenger from some of the crowned heads of Europe, who has crossed the

world to inquire after his welfare. Through me he sent a most courteous

message to the Queen, which I did not have the honour of delivering.

That night the storm-clouds came over the mountains in good earnest,

and I was forced to abandon my intention of returning to Noumea by

road, since the said road would in a few hours be for the most part a

collection of torrents, practically impassible, to say nothing of the

possibility of a cyclone. There was nothing more to be seen or done, so I

accepted the Commandant’s offer to drive me back to the port.

On the way he told me an interesting fact and an anecdote, both of which

throw considerable light upon the convict’s opinion of the settlement of

Bourail.

The fact was this: There are in New Caledonia a class of convicts who

would be hard to find anywhere else. These are voluntary convicts,

and they are all women. A woman commits a crime in France and suffers

imprisonment for it. On her release she finds herself, as in England,

a social outcast, with no means of gaining a decent living. Instead of

continuing a career of crime, as is usually the case here, some of these

women will lay their case before the Correctional Tribunal, and petition

to be transported to New Caledonia, where they will find themselves in a

society which has no right to point the finger of scorn at them.

As a rule the petition is granted, plus a free passage, unless the woman

has friends who can pay. Generally the experiment turns out a success.

The woman gets into service or a business, or perhaps marries a _liberé_

or concessionnaire, and so wins her way back not only to respectability

as it goes in Caledonia, but sometimes to comfort and the possession of

property which she can leave to her children.

As a matter of fact, the proprietress of the little hotel at the port

was one of these women. She had come out with a few hundred francs

that her friends had subscribed. She now owns the hotel, which does an

excellent business, a freehold estate of thirty or forty acres, and she

employs fifteen Kanakas, half a dozen convicts, and a Chinaman—who is her

husband, and works harder than any of them.

The anecdote hinged somewhat closely on the fact, and was itself a fact.

There is a weekly market at Bourail, to which the convict farmers bring

their produce and such cows, horses, calves, etc., as they have to sell.

Every two or three years their industry is stimulated and rewarded by the

holding of an agricultural exhibition, and, as a rule, the Governor goes

over to distribute the prizes. One of these exhibitions had been held,

I regret to say, a short time before my arrival, and the Governor who

has the work of colonisation very seriously at heart, made speeches both

appropriate and affecting to the various winners as they came to receive

their prizes.

At length a hoary old scoundrel, who had developed into a most successful

stock-breeder, and had become quite a man of means, came up to receive

his prizes from his Excellency’s hands. M. Feuillet, as usual, made

a very nice little speech, congratulating him on the change in his

fortunes, which, by the help of a paternal government, had transformed

him from a common thief and vagabond to an honest and prosperous owner of

property.

So well did his words go home that there were tears in the eyes of the

reformed reprobate when he had finished, but there were many lips in the

audience trying hard not to smile when he replied:

“_Ah, oui, mon Gouverneur!_ if I had only known what good chances an

unfortunate man has here I would have been here ten years before.”

What his Excellency really thought on the subject is not recorded.

The hotel was crowded that night for the steamer was to sail for Noumea,

as usual, at five o’clock in the morning; but as Madame was busy she was

kind enough to give up her own chamber to me; and so I slept comfortably

to the accompaniment of a perfect bombardment of water on the corrugated

iron roof. Others spread themselves on tables and floors as best they

could, and paid for accommodation all the same.

By four o’clock one of those magical tropic changes had occurred, and

when I turned out the moon was dropping over the hills to the westward,

and Aurora was hanging like a huge white diamond in a cloudless eastern

sky. The air was sweetly fresh and cool. There were no mosquitos, and

altogether it was a good thing to be alive, for the time being at least.

Soon after the little convict camp at the port woke up. We had our early

coffee, with a dash of something to keep the cold out, and I made an

early breakfast on tinned beef and bread—convict rations—and both very

good for a hungry man. Then came the news that the steamboat _La France_

had tied up at another port to the northward on account of the storm, and

would not put in an appearance until night, which made a day and another

night to wait, as the coast navigation is only possible in daylight.

I naturally said things about getting up at four o’clock for nothing

more than a day’s compulsory loafing, but I got through the day somehow

with the aid of some fishing and yarning with the surveillants and the

convicts, one of whom, a very intelligent Arab, told me, with quiet

pride, the story of his escape from New Caledonia twelve years before.

He had got to Australia in an open boat, with a pair of oars, the

branch of a tree for a mast and a shirt for a sail. He made his way to

Europe, roamed the Mediterranean as a sailor for nine years, and then,

at Marseilles, he had made friends with a man who turned out to be a

_mouchard_. This animal, after worming his secret out of him under pledge

of eternal friendship, earned promotion by giving him away, and so here

he was for life.

He seemed perfectly content, but when I asked him what he would do with

that friend if he had him in the bush for a few minutes, I was answered

by a gleam of white teeth, a flash of black eyes, and a shake of the

head, which, taken together, were a good deal more eloquent than words.

[Illustration: One of the Lowest Types of Criminal Faces. An illustration

of the ease with which it is possible to disguise the chin, typical of

moral weakness, and the wild-beast mouth, which nearly all Criminals

have, by means of moustache and beard.

_By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd._]

_La France_ turned up that afternoon, so did the Commission of

Inspection from Bourail with several other passengers. I was told that

we should be crowded, but until I got on board in the dawn of the next

morning I never knew how crowded a steamer could be.

I had travelled by many crafts under sail and steam from a south sea

island canoe to an Atlantic greyhound, but never had the Fates shipped

me on board such a craft as _La France_. She was an English-built cargo

boat, about a hundred and thirty feet long, with engines which had

developed sixty horse-power over twenty years ago. She had three cabins

on each side of the dog-kennel that was called the saloon.

If she had been allowed to leave an English port at all she would have

been licensed to carry about eight passengers aft and twenty on deck.

On this passage she had twelve first-class, about fifteen second, and

between fifty and sixty on deck, including twenty convicts and _relégués_

on the forecastle, and a dozen hard cases in chains on the forehatch.

She also carried a menagerie of pigs, goats, sheep, poultry, geese,

and ducks, which wandered at their own will over the deck-cargo which

was piled up to the tops of her bulwarks. Her quarter-deck contained

about twenty square feet, mostly encumbered by luggage. The second-class

passengers had to dine here somehow. The first-class dined in the saloon

in relays.

The food was just what a Frenchman would eat on a Caledonian coast-boat.

It was cooked under indescribable conditions which you couldn’t help

seeing; but for all that the miserable meals were studiously divided into

courses just as they might have been in the best restaurant in Paris.

Everything was dirty and everything smelt. In fact the whole ship

stank so from stem to stern that even the keenest nose could not have

distinguished between the smell of fried fish and toasted cheese. The

pervading odours were too strong. Moreover, nearly every passenger was

sick in the most reckless and inconsiderate fashion; so when it came to

the midday meal I got the _maître d’hôtel_, as they called the greasy

youth who acted as chief steward, to give me a bottle of wine, a little

tin of tongue, and some fairly clean biscuits, and with these I went

for’rard on to the forecastle and dined among the convicts.

The forecastle was high out of the water, and got all the breeze, and the

convicts were clean because they had to be. I shared my meal and bread

and wine with two or three of them. Then we had a smoke and a yarn, after

which I lay down among them and went to sleep, and so _La France_ and her

unhappy company struggled and perspired through the long, hot day back

into plague-stricken Noumea. When I left _La France_ I cursed her from

stem to stern, and truck to kelson. If language could have sunk a ship

she would have gone down there and then at her moorings; but my anathemas

came back upon my own head, for the untoward Fates afterwards doomed me

to make three more passages in her.

To get clean and eat a decent dinner at the Cercle was something of a

recompense even for an all-day passage in _La France_. But it is not a

very cheerful place to come back to, for the shadow of the Black Death

was growing deeper and deeper over the town. The plague was worse than

ever. The microbe had eluded the sentries and got under or over the iron

barriers, and was striking down whites and blacks indiscriminately,

wherefore I concluded that Noumea was a very good place to get out of,

and, as I thought, made my arrangements for doing so as quickly as

possible.

VII

_THE PLACE OF EXILES_

My next expedition was to include the forest camps to the south-west of

the island, and a visit to the Isle of Pines, an ocean paradise of which

I had read much in the days of my youth; wherefore I looked forward with

some anticipation to seeing it with the eyes of flesh. There would be no

steamer for three or four days, so the next day I took a trip over to the

Peninsula of Ducos, to the northward of the bay.

The glory of Ducos as a penal settlement is past. There are now only a

few “politicals,” and traitors, and convicts condemned a _perpétuité_;

that is to say, prisoners for life, with no hope of remission or release.

A considerable proportion of them are in hospital, dragging out the

remainder of their hopeless days, waiting until this or the other disease

gives them final release.

[Illustration: The Peninsula of Ducos. In the background is Ile Nou with

the Central Criminal Depôt.]

On another part of the peninsula, in a semi-circular valley, hemmed in

by precipitous hills, there is a piteously forlorn colony, that of the

_liberés collectifs_; that is to say, convicts who have been released

from prison, but are compelled to live in one place under supervision.

They are mostly men whose health has broken down under the work of the

_bagne_, or who have been released on account of old age.

They live in wretched little cabins on the allotments, which it is

their business to keep in some sort of cultivation. They have the poor

privileges of growing beards and moustaches if they like, and of wearing

blue dungaree instead of grey, and of earning a few pence a week by

selling their produce to the Administration.

This is not much, but they are extremely proud of it, and hold themselves

much higher than the common _forçat_. They do not consider themselves

prisoners, but only “in the service of the Administration.” I have

seldom, if ever, seen a more forlorn and hopeless collection of human

beings in all my wanderings.

There was, however, a time when Ducos was one of the busiest and

most important of the New Caledonian Settlements, for it was here

that the most notorious and most dangerous of the _communards_ were

imprisoned after their suppression in 1872. Here lived Louise Michel,

the high-priestess of anarchy, devoting herself to the care of the sick

and the sorrowing with a self-sacrifice which rivalled even that of the

Sisters of Mercy, and here, too, Henri Rochefort lived in a tiny stone

house in the midst of what was once a garden, and the delight of his days

of exile.

Louise Michel’s house has disappeared in the course of improvements.

Rochefort’s house is a roofless ruin in the midst of a jungle which takes

a good deal of getting through. It was from here that he made his escape

with Pain and Humbert and two other _communards_ in an English cutter,

which may or may not have been in the harbour for that particular purpose.

One night they did not turn up to muster, but it was explained that

Rochefort and Humbert had gone fishing, and the others were away on

a tour “with permission.” As they did not return during the night

search-parties were sent out for them. Meanwhile, they had kept a

rendezvous at midnight with the cutter’s boat and got aboard.

The next day was a dead calm; and, as the cutter lay helpless at her

anchor, the fugitives concealed themselves about her cargo as best they

could. The hue and cry was out all over the coast, but the searchers

looked everywhere but just the one place where they were. If the next day

had been calm they must have been caught, for the authorities had decided

on a thorough search of every vessel in the harbour. Happily for them a

breeze sprang up towards the next morning, and the cutter slipped quietly

out. Once beyond the outward reef the fugitives were in neutral water,

and, being political prisoners, they could not be brought back.

By daylight the truth was discovered, but pursuit was impossible. The

cutter had got too long a start for any sailing vessel to overtake her

in the light wind, and the only steamer which the administration then

possessed had gone away to Bourail to fetch back the Governor’s wife. If

it had been in the harbour that morning, at least one picturesque career

might have been very different. MacMahon was President at the time, and

of all men on earth he had the most deadly fear of Rochefort, so he took

a blind revenge for his escape by ordering the Governor to expel every

one who was even suspected of assisting in the escape.

The story was told to me by one who suffered through this edict quite

innocently, and to his utter ruin. He was then one of the most prosperous

men in Noumea. He owned an hotel and several stores, and had mail and

road-making contracts with the government. Unhappily, one of his stores

was on the Peninsula of Ducos, and the man who managed it was reputed to

be very friendly with Rochefort.

This was enough. He was ordered to clear out to Australia in two months.

It was in vain that he offered himself for trial on the definite charge

of assisting a prisoner to escape. The Governor and every one else

sympathised deeply with him, but they dare not even be just, and out

he had to go. He is now canteen-keeper on the Isle of Pines, selling

groceries and drink to the officials and _relégués_ at prices fixed by

the government. He told me this story one night at dinner at his own

table.

The general amnesty of 1880 released Louise Michel and the rest of those

who had survived the terrible revolt of 1871 from Ducos and the Isle of

Pines.

There are, however, two other celebrities left on Ducos. One of them

is a tall, erect, grizzled Arab, every inch a chieftain, even in his

prison garb. This is Abu-Mezrag-Mokrani, one of the leaders of the

Kabyle insurrection of 1871, a man who once had fifteen thousand desert

horsemen at his beck and call. Now he rules a little encampment in one

of the valleys of the peninsula, containing forty or fifty of his old

companions-in-arms, deported with him after the insurrection was put down.

When the Kanaka rebellion broke out in New Caledonia in 1878, Abu-Mezrag

volunteered to lead his men against the rebels in the service of France.

The offer was accepted and the old warriors of the desert acquitted

themselves excellently among the tree-clad mountains of “La Nouvelle.”

When the rebellion was over a petition for their pardon was sent to the

home government, but the remnant of them are still cultivating their

little patches of ground on Ducos.

The other surviving celebrity is known in Caledonia as the Caledonian

Dreyfus, and this is his story:

In 1888 Louis Chatelain was a _sous-officier_ of the line stationed

in Paris. He was dapper, good-looking, and a delightful talker. He

engaged the affections of a lady whose ideas as to expenditure were far

too expansive to be gratified out of the pay of a _sous-officier_. Poor

Chatelain got into debt, mortgaged or sold everything that he had, and

still the lady was unsatisfied. Finally, after certain recriminations,

and when he had given her everything but his honour, she suggested a

means by which he could make a fortune with very little trouble. She

had, it appears, made the acquaintance of a gentleman who knew some one

connected with a foreign army, who would give twenty thousand francs for

one of the then new-pattern Lebel rifles.

He entered into correspondence with the foreign gentleman, addressing

him—c/o the —— Embassy, Paris. His letters were stopped, opened,

photographed, and sent on. So were the replies. Then the negotiations

were suddenly broken off, Chatelain was summoned before the military

tribunal and confronted with the _pièces de conviction_. He confessed

openly, posing as a martyr to _la grande passion_—and his sentence was

deportation for life.

[Illustration: The remains of Henri Rochefort’s House.]

[Illustration: The Bedroom of Louis Chatelain, “The Caledonian Dreyfus”

in Ducos. The photographs on the wall and the one on the table are those

of the woman who ruined him.]

When I went into his little sleeping-room at Ducos, I found on a

little table beside his mosquito-curtained bed, a photograph of a very

good-looking young woman. On the wall above the table there were two

others of the same enchantress, the evil genius of his life. The moment

he fell she deserted him. Unlike many another Frenchwoman, who has done

so for lover or husband, she did not follow him across the world to

Caledonia, and yet every night and morning of his life Louis Chatelain

kneels down in front of that table as he might before an altar, and says

his prayers with his eyes on those photographs.

VIII

_A PARADISE OF KNAVES_

For the next three or four days after my visit to the Peninsula of Ducos

there was nothing definite to be learnt about means of transit. In fact

there was nothing certain except the plague—always that Spectre which

seemed to stand at the end of every pathway. It was really getting quite

monotonous, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should ever get out

of Noumea at all.

Then I began making inquiries as to an over-land journey through the

interior. No, that was impossible, save at great risk and expense. The

Spectre had jumped the mountains. Huge armies of rats had appeared in the

bush, just as though some Pied Piper of Hamelin had enticed them away

from the towns into the mountains, and they were spreading the plague in

all directions among the Kanakas.

It is a curious fact that rats, who of all animals are the most

susceptible to the plague, will migrate from a plague-stricken town just

as they will try to escape from a sinking ship.

Convicts and Kanakas were dying in unknown numbers. Camps were being

closed, and the rains were coming on. There was nothing to be seen or

done worth seeing or doing, so I had to content myself with wandering

about Noumea and the neighbourhood, taking photographs, making

acquaintances with convicts and _liberés_ and getting stories out of

them, wondering the while, as every one else was doing, what the Spectre

was going to do next.

As far as I was concerned, he did me the unkindest turn that he could

have done, save one. He infected the only two decent boats on the Coast

Service, and so left me the choice between voyaging to the Isle of Pines

in _La France_ or stopping where I was.

I had to get to the island somehow, so I chose _La France_, and at five

o’clock one morning, after being duly inspected and squirted, I once more

boarded the detestable little hooker.

I thought my first passage in her was bad enough, but it was nothing to

this. She was swarming with passengers, bond and free, black, white, and

yellow, from end to end. She was loaded literally down to the deck, and

she smelt, if possible, even stronger than she did before. The worst of

this was that before we got to the Isle of Pines we had to get outside

the reef and into the open water.

I have seen too much of seafaring to be easily frightened on salt water,

but I candidly admit that I was frightened then. In fact, when we got

outside and she began to feel the swell, I took out my swimming-jacket

and put it on, though, of course this was a pretty forlorn hope, as the

water was swarming with sharks and the shortest swim would have been a

couple of miles. Still, one always likes to take the last chance.

Happily, she was English-built, and high in the bows, so she took nothing

but spray over. Two or three green seas would have swamped her to a

certainty, but they didn’t come, and so in time we got there.

On board I renewed the acquaintance of the Commandant of Ile Nou, who was

taking his wife and family to the Isle of Pines, which is to Caledonia as

the Riviera is to Europe. At midday we stopped at Prony, the headquarters

of the forest camps which I was to visit later on my return; and we

lunched in the saloon with six inches of water on the floor. That was

the first time I ever saw a steamer baled out with buckets. Still, they

managed to get the water under somehow. There didn’t appear to be a pump

on board.

When we passed the reef, and started on the sixty-mile run through the

open sea, some began to say their prayers and some said other things, but

in the end we worried through, and just as the evening star was growing

golden in the west we anchored in the lovely little Bay of Kuto.

Never before had I heard the anchor chain rumble through the hawse-hole

with greater thankfulness than I did then, and, judging by the limp and

bedraggled look of every one, bond and free, who went ashore, I don’t

think I was alone in hoping that I had seen the last of _La France_—which

I hadn’t.

My friend the Commandant introduced me to his _confrère_ of the Isle of

Pines. He was not particularly sympathetic. I believe I was the only

Englishman who had ever come to the island with authority to inspect his

domains, and he didn’t take very kindly to the idea. Still, ruler and

all as he was in his own land, the long arm of the Minister of Colonies

reached even to the Isle of Pines, and, although he did not even offer me

the usual courtesy of a glass of wine, he handed the credentials back to

me, and said:

“_Très bien, monsieur!_ If you will come and see me at nine o’clock

to-morrow morning we will make arrangements. You will, I think, find

accommodation at the canteen.”

With that I took my leave, and went out into the darkness to find the

canteen and some one to carry my luggage there. I found a surveillant,

who found a _relégué_, and he shouldered my bag and found the canteen,

the only semblance of an hotel on the island.

There, quite unknowingly, I stumbled upon excellent friends. The

canteen-keeper was the man whose story I told in the last chapter. I was

a stranger from a very strange land. Their resources are very limited;

for communications with the _grand terre_ were few and far between, and

yet the twenty days that I was compelled to stop on the Isle of Pines,

proved after all to be the pleasantest time that I had spent in New

Caledonia.

But there was one exception, happily only a transient experience, yet bad

enough in its way. If the plague was not on board _La France_ it ought

to have been, for never did a fitter nursery of microbes get afloat, and

when I got into the wretched little bedroom, which was all they could fix

up for me that night, I honestly believed that the little wriggling devil

had got into the white corpuscles of my blood.

I had all the symptoms with which the conversation of the doctors at the

Cercle in Noumea had made me only too familiar—headache, stomachache,

nausea, dizziness, aching under the armpits and in the groins.

Of course, I was about as frightened as an ordinary person could very

well be, a great deal more so in fact than I had been a few years before

when I first experienced the sensation of being shot at. It may have been

the fright or the fact, but the glands were swelling.

Then I caught myself repeating fragments of “Abide with me,” mixed up

with Kipling’s “Song of the Banjo”; and when a lucid interval came I

decided that the case was serious.

I had three things with me which no traveller in the outlands of the

world should be without—quinine, chlorodyne, and sulpholine lotion. I

took a big dose of quinine, and then one of chlorodyne. I should be

afraid to say how big they were. Then I soaked four handkerchiefs in the

lotion, put them where they were wanted, and laid down to speculate as to

what would happen if the microbe had really caught me?

I had an appointment with the Commandant at nine o’clock the next

morning. His house was more than a mile away. What would happen if I

couldn’t walk in the morning?

I should have to explain matters, if I were still sane, to the people at

the canteen. I had just come from Noumea, the very centre of the plague.

The inference would be instant. The military doctor in charge of the

hospital would be sent for, and he would say _la Peste_. I should be

taken to the hospital, where, a day or two after, I saw a man suspected

of the plague die of blood-poisoning, and once there—_quien sabe?_

Thinking this and many other incongruously mixed-up things, I went to

sleep. Probably it was only a matter of a few minutes altogether. Nine

hours after I woke and thought I was in heaven. The pains and the deadly

fear were gone. I pulled my watch out from under my pillow. It was ten

minutes to seven. The light was filtering in through the closely shut

_persiennes_. The waves on the silver-sanded beach within a few yards of

my bedroom were saying as plainly and seductively as waves ever said:

“Come and have a dip, and wash all that plague nonsense out of your head.”

So I got up, opened the window, put on my deck-shoes, and walked down to

the beach.

I could walk! Out of hell I had come back to earth. A few hours before I

had really believed that the next dawn would be shadowed by the presence

of the Black Death. Now I looked up at the sapphire sky, and threw my

hands above my head to make sure that the pains in the armpits were gone.

Then I stepped out to the full length of my stride along the smooth, hard

coral sand, to see if the groins were right.

Having reached a decent distance from the canteen I rolled into the cool,

bright, blue water, and for half an hour I splashed around—not daring to

go much beyond my depth, because those same blue waters are often cut by

the black triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin—thinking how good a thing it

was to live instead of dying, especially in such a paradise as this.

When I paid my official visit after breakfast, I found M. le Commandant

in a more friendly mood. We exchanged cigarettes and compliments, and

then we had a stroll round the little settlement of Kuto.

Kuto is most exquisitely situated on a promontory between two delicious,

white-shored, palm-fringed bays, broken with fantastic, tree-crowned

rocks. Long ago it was the home of the “politicals” and those soldiers

of the _Commune_ who had not been thought dangerous enough to be put

in batches against a wall and shot. In those days Kuto, so they told

me, might have been taken for a tiny suburb of Paris. It had a theatre,

and a couple of newspapers, one serious and one humorous. There were

social functions and many gaieties in the intervals of road-making and

barrack-building.

But nowadays all this is changed. The _deportés_ have gone back to

France, and the _relégués_ have come in their place, which is the same

thing as saying that over this lovely scrap of earth there has descended

the moral night of incurable crime and hopeless despair. Kuto is now

a silent place of prisons, barracks, and workshops, inhabited by a few

soldiers and officials and many blue-clad figures with clean-shaven

faces, mostly repulsive to look upon and all stamped with the seal of

stolid despair.

In order that you may understand what manner of people these were it is

necessary to explain the meaning of the French legal term _relégation_,

since there is nothing at all corresponding to it in the English system.

In France, as in all countries, there are criminals of many kinds and

ranks, and of these the French _relégués_ are the lowest and meanest.

I have said before that in the criminal society of New Caledonia the

assassins, forgers, embezzlers, and what we should call swell-mobsmen

form the aristocracy. The _relégués_ are the lowest class. They are the

gutter-snipes of crime; the hard cases; the human refuse beyond all hope

of social salvation; mental and moral derelicts, of no use to themselves

or anybody else.

We have thousands of them in this country, but we don’t deal as wisely

or as humanely with them as the French do. Our judges and magistrates

send them to prison again and again, well knowing that they will only

come out to commit more crimes and be sent again to prison, becoming in

the intervals of liberty the wives and husbands and parents of other

criminals.

This is one of the social problems which they deal with better in

France. There is no nonsense there about a criminal “having paid his

debt to society” when he has served his sentence, and being, therefore,

free to go and commit more crimes. When a man or woman has committed a

certain number of crimes of the minor sort, or has been convicted of

hopeless immorality or alcoholism—in other words, when there is reason

to believe that he or she is absolutely unfit to possess the rights of

citizenship—such person may be, in the last resort, sentenced as in

England, say, to twelve or eighteen months’ hard labour as punishment for

that particular crime.

Now in an English police-court the habitual criminal might possibly thank

the magistrate and go away to “do it on his head,” but in France he may

hear the fatal words:

“At the expiration of your sentence you will be placed in _relégation_.”

[Illustration: The “Market” in the Convent, Isle of Pines. The Female

_Réliqués_ are drawn up before one of the Prison Buildings. In the

foreground are the Kanakas waiting to sell their fruit and vegetables.

_Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph._]

Of this the meaning is: “You have proved yourself unfit to live in the

society of your fellow-citizens. Punishment is no warning to you. You

will neither reform yourself nor be reformed; therefore Society has done

with you: you are banished! You will be fed and clothed and attended when

you are sick. You will have work found for you, and you will be paid for

it. But if you won’t work there will be the prison and the cell for you.

Now go, and make the best of it.”

The banishment is practically for life. There are circumstances under

which a _relégué_ can win his release, but there are two things that he

can never do: he can never gain a concession and marry and settle down on

his own property; and he can never gain restoration of the full rights of

citizenship—both of which, as I have shown, the _forçat_ can do.

As we drove out through the big gate in the wall which had been built

across the neck of the peninsula to keep revolting Kanakas out, I

remarked what a pity it was that such a lovely land should be nothing

better than the habitation of scoundrels, to which the Commandant replied

that the island served the purposes of the Administration very well, and

if the _relégués_ were not there it would have to be given over to the

Kanakas, for free colonists would not come.

I thought—but, of course, I didn’t say—what British colonists would

have made of such a paradise—fertile, well-watered, and blest with an

absolutely perfect climate.

The first thing I noticed in the Isle of Pines was the excellence and

extent of the roads. They are broad, level, and beautifully kept, and,

tiny as the island is, there are many more miles of them than there are

in all New Caledonia. They were mostly made by the deported _communards_,

who also built the solid stone prisons, barracks, hospitals, chapels, and

official residences which seemed to me to be ample for about twice the

present white population of the island, which is under two thousand, bond

and free.

I found very little difference between the treatment of the _relégués_

and the best class of convicts, save that they were rather better fed,

and lived in open camps. They slept in hammocks in common dormitories,

and were permitted to have any little luxuries that they could buy

with their earnings. There were no plank-beds or chains to be seen

in the camps. In fact, they might just have been ordinary industrial

settlements, save for the blue cotton livery, the bandless straw hats,

and the hang-dog, hopeless faces which looked out under the brims.

But before our first drive was half over we passed a big quadrangle of

high, white walls, and over the little black door in front was the word

“Prison” in big black letters.

“That’s for the hard cases, I suppose?” I said to the Commandant as we

passed.

“Yes,” he said; “we will visit it another day, and you shall see. This is

worse than Ile Nou, you know. There they have the aristocrats. Here we

have the canaille, the sweepings of the streets. Any one of these animals

here would cut your throat for a few francs if he dare.”

Then I told him what the Commandant of Bourail had said about locking

doors.

He laughed, and said:

“_Parfaitement_, but you had better lock your door here, and if you have

a revolver put it under your pillow.”

The advice was well-meant but somewhat superfluous. The faces I had seen

were quite enough. I soon found that my friend was somewhat of a cynic

and a humorist in his way, for when I asked him what was the greatest

punishment he could inflict on a recalcitrant _relégué_, he said:

“Make him work. Look at that gang of men yonder,” he went on, pointing

to the hillside, which a long row of blue-clad figures was breaking up

with picks and spades. “Every stroke of the pick is a punishment to

those men. They are wretches whose only idea of life is to get through

it without working. They have been thieves and swindlers, beggars and

_souteneurs_—everything that is useless and vile. There is nothing they

have not done to save themselves from working. Now, you see, we make them

work.”

“And if they won’t?”

“_Eh bien!_ They have stomachs—and soup and fish and meat and coffee and

a drink of wine now and then, with a cigarette or a pipe, are better than

bread and water, and the open air in a country like this is better than

the black cell or the _quartier disciplinaire_, which you will see later

on.”

“In other words,” I said, “you have gone back to the good old law: If a

man will not work, neither shall he eat. Well, I must admit that you deal

more sensibly with your hopeless vagabonds than we do with ours.”

“_Bien possible_,” he said, with some justification, “you will see that

at least we make some use of them, more than they would in Paris or

London, I think. For instance, this is our farm.”

As he said this we pulled up opposite to a rustic arch, over which were

the words _Ferme Uro_.

We went down through a flowery avenue to a pretty verandahed house almost

buried in greenery and flowers—the home of the Farm Superintendent. He

came out and greeted his territorial lord, and then we went over the farm.

It was as perfect a specimen of what the French call _petit culture_ as

could be imagined. It was, in fact, rather a collection of exquisitely

kept vegetable gardens than a farm. Every patch was irrigated by water

from the low hills which run across the centre of the island. Every kind

of vegetable, tropical and temperate, was under cultivation, and outside

the gardens there were broad fields of maize and grass pasture.

In one of the fields I saw a long line of women hoeing the ridges for

corn, and at one end of the line stood a white-clad surveillant, revolver

on hip. For the fiftieth time my English prejudices were shocked when

I learnt that these were a detachment of the female _relégués_; and I

wondered what would be thought at home if the lady-guests at Aylesbury

were turned out to work in the fields under the charge of a male warder.

Here it was quite a matter of course.

“Wait till you have made the acquaintance of the ladies,” laughed the

Commandant, in reply to a rather injudicious question, “and you will see

that they want some watching.”

IX

_USE FOR THE USELESS_

From the farm of Uro, after a drink of delicious milk, which, for some

reason or other, took me back instantly to far-away England, we went on a

few miles along the road to the ateliers, or workshops, where all kinds

of industries, from boot-making to waggon-building, were being carried on

in a somewhat leisurely style, and under what seemed to me very slight

supervision.

“This is a hard school for them to learn and us to teach in,” said the

Commandant. “The _forçats_ generally know a trade and are accustomed to

work, if they have not been gentlemen; but these have been brought up

to hate the name of work. Yet you see we have made something of them.

Everything that is used on the island is made here. In fact, we make

something which will be used a long way from here.”

I saw this later on during our visit to the prison, which was too

similar to the others to need any description. About a score of the

occupants of a big shed within the walls were busy plaiting a long, reedy

grass which others, squatted about the yard, were stripping and preparing

for them. They had to get through so much a day or their rations were

docked. The unhappy wastrels didn’t seem to like the regime at all, but

they worked, if only for their stomachs’ sake.

When we left the prison we went to a long shed, where the plaits were

being worked up into matting—miles of it there appeared to be—and when I

asked what it was all for, I learnt that it was destined to be trodden by

the millions of careless feet which would saunter through the halls and

corridors of the Paris Exhibition.

This was the contribution of this far-away spot to the great show. Of

course, those who were making it knew what it was for. Perhaps their

thoughts—if they had any by this time, beyond their daily meat and

drink, or any dreams of delight, beyond the little luxuries that their

hard-earned pence could buy them at the canteen—were travelling even

as they stitched back to the elysium of crime and idleness which they

would never see again. From what I saw and heard I doubt not that many

a bitter thought was woven in with the miles of matting which afterwards

covered the exhibition floors.

The next day we went to make the acquaintance of the lady _reléguées_,

who are accommodated in the Convent, as it is called, under the charge

of a Mother Superior and six Sisters of St. Joseph, among whom I was a

little surprised to find one who, learning that I was English, came and

greeted me in a deliciously delicate Irish brogue. She was an Irish lady

who had taken the vows in a French Convent, and had voluntarily exiled

herself to this far-away foreign land to spend the rest of her days in a

prison. Still, she and her French sisters appeared to be most cheerfully

contented with their lot.

They had, however, one little trace of feminine vanity left. They sorely

wanted their photographs taken, and my Irish compatriot wanted it most

of all. It was against the rules not only of the Administration, but of

their order, wherefore the photographs which I did take of the convent

and its occupants did not turn out successes.

There were one hundred and seventy-six female _reléguées_ in the Convent

just then, mostly healthy, hearty-looking women of all ages, from twenty

to sixty. Their faces were, if anything, more repulsive than the men’s.

They had committed almost every possible crime, but most of them were

there for infanticide. I was the first man—not an official—that they had

seen, perhaps, for a good many years, for there are few visitors to the

Isles of Pines, and fewer still to the jealously guarded Convent.

A little before dinner that evening I was sitting under the trees in

front of the canteen jotting down some notes when I heard a voice, with

a suspicion of tears in it, asking whether “monsieur would speak for a

minute with an unfortunate woman.”

I turned round, and saw the gaunt figure and unlovely face of Marie, the

_reléguée_ housemaid of the canteen. Here was another human document, I

thought, so I told her to go on.

She was in great trouble, she told me, and as I was a friend of the

Government and of the Administration I could help her if I would. She had

been released from the Convent to take service at the canteen, but though

she was comfortable, and had a good master and mistress, her heart

was pining for the society of her husband, who was working in enforced

celibacy in far-away Bourail. They had been parted for a trifle, and she

was sure that if “Milor” interceded for her with the Director she would

be restored to his longing arms.

When she had finished, I said:

“And what was your husband sent out here for?”

“_Il a éventré un homme_,” she murmured.

“And what are you here for?” I continued.

“_J’ai tué mon enfant_,” she murmured again as softly as before.

I did not think the reunion desirable, and so the petition was not

presented. Nevertheless, it would have probably been a very difficult

matter to have convinced that woman that she hadn’t a perfect right

to rejoin her husband, raise a family, and become with him a landed

proprietor. I learnt afterwards that she had been relegated to the Isle

of Pines for theft aggravated by assault with a hatchet.

Somehow the food that she handed round the table at the canteen that

night didn’t taste quite as nice as usual, in spite of the conversation

of Madame Blaise and her two charming daughters, the elder of whom,

though she had never been farther into the world than Noumea, might, as

far as grace of speech and action went, have just come out from Paris.

In the course of the next few days I wandered, sometimes in the

Commandant’s carriage and sometimes afoot, all over the island, and

ascended its only mountain, the Pic ’Nga, on the top of which there are

the foundations of an old fort and look-out tower, dating back, so they

say, to the old days of the pirates of the southern seas. From here you

can see every bay and inlet round the coast, and a very lovely picture

the verdant island made, fringed by its circlet of reefs and coral

islets, with their emerald lagoons and white breakers, and the deep blue

of the open ocean beyond.

Another day I went through the native reserve, and visited the settlement

of the Marist Brothers, a most delightful little nook where the good

brothers lead a contented existence, teaching their bronze scholars the

beauties of the Catholic Faith, and the beneficence of the good French

Government, which graciously permits them to live in a part of their

own country, and sell their produce to the officials and such of their

prisoners as have money _à prix fixe_.

After this I visited the coffee plantation—the only actually profitable

industry in which prisoners are employed in New Caledonia—the hospitals

and the disciplinary camps, which I found practically the same as those

which I had already seen on the mainland.

The hospital was, however, an even more delightful abode of disease and

crime than the one on Ile Nou. It stands well up the hillside behind the

Convent, and the view from its terraces is one of the most beautiful I

have ever seen. With the exception of the man who died of blood-poisoning

under suspicion of the plague, the principal disease seemed general

decay and old age. In fact, out of a criminal population of over twelve

hundred, there were only thirty patients, for which reason the Isle of

Pines, with its perfect climate, reminded me of Mark Twain’s Californian

health resort, which was so healthy that the inhabitants had to go

somewhere else to die.

Later on I saw a much more mournful place than the hospital. This was the

Camp des Impotents.

I don’t think I ever saw a more miserable, forlorn-looking collection of

human beings than I found here. They were not suffering from any specific

disease, or else, of course, they would have been in the hospital. They

are just mental and physical derelicts, harmless imbeciles, cripples

incapable of work, and men dying quietly of old age.

Of course, the camp was exquisitely situated, and their lot struck me as

being, after all, not a very bad ending to a useless, hopeless life—to

dream away the last years under that lovely sun, breathing that delicious

air, and waiting quietly for the end without anxiety or care.

The poor wretches looked at me somewhat as they might have looked at

a visitor from some other world. They had ceased to be criminals or

prisoners. They had no more crime left in them, and they would not

have escaped if they could, so in their case discipline was relaxed

and I spent a few francs in buying some of the rude carvings and a few

walking-sticks which they had made out of lianes, the only work with

which they whiled away the long sunny hours. It was worth twenty times

the money to see their feeble, almost pitiful, delight as they looked at

the little silver coins in their brown, shrivelled hands, and I really

think that some at least of the blessings which followed me out of the

camp were sincere. But when I said this to the Commandant he only smiled,

and said:

“Perhaps! But no doubt they would like a visitor from England every day.”

A few days after I had finished my round of visits to the prison camps

I had the privilege of assisting at a session of the Disciplinary

Commission, a court whose function it is to hear complaints, grant

redresses and privileges, try offences against the penal regulations,

and inflict punishment. The Commandant is President, _ex officio_, and

he is assisted by an officer of the Administration, who is a sort of

civil magistrate and the Conductor of Works. These functionaries sit at a

curved desk on a platform, and here, for the first time, I took my seat

on a judicial bench.

There was a space of about twelve feet between the end of the platform

and the railing which divided off the rest of the hall. Here the

Principal Surveillant sat at one desk, and opposite to him on the other

side of the room the _Greffier_ or Clerk of the Court.

The court being a French one, precedence was, of course, given to the

ladies. They were brought in one by one through a side door between the

railings and the platform. The triviality of their complaints testified

eloquently to the narrowness of the little lives they led.

One woman accused another of stealing her needle and thread so as to get

her into trouble. Another wanted three halfpence of her savings, which

she said the Mother Superior was unjustly keeping from her. A third

wanted to know why she hadn’t had a letter from a friend of hers in

service in Noumea, and was gravely informed that the plague had seriously

interrupted communications and the letter would probably arrive as soon

as possible. Another had rheumatism, and wanted to be taken off the

field-work; besides, she was getting too old, she was nearly seventy—and

her request was promptly granted.

Then a few were accused of little acts of idleness or insubordination or

wastefulness. These were either fined a penny or so, according to the

magnitude of the offence, or dismissed with a caution.

It must not, however, be imagined from this that the ladies of the

_relégation_ at the Isle of Pines are exactly models of female

deportment, for, as the Commandant told me afterwards, they once

revolted, and before help could be got they had caught two surveillants,

stripped them stark naked, and made them run the gauntlet of the Convent

between two rows of beautiful palms, after which they douched them well

in a muddy duck-pond. They were proceeding to treat the good sisters in

the same way when rescue arrived from Kuto and the other camps.

The male prisoners were a terribly hard-looking lot. They were brought up

in twos and threes—plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses—and they accused

each other of every sort of crime, from stealing a bit of bread to

attempted murder.

The English axiom about dog eating dog does not hold good among

_relégués_. They will steal from each other just as cheerfully as they

will from anybody else, and will descend to any little meanness to spite

each other. Most of the offences were of the pettiest and meanest kind,

such as stealing each other’s clothes, or food, or tools and selling them

for a penny or so to some one else who had lost his.

Others were up for being out of bounds after hours, and I noticed that

these nearly all said they’d been fishing, which was not inappropriate.

During the proceedings I was very much struck by the appearance of

an Arab in the grey uniform of the _quartier disciplinaire_. He was

a tall, well-built, handsome fellow of about thirty, with a frank,

open expression and an ever-smiling mouth which continually showed a

magnificent set of teeth. There was a wonderful difference between him

and his fellow-scoundrels, but I learned afterwards that he was the

biggest scoundrel of the whole lot.

Two or three hundred years ago he would probably have commanded a fleet

of Corsairs, and made his name a terror from one end of the Mediterranean

to the other. Now, thanks to changed environment, he was only a deserter

and a common thief who could not even keep his hands off the property of

his fellow-thieves.

The procedure of the Court was quite different to anything we have in

England. The prisoners were all, as I say, brought up and examined

individually with accusers and witnesses. Then they were taken away

what time the Court deliberated and fixed the sentence. Then the whole

lot were brought in and ranged up along the two sides of the room. The

_greffier_ called out the names, and each man stepped forward, heard his

sentence, and was marched out. The Arab took his fifteen days’ prison

with an even jauntier smile than usual.

While this was going on I had been making a study in criminal

physiognomy, and I came to the conclusion that if forty criminals were

taken at random from English prisons, dressed exactly as these forty

French criminals were, and mixed up with them, it would be absolutely

impossible to tell which were French and which were English. There is no

nationality in crime. Criminals belong to a distinct branch of the human

family, and the family likeness among them is unmistakable.

As we were driving back that morning the Commandant invited me to a

picnic which he was giving in honour of the Commandant of Ile Nou and

myself. Naturally I accepted, and, being on the subject of pleasure

excursions, I said:

“Of course you must have some delightful yachting and fishing about these

lovely bays. I have been wondering why I haven’t seen any sailing craft

about.”

“That is forbidden,” he said. “No one may own even a rowing boat without

the licence of the Administration in Noumea, and even then he would have

to give guarantees for its safety. You see these fellows would think

nothing of stealing a boat and trying to escape in it, and the owner

of the boat would be responsible for any escapes. Twenty-five of the

politicals once managed to make a big canoe and got away in it, but they

were all drowned or eaten by the sharks. Now all boats, even the Kanakas’

canoes, have to be kept locked and chained and guarded from sunset to

sunrise.”

This, then, was why these smooth, sunlit waters were sailless and

deserted—another effect of the curse of Crime on Paradise.

The picnic was a great success, and the Commandant proved a most

excellent host. There were four wagonette loads of us, with a fair

sprinkling of pretty girls, among whom, of course, were my host’s

daughters. Everybody seemed to have forgotten for the time that I was an

Englishman, and so I passed a very jolly day.

We camped in a big white stone building which had once been a

_gendarmerie_ barracks, standing in a delightful valley near to the

entrance of a magnificent limestone cavern. We lunched sumptuously under

the verandah, and I think I prattled French more volubly than I had ever

done before. Then we went and shot pigeons, quite half as big again as

the English variety, and splendid eating. The woods of the Isle of Pines

swarmed with them and other feathered game whose names I don’t remember.

Of course, we wound up with a dance, and this was the queerest dance

I had ever seen. Our drivers and attendants were, of course, all

_relégués_, and so were the musicians. One ingenious scoundrel led the

orchestra with a fiddle that he had made himself, even to the strings and

the bow. It had an excellent tone, and he played it very well. I wanted

to buy it, but he loved it and wouldn’t sell.

I must say that I pitied these musicians not a little as I watched them

standing in a corner looking with hungry eyes upon the Forbidden and the

Unattainable as it floated about the room in dainty light draperies with

the arms of other men about its waist—for the _relégué_ is not like the

_forçat_. He has no hope of marriage, even with the meanest of his kind.

His sentence includes, and very wisely too, perpetual celibacy.

All the same, I tried to picture to myself a picnic, say, at Dartmoor,

with a company of English men and maidens dancing in one of the prison

halls to music made by a convict band!

When the feast was over every bottle, full and empty, every knife,

fork, spoon, plate, cup, and dish was counted over. The remnants were

given away, but everything else was packed under the official eye. If

the slightest trifle had been overlooked it would have been immediately

stolen. This is one of the peculiarities of picnicing in Prisonland.

A few days afterwards my pleasant exile came to an end. The ungainly form

of _La France_ waddled into the bay, bringing news of the outside world.

The principal items were to the effect that the plague was increasing

merrily in Noumea, and that the victorious Boers were driving the British

into the sea.

We had quite a sad little supper that night at the canteen, for I

was rapidly becoming quite one of the family. Still this was the

turning-point in my thirty-thousand-mile journey. At daybreak the snub

nose of _La France_ would point toward home, and so when I had said

good-bye for the third or fourth time I pulled out across the bay which

lay like a sheet of shimmering silver under the glorious tropic moon,

and boarded the wretched little hooker for the last time with feelings

something akin to thankfulness.

When many days afterwards, I got back to Noumea the Director asked me

what I thought of the Isle of Pines.

“If you want my candid opinion,” I said, “I think it is an earthly

paradise which you have used as a dust-heap to shoot your rubbish on. If

the French Government would give me a hundred years’ lease of it, with

power to do as I liked as long as I didn’t break the law, I would find

capital enough in England and Australia to make it the Monte Carlo of the

South Pacific. I’d have everything there that there is at Monte Carlo,

and a couple of fast boats to bring the people over from Sydney in two

days. I’d have all the wealth and fashion of Australia and a good many

people from Europe there every year. In fact, your paradise should pay

you a million francs a year and me twenty millions.”

“Ah!” he said, after a few moments of silence. “That is just like you

English. That is enterprise. Here we only have government.”

X

_A LAND OF WOOD AND IRON_

New Caledonia is essentially a land of contrasts, both in scenery

and climate, and when I had left the sunny hills and plains and the

silver-sanded, palm-fringed bays of the Isle of Pines some fifty miles

behind me, I found myself in a region of enormous forests, clothing the

slopes of rugged mountains running sheer down to the sea from the clouds

which rarely broke above them.

There were no white beaches here, only boulder-strewn shores, which were

literally, as well as in the metaphorical sense, iron-bound. Not only the

rocks and the boulders, but the very sands of the shore themselves were

of iron, sometimes pure, but, as a rule, containing from eighty-five to

ninety per cent. of the metal.

This was Prony, the chief of a cluster of convict camps scattered about

what is literally a land of wood and iron. The wood is used, the iron

is not. Millions of tons of it are lying round the shores of one of the

finest and safest natural harbours in the world. A thousand miles away

are the coal-fields of New South Wales. Since it pays to ship copper and

iron from Spain and even South America to Swansea, one would think it

would pay to ship this to Newcastle. However, there it lies, waiting, I

suppose for some one to make fortunes out of it, and the energies of the

eight hundred or one thousand _relégués_ are devoted to hewing timber in

the forests, bringing it down to the shore, and floating it in big barges

to Prony, where there is a finely equipped saw and planing mill.

The dressed timber is, of course, the property of the Administration, and

is used for building wharves and jetties. A good deal of it is sold to

the public for building purposes. Some day, too, there is going to be a

real railway in Caledonia, and then the forest camps of the Baie du Sud

will furnish the sleepers, signal-posts, and platforms.

Meanwhile Prony has a railway all to itself, of which I shall here give

some account.

I was fortunate in making two very pleasant acquaintances in this

out-of-the-way corner of the world. One was the Commandant, who was

quite the most intelligent and broad-minded man of his class that I

met in Caledonia, and the other was the Doctor of the port. He was, of

course, a military Doctor, and held the rank of lieutenant in the army.

His official title was “Le Médecin Major!” He had seen a good deal of

the world, and had visited the United States on a French warship, and

from him I heard the first words of English that I had heard for nearly

three weeks. The dear little Doctor was proud of his English, and he had

a right to be. Although it was not very extensive, it was distinctly

select. One day the Commandant referred somewhat slightingly to it as

“_son peu d’Anglais_”; but perhaps that was because he couldn’t speak a

single word himself. At any rate, he never tried to.

At Prony, too, I renewed my acquaintance with the microbe. In fact, the

Doctor was there because of him. One day a coast steamer had brought

some tons of flour for the station, which depended entirely for its

food on Noumea and Australia. The sacks were stacked under cover in the

Commissariat Department. The little daughter of the Chief Surveillant

got playing about among these sacks. Some infected rats had been doing

the same a short time before, and so she got the plague.

The Doctor was telegraphed for to Noumea, and he came and saved her, and,

thanks to his skill and precautions, that was the only case in Prony,

although we actually had the infection in the midst of us, and for the

fifteen days that I was tied up there we ate bread made from that flour!

I often had to pass the sacks, but I did so at a respectful distance. One

morning, however, I had a bit of a fright. There had been a deluge of

rain all night, and, when I woke, I found a dead and very wet mouse on my

bedroom floor.

What if it had come from those sacks?

I drenched it with corrosive sublimate, and pitched it carefully out of

doors with a stick. Then I poured petroleum over it and burnt it and the

stick, and there the incident closed.

It always struck me as somewhat of a miracle that rats did not find those

sacks out and spread the plague broadcast among us. It would have been

a terrible thing in that isolated camp, cut off from all communication

with the world except the telegraph. Perhaps there were no rats. At any

rate, I never saw any, and felt duly thankful.

There are no roads about Prony, only footpaths, and not many of these, so

we paid our visits to the camps in steam launches. When it was fine it

was very pleasant work cruising about the picturesque bays, discoursing

the while on crime, criminals, and colonisation with the intelligent

Commandant, or swopping Anglo-French jokes and stories with the Doctor,

who had a very pretty wit of his own.

The Commandant was a firm believer in relegation and transportation

generally, but like every one else, he looked down upon the _liberé_ and

the _relégué_. According to him a _forçat_ was worth two _liberés_, and

a _liberé_ was worth a _relégué_ and a half, if not more. Nevertheless,

during my stay at Prony I saw a squad of _relégués_ working about as hard

as I have ever seen men work. This was on the railway aforesaid.

[Illustration: The Convict Railway at Prony.

_Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph._]

We started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across

two or three bays to the Camp du Nord. In all the other camps the timber

is got down from the hills to the sea by means of wood-paved slides,

which are quite as much a feature of this part of Caledonia as the

ice-slides are in Norway, but the Camp du Nord rises to the dignity of a

railway on which that morning I did the most curious bit of railroading I

have ever done.

When we had inspected the camp at the terminus and, for the Commandant’s

sake, I had duly admired the landing-stage, the trim buildings, and the

gardens in which the flowers and vegetables were struggling for existence

in the burning iron soil, the State car was brought out for us.

It was a platform on wheels, with four sloping seats facing backwards. I

could see the line twining away up through the forest, but there was no

engine.

Presently it, or, rather, they, materialised at the summons of the Chief

Surveillant. Fifteen blue-clad figures, each with a halter and hook-rope

over his shoulder, came out of one of the dormitories. There was a long

chain shackled to the front of the car. At an order the human beasts of

draught passed the halters over their heads and hooked on to the chain,

seven on each side and one ahead.

Then the Commandant invited the company to mount. There were seven of

us. The Commandant had brought his two little girls, and there were four

besides: the Chief Surveillant, who weighed fifteen stone if he weighed

a pound, the Chief Forester, who weighed a good twelve stone, and the

Doctor and myself, who were comparatively light weights.

I had often seen convicts harnessed to carts in England, and, of course,

I had ridden many miles in rickshaws in the East, but this was the first

time I had ever travelled in a car drawn by human beings who did it

because they had to, and who would have had their food docked if they had

refused to do it, and I confess that I didn’t exactly like it. Still, I

took my place, and the strange journey began.

At first it didn’t seem very bad, for the line was almost level, but when

we got into the hills the collar-work began, and our human cattle had to

bend their necks and their backs to it.

The line wound up through cuttings and over bridges at what seemed to me

an ever-increasing gradient. It was a damp, muggy, tropical morning. It

was not exactly raining, but the moisture soaked you to the bones for

all that, and the leaves and branches of the vast virgin forest on either

hand shone and dripped as the moisture condensed on them.

We perspired sitting still and making no more exertion than was necessary

for breathing, so you can imagine how those poor wretches tugging at

the chains sweated—and, great heavens, how they stank!—though the most

fastidious, under the circumstances, could hardly blame them for this.

For very shame’s sake I got off and walked whenever there was an excuse.

It made breathing pleasanter. So did the Doctor, who was a botanist

and found us Venus’ Fly-Traps and other weird vegetable monsters. The

Forester also got off now and then, not from motives of mercy, but to

point out varieties of timber to the Commandant. The Chief Surveillant

sat tight, probably on account of his weight, until I wanted to put him

into one of the halters.

But what, though I hardly like to say so, disgusted me most was the

absolute callousness, as it seemed to me, of the two little girls.

Perhaps the worst of it was that it was absolutely innocent. They had

been born and bred in Prisonland, and I don’t suppose they really saw

any difference between that sweating, straining, panting team of human

cattle and a team of mules or donkeys.

At last, to my own infinite relief, the journey was over. What it must

have been like to our team I can only guess from the fact that in a

distance of a little over four miles they had dragged us up one thousand

five hundred feet! It took an hour and three-quarters to do it. They were

dismissed when we got to the top and allowed to have a drink—of water.

The Doctor took us back. He understood the brake, and in consideration

for the young ladies he kept the speed moderate. We got back in twelve

minutes and a half. He said he had done it in six; but I wasn’t with him

then, and didn’t want to be.

Although forestry is, of course, the same all the world over, and,

therefore, not the sort of thing to describe here in detail, there were

two other camps that I visited which had interesting peculiarities of

their own. One of these was the Camp of Bonne Anse, a pretty little

spot whence a very steep and stony path led over a little range to a

promontory called Cap Ndoua, which is the telegraph station for the Isle

of Pines. I don’t know whether there are any other telegraphic stations

which have neither cables nor wires and make no use of electricity, but

this and the one on the Isle of Pines were the only ones I have ever seen.

When I was taken into the operating-room at Cap Ndoua I saw an apparatus

which looked to me like a gigantic magic-lantern with a telescope fixed

to its side. In the front of the big iron box there was a huge lens about

eighteen inches across, behind this was another smaller one, and behind

this again a powerful oil lamp, with a movable screen in front of it,

worked with a sort of trigger; on a table in the corner of the room were

the usual telegraphic transmitters and receivers in connection with the

general telegraphic system to Noumea and the cable to Sydney.

Every evening at seven, when it is of course quite dark, the operators

go on duty until nine. If Ndoua has a message to send to the island the

lamp is lit, and the man at the telescope in the observatory above the

hospital on the island sees a gleam of white light across the forty-six

miles of sea. He lights his lamp, and the preliminary signal twinkles

through the darkness. Then the shutter begins to work. Short and long

flashes gleam out in quick succession, the dots and dashes of the Morse

system in fact; and so the words which have come over the wire from

Noumea, or, perhaps, from the uttermost ends of the earth, are translated

into light, and sent through the darkness with even more than electrical

speed.

Saving only fogs, which are not very frequent in those latitudes, the

optic telegraph is just as reliable as the cable and the wire, and they

are good for any distance up to the range of the telescope. The apparatus

cost about £50 apiece, while a cable would cost several thousands; and it

struck me that for quick communication between the mainland and islands

or distant light-houses, the optic telegraph is worthy of a wider use

than it seems to have.

The other visit was to Port Boisé, near to Cape Queen Charlotte, which

is the extreme north-western point of Caledonia. Port Boisé is, like so

many other of the Caledonian convict camps, a most beautiful spot. It is

fertile, too, thanks to the existence of ancient bog lands, which make it

possible to temper the heat of the ferruginous soil, and so skill and

patience have made it a delightful oasis in the midst of the vast forest

and jungle which surround it on all sides save the one opening to the sea.

These forests and jungles, by the way, are of somewhat peculiar growth;

the timber is mostly what is called _chêne-gomme_, and is an apparent

combination of oak- and gum-tree. It is almost as hard as the iron which

is the chief ingredient in the soil from which it derives its sap, and it

is practically indestructible. As for the jungle, it is composed of brush

and creepers which have the consistency of wire ropes—a sort of vegetable

steel cable, in fact.

But for me, as an Englishman, the chief interest in Port Boisé was

connected with Cape Queen Charlotte, and a little island lying about five

miles out to sea, which is called Le Mouillage de Cook—the Anchorage

of Captain Cook. It was here that the great navigator made perhaps the

greatest mistake of his life. As every one knows, he discovered and named

New Caledonia. He sailed along its shores, and contented himself with

describing it as an island of lofty mountains surrounded by reefs which

made it inaccessible.

He anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front

of him Cape Queen Charlotte. He landed here, and, as he says, found

the natives very civil and obliging. It is a million pities that he

did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about

their country. He would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and

“unapproachable.”

Beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch

of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched

till they discovered what is now the Baie du Sud—another Sydney Cove in

miniature. If he had only done this, Caledonia, with its enormous mineral

wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been British instead

of French, a worthy appanage to that other Empire of the future, the

new-born Commonwealth of Australia.

I discussed this with the Commandant as we walked back to Bonne Anse,

and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost

Caledonia.

Once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two

frigates lying in Sydney Harbour—one British and one French. We will

call the British ship H.M.S. _Dodderer_. She was commanded by an old

woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before.

The Frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort.

New Caledonia in those days was a sort of No-Man’s Land, but there were

both Catholic and Protestant European missionaries working among the

natives. The two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go

and annex the island. They started the same day. The British frigate

out-sailed the Frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of

Captain Cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded

reefs he began to take soundings. The Frenchman went ahead, neck or

nothing. He gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most

ordinary precautions, he kept on his course.

By great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which

leads to the harbour of Noumea, and when H.M.S. _Dodderer_ eventually

groped her way in she found the French frigate at anchor, and the

Tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the

French captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an

excursion on French soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter

in our colonial history.

I had been ten days in Prony when we visited Port Boisé, and each day we

had been looking anxiously for the coming of the steamer which was to

bring us food and me release. Morning after morning we looked out across

the bay to the two islands which guarded the channel through which she

had to come, but for six more days never a whiff of smoke drifted across

the clear-cut horizon. Meanwhile, food was running very low, and we were

getting decidedly _ennuyés_. So one day, by way of a diversion, the

Doctor proposed that we should break the law and go dynamite-fishing and

shark-slaying.

The fresh meat had given out. Vegetables—far more important to a

Frenchman than to an Englishman—were nearly a memory. The fruit supply of

the camp was represented by a lime-tree in the Doctor’s garden, and that

grew in imported soil. No fruit would grow in the iron soil of Prony.

The preserved Australian meat was getting very low. In short, in a few

more days we should have got within measurable distance of starvation,

and then mutiny; and it was with an idea of deferring such unpleasant

contingencies that the doctor suggested we should go fishing.

Any change from the monotony of wandering about the little area walled in

by jungle and forest, impassable by any save those who knew the Kanaka

paths, was welcome, and I began to talk gladly about rods and line and

bait, to which the doctor replied:

“Oh no, we must work quicker than that. We shall fish with dynamite! You

will see them come to the bait, and then—_pouf!_—there breaks out the

waterquake, not earthquake, as you say, and they are all dead—hundreds!

You shall see sharks, too. Dynamite is good medicine for them.”

This sounded interesting, and I got up the next morning about half-past

four, more cheerfully than usual, because, of course, we were going

to start at five o’clock. It was a dull, cloudy, steamy morning when

I went down to the jetty, and found the big whale-boat manned by six

stalwart Kanakas armed with their throwing-spears, and the Doctor with

a little saloon rifle, and the Director of Works—the biggest and most

English-looking Frenchman that I met in the colony—with his pockets full

of dynamite.

We first paid a visit to a camp about eight miles away, taking a

contribution of meat and bread, and the news that the long-expected

supplies had not yet come. Then we shaped our course for Sharks’ Bay,

which proved to be a most characteristically tropical piece of water. The

dense vegetation not only came down to the water’s edge, but threw out

long, snaky-looking roots a couple of yards from the shore. It was among

these that the first sport began, because it was in these oily-looking

shallows that the flat fish were wont to take refuge from the wolves of

the sea.

This was the Kanakas’ part of the sport. We ran the boat in quietly and

four of them went ashore with their spears. The Director of Works did the

same, and when he had landed I felt that the Doctor and I were a little

farther off from the razor-edged brink of eternity than when he was

sitting beside us with enough dynamite in his pockets to blow the boat to

matchwood and ourselves beyond the confines of time.

We amused ourselves by taking potshots at the black triangles which

keenly cut the unrippled surface of the brown water. As far as my own

experience goes, I don’t think there’s another piece of water in the

world that possesses as many sharks to the acre as that well-named bay.

Wherever you looked you could see a black fin cutting the water, and

every minute or so you would see a swirling eddy which meant that one

of the sea-wolves had made a dash at something, and had either got an

instalment of his breakfast or missed it.

When I was talking this over afterwards with the Doctor, who was a bit

of a naturalist, I learnt a little more about the doctrine of evolution

and the survival of the fittest than I knew before. Sharks swarm in the

New Caledonian waters, and the only chance for their victims is flight;

wherefore about the shores of New Caledonia you find the fastest swimming

fish in the world.

After we had had a few ineffective shots at dorsal fins, one of our crew

said “Ough!” and pointed to the shore. We pulled in, it being evident

that there was sport afoot. The Kanakas ashore had been climbing with

marvellous agility over the snaky water-roots of the trees until they had

come to a tiny little cove.

They were leaning over the roots peering down into the water, motionless

as bronze images. Then one swiftly and silently shinned up a tree with

his spear in his mouth. He got a foot- and hand-hold. Then with his right

hand he took the spear out of his teeth, balanced it for a moment, and

then down it went like a flash of lightning.

The next instant there was a terrific commotion in the water below. Three

other spears went down, and our men laid to their oars and rushed the

boat in. Two of the others jumped into the water, and the crowd began

struggling with a huge flat-fish, something like an exaggerated flounder,

which was nailed to the bottom by a couple of spears. When we got him

into the boat, I thought he would have knocked the side out of it.

Subsequently he made good eating for many hungry convicts.

Meanwhile, the Director had been wandering about with a cigarette in his

mouth and a dynamite cartridge in his hand, looking for his prey, which,

unobligingly, kept too far out. His turn was to come later on, when we

had pulled across past the sulphur stream to the mouth of the river which

flows into Sharks’ Bay.

It is a rather curious fact that the waters of this bay are strongly

impregnated with sulphur, and yet, as I have said, they are literally

swarming with fish. They evidently seemed to like it, for both the sharks

and their victims were thicker in the neighbourhood of the submarine

springs than they were anywhere else. Wherefore it was here that we made

the best bags.

Our Kanakas seemed to have a faculty of seeing through the brown water

which none of us possessed. Again and again they located swarms of fish

that we had no notion of. One of them lay in the bows with his big black

eyes seeing things where we could see nothing, and directing our course

by moving his right or left hand.

Meanwhile the dynamiter stood on the seat with one foot on the gunwale,

puffing at his cigarette, keeping it in a glow so that he might light

the fuse of his cartridge at it. Presently there came from the bows a

low intense whisper, “Stop!” The Kanakas use a good deal more English

than French when they’re out sporting. He got up and pointed to the water

about ten yards ahead, and hissed:

“There, _là_! plenty! _beaucoup!_”

The dynamiter took his cigarette from his lips, blew the ash away, and

touched the end of the fuse with it. Then he pitched his cartridge into

the water about ten yards from the boat. Ten seconds later a volcano

seemed to burst up from the bottom of the bay, and the boat jumped as if

a whale’s flipper had struck her. The water ahead boiled up into a little

hillock of foam and dropped again.

Then all about us I saw the water sprinkled with the white bellies of

fish, some quite dead, and others swimming in a feeble, purposeless sort

of way with their tails. The next moment there were six big splashes, and

I saw six pairs of brown legs disappearing into the water, after which

heads and arms bobbed up, and it began to rain fish into the boat.

They ran from eight to eighteen inches in length, and from two to six

pounds in weight, and so I took some pains to dodge them as they came

flying up out of the water. They were something like bass, but they had

the heads and tails of mackerel, and they swam like lightning—of course,

before they struck the dynamite.

I have often watched, in clearer waters, the sharks hunting shoals of

them. The Caledonian shark can get a tremendous speed on him. I have seen

a twelve-footer carried clean out of the water by the impetus of his

rush. But the way these things dodged them just at the moment that they

turned over to make their grab was simply marvellous. You would see a

shark plunge into the midst of a swarm of them. The long, blue-grey body

would turn over, the mouth—the ugliest mouth in all creation—would open,

and the tripled-armed jaws would clash together on a mouthful of empty

water. Every fish had vanished, and brother shark would give a disgusted

wriggle, and go on the prowl again.

Escapes of this kind were, of course, due to inherited wisdom, but

dynamite was a recent experience, and the fish fell victims to it through

sheer curiosity. When the cartridge dropped into the middle of the shoal

they naturally scattered in all directions. Then they came back to see

what had fallen into the water, and after that came the catastrophe.

Those who died were victims to curiosity. Those who escaped would

probably be about the most scared fish that ever wagged a fin.

The effect of the dynamite on those who did not escape was most

extraordinary. In every case the vertebral column was broken just behind

the head, and the heart was as cleanly divided as if it had been cut with

a razor.

When we had our boat about half full we started in pursuit of bigger

game. The shock of the explosion had startled the sharks, who, like

all bullies, are mostly cowards, and the Kanakas had kept them away by

beating the water every now and then with their hands in their usual

fashion. So our dripping, laughing crew, sure now of a splendid feed,

pulled merrily down the bay to a point on which we landed two of them and

the dynamiter. They crept stealthily along the tangled shore till one

of the Kanakas stopped and pointed to three little black spots on the

surface of a tiny jungle-fringed bay.

The dynamiter took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the three points

the while as they moved along the oily surface through little eddies

made by the great bodies underneath. Presently they formed a triangle

not many feet apart. Two or three vigorous whiffs of his cigarette, a

touch to the fuse, and a motion of the hand, a scurry in the water—and

then a muffled bang and an uprising of muddy water.

We waited a moment or two, and then we could see something white—three

streaks of it—gleaming through the water, and three livid shapes rose

slowly to the surface, wagging the great tails which would never send

them through the water again. Their horrible mouths were a little open,

but they would never close fish or man again.

I took the Doctor’s word for it that their necks, so to speak, were

broken, and their hearts split as those of the smaller fry were; but I

didn’t make any personal investigations, for soon after the troubling of

the waters had subsided there came swift, swirling rushes from all sides;

black fins cut the water, white bellies gleamed under it, and then came

a clashing of cannibal jaws, a tugging and a tearing, a silent, horrible

contest, and presently all that was left of those three sharks was a

blood-reddened scum on the surface of the little leaf-fringed bay.

Our morning’s fishing closed with the slaying of a shark who fell a

victim to his insatiable appetite just as the smaller fry had done to

their curiosity. When the tragedy was over we pulled out into the middle

of the outer bay and waited until quiet and confidence was restored among

our friends below. Meanwhile, one of the Kanakas had cut one of our

biggest fish open. The Director put a dynamite cartridge into it, and

then it was tied up, after which the end of a line was passed through its

gills. When one of the black triangles came within a few yards of us the

Director touched the end of about six inches of fuse with his cigarette

and dropped it quietly overboard.

Brother Shark didn’t seem to notice the little fizzy splutter which made

this fish different from all others that he had eaten, or, if he did, he

took no notice of it. He turned over on his side, the jaws opened, and

the fish vanished.

In a few moments and for just an immeasurable fraction of a second he was

the most astounded shark in the Pacific Ocean. After which came chaos

for him, and a breakfast for his brethren. The pieces weren’t very big,

with the exception of the head, which, after a bit of a scrimmage, was

carried off by a monster who might have been his mother-in-law. The rest

of the fragments disappeared in a swirl of bloody froth, and we went home

to breakfast to learn the glad news that the long-awaited _Emily_ had

really left Noumea at last.

XI

_MOSTLY MOSQUITOS AND MICROBES_

The _Emily_ arrived that evening, and we fed royally on good fresh

Australian beef, fried fish, and potatoes, and _compôte_ of fruit,

followed by fresh cream cheese, with bread and tinned butter—as usual,

from Australia. In fact, if it wasn’t for Australia I believe that New

Caledonia would either live on tinned everything or starve, which is of

course a good thing for Sydney and Newcastle.

The Doctor produced a couple of bottles of excellent Burgundy from his

private cellar, and altogether we did ourselves exceeding well. The next

morning the _Emily_ sailed, of course, at five o’clock; but I turned

out of bed in the moonlight well contented, for my last journey but one

was over. The Commandant invited me on to his verandah for a farewell

consommation. After which I went with the Doctor and the Dynamiter for

another one or two at the canteen. Then we parted in as friendly a

fashion as English and French ever did.

I was glad to get away, yet I left some regrets behind me. Though I had

come under unpromising circumstances, every one had made me welcome, and

although my stay had lengthened into something like a little exile, my

visit to the Land of Wood and Iron had been both pleasant and profitable.

The Doctor I parted from with real regret. He was one of the best types

of the travelled French officer and gentleman that I have ever met. At

first his ideas about the Boers were hopelessly wrong, and that was

all there was the matter with him; but I was the first man he had ever

met who had actually lived among them, and when I left his views were

considerably altered.

Just before I left, the Director of Posts and Telegraphs—every official

seems to be a director of something in Caledonia—brought me the first

letters that I had received in Prisonland. They had been carried

by a Kanaka over the mountains from Noumea, through fifty miles of

jungle-paths. These bush-postmen have never yet been known to lose a

letter. When I asked how much extra they were paid for work like this I

was told that they were made to do it as a punishment—which struck me as

being entirely French.

The _Emily_—may her name be blessed!—was only a steam launch multiplied

by two, but she was clean and sweet, and her nose was pointed towards

home. She towed two lighters loaded with dressed timber, and she took

something like fifteen hours to do forty-five miles. But that mattered

little. It was a delicious day, and the scenery along the coast was

lovely. Moreover, you could lie down on her decks without having to

change afterwards and throw your clothes overboard, and so the long hours

passed pleasantly under the awning.

When at length she had puffed and panted her way into Noumea, I looked

about the harbour and saw that Yellow Jack was flying more numerously

than ever. The first news I learnt when I landed was that the plague was

a great deal worse than the papers were allowed to say. It had begun to

jump about all over the town, just as it did later on in Sydney. The

Chief of the Sanitary Commission had just been struck down by it.

The first thing I noticed as I drove from the wharf to my old quarters

was the number of people in mourning. My landlady, who—I dare say under

compulsion—had had her premises cleaned and disinfected, greeted me with

even more than French effusion. I owed her a long bill, and she thought I

was dead of the plague in some out-of-the-way spot. She nearly cried for

joy when she saw me. Poor old lady, she was to be one of the next of the

microbe’s victims!

At dinner that night I learnt, to my intense disgust, that the Messagerie

Company and the Government had established a twelve-days’ quarantine on

a mosquito-haunted islet in the bay for any one who wanted to travel by

the monthly mail to Sydney. The principal reason for this was that the

Governor was going home and wanted to be quite certain that no microbes

got on board concealed about the persons of his fellow-passengers.

From my point of view it amounted to this: Twelve days on _Ile

Freycinet_, four days’ passage, and from eight to ten days’ quarantine

in Sydney—total at least twenty-six days for a trip of a little over a

thousand miles.

It had to be avoided somehow, and at the same time Noumea was getting

every day a better place to get out of. Even Lord Dunmore, who had stuck

to his offices down near the wharves while his neighbours were running

away, and while the rats, driven out of destroyed buildings, were coming

under his floors to die, at last admitted that things were serious, and

advised me to “get” as soon as I could.

Fortunately one of the larger coast-boats had been disinfected and

was put on the line again, and in her I took passage to Pam, at the

north-eastern extremity of the island.

Pam is the port and headquarters of an immensely rich mining district,

the property of the International Copper Company, of which his lordship

is Administrator. It has been said that when Nature made New Caledonia

she set herself to dump down as many ores and minerals in as small a

space as possible.

She has certainly succeeded, for there is scarcely a mineral known to

science that is not represented in greater or less quantities in this

wonderful island.

[Illustration: The Mines of the International Copper Co., Pilou, New

Caledonia. There is a greater variety of Metallic Ores within the area

shown here than in any other region in the world.]

A very clever and experienced mining expert once went over from Australia

to make a survey for the International, and after an exhaustive

examination he was shipped to London to make a personal report to

the Board. He knew as much about mining as any one in the Southern

Hemisphere, but his language and deportment were those of the bush and

the mining camp. A noble lord asked him if he could give any estimate

of the amount of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, silver, gold, etc., that

might be found in the Central Chain, and this was his answer:

“My lord, if you were to take all the —— minerals there are out of those

—— mountains the —— island would —— well fall to pieces.”

The report was taken as satisfactory.

I brought some specimens away with me which certainly seem to bear out

his estimate. They were the wonder and envy of several mining experts

in Australia. One of the specimens weighs about three pounds, and I am

told that it contains about a dozen distinct kinds of minerals. It didn’t

come out of the mine. It was just chopped off the surface for me with a

pickaxe.

The mines are not at Pam. They are at Pilou, about seven miles up the

river. Here, connecting the principal mining station with the wharf,

is the only other railway in Caledonia, which is run by steam. It is a

narrow gauge and about five miles long.

That five miles is a journey through purgatory. The attendant demons are

little black and devilishly businesslike mosquitos. Now, I thought I knew

something about mosquitos. They had lived off me in many parts of the

world from Delagoa Bay to Panama, and Honolulu to Guayaquil, but when I

got to Pilou I found I hadn’t begun to learn about them.

The air above the swamp over which the railway ran was black with them,

and their song made the whole atmosphere vocal. They were all over us in

a moment. They even settled on the boiler of the engine, and bit it until

it whistled in its agony. We were black with them from head to foot.

Clothing was no protection; and, of course, ours was pretty thin. They

just stood on their heads and rammed their probosces down into our flesh,

usually along the line of a vein, and sucked in our life-blood until they

were too gorged to get their blood-pumps out again.

By constant sweeping with green branches we managed to keep our faces

fairly clear, and do our breathing without swallowing more than a dozen

at a time. Even the Kanakas, who are not as a rule a favourite article of

food with mosquitos, had to go on swishing themselves with boughs to keep

the little black demons out of their eyes and nose and mouth and ears.

As for me, I visited the camps and the mines, and then I fled. I was a

sight which my worst enemy, if I have one, might well have looked upon

with eyes of pity. I had got a touch of fever, too, in the swamp, and an

illness in Pilou was too terrible for contemplation. I would not live in

the place, rent free and with nothing to do but fight mosquitos, for a

hundred pounds a week.

The unhappy convicts who work the mines were the most miserable lot I had

seen in all Caledonia. Neither by day nor night have they any protection

from the swarming pests, which, as one or two of them told me, made their

lives one long misery. They sleep in open barracks without mosquito

curtains over their hammocks, and by day their tormentors pursue them

even down the shafts of the mine.

It was the same with the officials and their wives and children. They all

looked anæmic, as though most of the blood had been sucked out of them.

They were worried and nervous. Their hands had got into a way of moving

mechanically towards their cheeks and necks and foreheads, the result of

long and mostly vain efforts to squash mosquitos.

When we were going to have a meal a couple of fire-pots, covered with

green boughs, had to be put into the room until it was full of smoke and

comparatively empty of mosquitos. Then we went into the smoke, and the

fire-pots were put in the doorway. I wasn’t at Pilou long enough to get

used to being half-cooked myself while I was eating my dinner, but even

the smoke in your eyes and lungs was a more bearable affliction than the

winged tormentors who seemed to be a sort of punitive discount on the

vast mineral wealth of Pilou.

No one but very wicked people ought to live there, and when they die

their accounts ought to be considered squared.

[Illustration: The Saloon of the Ballande liner _St. Louis_.]

With eyes puffed up and almost closed; with nose and ears and lips about

twice their normal size; with knuckles and wrists swollen and stiff—to

say nothing of a skinful of itching bumps—I got back to Pam, and on board

the cargo boat on which I had booked a passage in Noumea.

We called her afterwards the Ballande liner _St. Louis_. She was an

exaggeration of _La France_, and belonged to the same distinguished firm.

She was bigger and, if possible, dirtier. She also smelt more, because

there was a larger area for the smells to spread themselves over.

No provision had been made for the eight passengers who were doomed to

travel by her. The captain had no money or credit to buy stores, and when

I offered to lend him some, he declined, in case his owners should hold

him responsible. The result was that the food we ate on that miserable

voyage made me look back longingly to the days when I had eaten salt

horse and pickled pork in the forecastle of a black-birder.

The decks were not washed down till the fifth morning, when we reached

Sydney Heads. Then there was a general clean-up before the Medical

Superintendent came on board, in case a worse fate than quarantine might

await us. Up went Yellow Jack again, and that afternoon saw us anchored

off the quarantine station at North Head.

I have been in prisons of many sorts, but that quarantine taught me for

the first time what imprisonment really means. The penalty for leaving

the _St. Louis_ without authority was £300 fine _and_ six months’ hard

labour—so there we were for eight days and nights of about one hundred

and fifty hours each.

On one side there was the quarantine station—about as beautiful a land

and seascape as those about to die ever took a last look from at earth

and sea and sky.

On the other hand, the varied beauties of “Our Harbour,” with Manly Beach

to the northward, North Shore with its red-roofed villas sprinkled among

the trees; and, away in the dim distance, the spires and chimneys of

Sydney. A couple of hours would have taken us to it, but as we looked

at it with longing eyes, thinking of what a cocktail at the bar of the

Australia Hotel would taste like, it might just as well have been twenty

thousand miles away.

It was during those eight days of mingled dirt and discomfort, cursing,

and cribbage that I saw as curious a contrast between life and death as

you might search the wide world over for.

On the starboard side, which is the right-hand side looking forward, lay

the route of the excursion steamers running between Sydney and Manly

Beach.

They came past at all hours of the day, and they came near enough for

us to hear strains of stringed and wind instruments, which brought back

memories of the dear old Thames with painful distinctness.

On the port side, with almost equal frequency, there came a

green-painted, white-awninged launch, flying the Yellow Flag and carrying

corpses, “cases,” and “contacts” from the depôt at Wooloomooloo. As she

rounded into the jetty she whistled. Day and night for eight days and

nights we heard that whistle—and the meaning of it was usually death. But

you get hardened to all things in time, and before our durance vile ended

we had got to call her the Cold Meat Boat.

One day the Medical Superintendent of the station acceded to an urgent

request made by myself and a fellow-passenger. Neither of us had washed

properly for six days, and so, after a little discussion and many

promises, he let us go ashore that we might enjoy ourselves under a hose.

We douched each other for more than half an hour, and then we went to

stretch ourselves on the beach—a silver-sanded rock-walled curve, trodden

by many feet which will never tread earth again.

As we were coming back to the quay to go on board we heard that

never-to-be-forgotten whistle again, and the green Death Boat swung round

the corner. One of the sanitary police on the wharf put his hand up and

waved us back.

In the stern there were about a dozen people sitting. Forward there was

a long shapeless bundle lying on a stretcher. It was a case. The others

were “contacts,” friends, lodgers, and relations who had lived in the

same house with the case. They had come to be isolated for ten days, so

that the microbe of the Black Death might show whether or not it was in

their blood.

They were taken out of the boat first. Their own feelings didn’t matter,

for the Black Spectre takes no account of human affections, and permits

no other to do so. They were marched away to the quarters set apart for

contacts. No farewells were permitted, just a look that might be the

last, and that was all.

Then the stretcher with the long bundle on it was lifted and carried on

to the wharf. Meanwhile the ambulance backed down to the shore-end, the

stretcher was put into it, and it drove away up through the trees to the

hospital. The next journey of that particular “case” was to the cemetery

four days afterwards.

When we got back to our floating prison I told the chief engineer what we

had seen on shore, and he said in very epigrammatic French:

“Quite so! What would you? You are a human being till you take the

plague; after that you are an outcast, a thing separate. You live and get

better; you die and are buried that’s all.”

And, as it happened, the very next day brought an all-too vivid

illustration of the truth of this saying. About ten in the morning we

heard the “woo-hoo” of the Death Boat’s whistle.

There was only one passenger this time, and he travelled in a coffin. A

common two-wheeled cart backed down to where the ambulance had been the

day before. The coffin was carried to it and put in just like any other

sort of packing-case might have been. The driver whipped up his horse,

and we watched the cart with its load of coffin, corpse, and quicklime,

trotting up the winding road which leads to the burying-ground of North

Head.

I have seen many funerals in a good many places from Westminster Abbey to

Wooloomooloo, but this one was the simplest and the saddest of them all.

Away on the other side of the bay, wife and children, brothers and

sisters and friends were mourning—and there was the indescribable Thing,

which two or three days ago had been a man, being carted away to be

dropped into a twelve-foot hole in the ground—buried like a dead dog,

because it had died of the Black Death instead of something else. From

which you will see that the Black Death has terrors for the living even

after it has claimed its dead.