Part II PRISON LAND

A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON CONVICTS AND COLONISTS

There are not many portions of the sea-realm of Oceania, or, indeed, of the whole Southern Hemisphere, of which the name is so well and the history so little known as New Caledonia. Throughout Europe, not excepting even France, it has for fifty years been the name of a convict station. To the forçat and the relégué its name meant something even worse than the traditions of the old galleys could tell of. It meant banishment over an illimitable stretch of ocean; and, through the hazes of distance, the French criminal, caged in the penal transport, saw horrors unspeakable. To him it was the Land of the Chain, of the Lash, and the Guillotine, a hell upon earth, a paradise of Nature transformed by despotism into an inferno of crime and cruelty, and, above all, it was the Land of Banishment. In earlier times it really was something like what the evadés who had reached Australia, through a thousand miles of sea-peril and starvation, described it to be. It will be seen from the chapters which follow that all this has long ago been done away with, but even now the commandants of the various camps are careful to remind the visitor from the other ends of the earth, that not the least part of the punishment of transportation to New Caledonia consists in the fact of banishment for many years, perhaps for ever from France.

That is one of the reasons why France will never make a real living colony out of New Caledonia until its present criminal and semi-criminal population has utterly died out—a contingency which is not likely to come to pass while French rule in the Pacific endures. The Frenchman cannot colonise, although, curiously enough, under another flag he can become a most excellent colonist. Take him away from France and plant him, as in New Caledonia, under the tricolour and under the care of his all too paternal, perhaps it would be more correct to say maternal government, and, whether bond or free, he begins to get homesick, and a homesick man is the last person on earth to begin colony-making.

Of course, if you take him out in a convict transport and plant him on an island as a prisoner you can make a colonist of a sort out of him, and that is the sort you find in New Caledonia, a human machine whose initiative, if he ever had any, has been ground out of him, not so much by prison discipline, for that, as I shall show, is indulgent to a degree that would be quite incomprehensible in England; but, rather, by a rigid system of supervision which permits him to do nothing for himself, which provides everything for him from the plough with which he breaks the virgin soil of his concession to the prize which he gets for a well-raised crop. Such a man walks on crutches all his life, and a colonist on crutches is an entirely hopeless, if not a quite impossible, person.

An experience of something over forty years has convinced all the most intelligent students of the question, that the convict civilisation of New Caledonia is a dream the realisation of which is made impossible by the conditions of the system itself.

During my last conversation with the Director of the Penal Administration, he asked me what I thought of the social conditions of the island, and the possibility of sometime transforming it from a penal settlement into a free colony? He was intensely in earnest on the subject. He believed, or at least he did his best to believe, in the future of that beautiful native land of his, and I would have encouraged him in his loyal belief if I could have done so; but I had seen too much of real colonisation in many lands to be able to do that honestly, and so what I told him was this:

“Noumea is the heart of New Caledonia, as Paris is the heart of France. The greater part of it is founded upon what was once a miasmatic swamp, and, no matter what you do, the poison-germs will find their way to the surface, and pollute the atmosphere that you breathe. That is a concrete likeness of your society. It is based on a substratum of crime. For forty years the poison-germs of the mental disease which is called crime have been rising from your lowest social stratum and permeating all the others.”

A Lake in the interior of New Caledonia.

He saw the justice of the parallel, and he tacitly admitted that the source of moral contagion was every whit as deeply rooted and as irremovable as the buried swamp that lies deep down beneath the palms and the flamboyants which shade the squares and the gardens of Noumea.

In Australia the matter was different. In the bad, old days men and women were shipped over seas for offences which would not earn fourteen days’ hard labour now, and the majority of them were morally and physically sound. Moreover, they were Anglo-Saxons. They knew how to tackle the wilderness and subdue it, and when they won their freedom they mixed freely with freemen, and, in due course, the wilderness got subdued, and the new nations got started. That was because there was a maximum of individual initiative, and a minimum of government control which made it possible for the man to work out his own moral and social redemption, and at the same time to shape a country for his children to dwell in. When I first went to Australia as a lad in the deck-house of a limejuicer, the letters M.L.A. didn’t only mean Member of the Legislative Assembly. Sometimes they meant Mustn’t Leave Australia; but to-day the penal settlements of fifty years ago are federated nations. Caledonia is still a convict settlement, and such it must remain until the last drop of convict blood within its confines solidifies in the veins of its last dead criminal, or until its moral and social swamp is drained and purified by more drastic measures than its present rulers appear to have dreamt of.

For the last decade or so the French Government has been doing its best to induce French peasants, artisans, and small tradesmen and manufacturers to go out to New Caledonia as agricultural and industrial colonists. It has given them free passages, land for nothing, free mining concessions, and even capital to start on, but, in spite all of these advantages and, perhaps, partly because of them, free colonisation has not been a success in New Caledonia. The causes of this failure are not very far to seek, and some of them are exactly the same as those which operate against the success of German colonies.

The first of them is the Functionary. New Caledonia is perhaps the most over-governed place in the whole world. The Australian colonies are beginning to suffer from over-government, the natural result of a too triumphant democracy, but there, as elsewhere under the British flag, it is still possible for the pioneer to fight his own battle for home and fortune against the Spirit of the Wilderness with no more governmental interference than is necessary to enforce obedience to the law. It doesn’t matter of what nationality he is, he succeeds or fails by his own strength or weakness.

In a later chapter I shall describe the most marvellously successful piece of cosmopolitan colonisation that has ever been accomplished, an experiment, the success of which completely bears out all that I am reluctantly obliged to say here against the French system.

From the moment that the Frenchman, whether peasant or artisan, leaves his native land to become a colonist in an oversea French possession he has a functionary in front of him, one on each hand, and one behind him. This is to ensure that he shall go along the dead straight line which governmental wisdom has drawn for him. The man in front prevents him going too fast, and the one behind sees that his footsteps to fortune do not fall behind the regulation pace. When he lands in the colony, his first task is to master more or less imperfectly the vast mass of regulations by which all his comings and goings are ordered. Within the sphere of action allotted to him everything is already cut and dried. To be original is to transgress the code and to trample on the official corns of a functionary. Wherefore, he very soon finds that originality is at a heavy discount, and a colonist without originality is of about as much use in a new country as a baby in long clothes. In fact the baby is a more valuable citizen, for he may grow into something which the officially conducted colonist never will.

Then there is that fatal convict question. In the following pages I have shown that in New Caledonia there are three classes into which the criminal population of New Caledonia is rigidly divided. First, there is the forçat, or convict proper, the man who has been sentenced to a definite term of transportation, ranging from eight years to life. The second class is composed of relégués who have been banished to New Caledonia for life, not for any particular crime, but because, by an accumulation of offences, they have proved themselves to be hopeless criminals, and therefore unfit for civilised society and incapable of bearing the burden of responsibility which is inseparable from freedom. The third class is composed of the libérés. We have no counterpart to the libéré in our criminal system. The nearest English analogue to him is the convict released on license, but the only real likeness between them is the fact that they are both responsible for their movements to the police.

In New Caledonia the forçat may become a concessionaire and after that a libéré, or he may become first a collective and then an individual libéré. In the former case he is free to hire himself out for work during the day, but he must return to sleep in barracks. In the latter he is absolutely free within the limits of the colony. Subject to the sanction of the Administration he may engage in any business he pleases.

Many men in this class have done exceedingly well for themselves. Others again have returned to France, of course under government sanction, to present their petition for “rehabilitation.” If this is granted they become freemen, their civil rights are restored to them, and they can either settle down in France or return to the colony. As a rule they choose the latter alternative. The keeper of the canteen where I lived at Prony had done this, and had won his way back not only to citizenship, but to universal respect.

The relégué has no such hope. He is banished for life and remains a well-cared-for slave of the government for the rest of his days. In some rare cases he may regain his freedom as a special act of grace, but his civil rights are never restored to him.

These three classes form the real substrata upon which the whole social and official fabric of New Caledonian society rests, and it is into such a soil, supersaturated with crime, that the French Government proposes to transplant freemen and women, and make colonists of them. In other words the free emigrant to New Caledonia must take his wife and children across thirteen thousand miles of ocean and make a home for them in a land where they will inhale the poison-germs of villainy with every breath they breathe. Their servants and their labourers, if they can afford them, will be thieves, swindlers, and assassins. Their sons and daughters will have to work with them, grow up with their children, sit beside them at school, and perhaps some day intermarry with them, for all children of convicts born in New Caledonia are free before the law, and the legal equals of all other children. It is obvious that under such conditions, healthy colonisation is about as impossible as healthy physical life in a colony of lepers.

Many have tried the experiment and have gone back to France richer in experience and poorer in pocket, and with such tales in their mouths as have justly persuaded their fellow-peasants and artisans that their hard, clean, thrifty life in France is infinitely better than State-aided contamination in New Caledonia.

Lastly, there is what I may call the commercial reason for failure, which is of course closely connected with the others. Officialism has strangled initiative, and crime has poisoned the sources of social prosperity; wherefore in New Caledonia the French govern, but they do not develop. Nine-tenths of the capital invested in the island is in the hands of British and Australian firms, or is owned by foreigners who have become naturalised French subjects. The French have had possession for half a century of one of the richest islands in the world, yet I am only telling the bare truth when I say that a withdrawal of foreign capital would promptly bring the colony to bankruptcy, and that the stoppage of the Australian carrying trade would starve it out in a month. This was clearly proved by the extremities to which nearly all the outlying camps were reduced by the interruption of the Coast Service during the plague epidemic.

Here, for instance, is one example out of many which might be quoted of the extraordinary ineptitude of the French colonial official in matters of business. An Anglo-French firm located in Sydney obtained a concession for a term of years to import corn, grind it, and sell the flour at a given price, which was about eight shillings per sack higher than the average of Australian prices. The government objected to the price, but yielded on condition that the firm would buy and grind all the corn raised in the colonies. The firm knew perfectly well that all Caledonia would not raise fifty bushels of wheat in as many years, so, of course, they consented, and for the next ten years or so the astute partners will go on selling flour to the government and the citizens at a much higher price than they could import it for themselves from Australia.

The whole trade of Noumea, which is the one trading centre of the island, is practically in English or Australian hands, although several large firms trade under French styles. The first essential of a commercial education in New Caledonia is a sojourn in Australia, and no French youth has a chance of a good start in a New Caledonian business house unless he can speak and write English. In fact the only people in the colony who do not speak English are the officials of the Administration and the military officers.

During the whole of my wanderings through the convict camps from end to end of the island, I only found one official who could converse intelligently in English, and that was the Director himself; and yet you can go into almost any store or office in Noumea and get what you want by asking for it in English.

New Caledonia may, in short, be fairly described as a French penal colony and a commercial dependency of Australia.

I SOME FIRST IMPRESSIONS

After a flying visit to Auckland, our old steam-roller staggered through a southerly buster into Sydney Heads on Christmas Eve, and it was then that I began to make acquaintance with the Microbe of the Black Death.

We had got alongside the wharf at Circular Quay. On the other side of the jetty a white-painted Messageries mail-boat was being moored. If Sydney had only known the terrible cargo which she carried, Sydney would have seen her sunk a thousand fathoms deep rather than let her touch Australian soil. She was the Pacifique, the ship I was to cross to New Caledonia in, and the Black Death was a passenger on board her. It was many days more before I learnt the how and the why of this—after I had walked in the same streets, lived in the same houses, and sat at the same table with the Spectre. I had also seen his material reality. This was what it looked like.

A lot of little circular globules, flattened in the centre, some red and some white, were floating in a greyish-white liquid under the microscope. Among them were some tiny dark, wriggling things swimming in the fluid and running their heads against the edges of the white globules. They were plague-microbes in blood-serum. If they got inside the white corpuscles the person to whom that blood belonged would have a very good chance of dying the Black Death. If not, he would be very ill, but would probably live, as I did.

The newspapers had come on board, and I was having a farewell cocktail in the Doctor’s cabin, a cosy little snuggery, which by this time contained many pleasant memories for me.

“There’s bubonic plague at Noumea,” said he; “and they seem to have it pretty bad, too. Of course you won’t think of going while anything like that’s messing around?”

Now I loved the Doctor because, in addition to his social qualities and medical skill, he possessed the art of making a cocktail which was an entirely delightful antidote to his medicine.

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

“Of course I shall. Do you suppose I’ve come fifteen thousand miles to get into that place to be scared by——? Anyhow, I suppose it’s only among the Kanakas?”

“My dear fellow, bubonic plague’s a mighty good thing to stop away from,” he said, with unwonted seriousness.

“And therefore all the more interesting.”

“Well, if you will go, so-long, and don’t get it. If you do, in a place like that you’ll have about one chance in five of getting back.”

Ten days afterwards I steamed into the lovely harbour of Noumea, the Malta of the Pacific, which England lost by about three hours one morning nearly fifty years ago. But the adventures of H.M.S. Dodderer will be a twist in another yarn.

Even if we had not known that the terrible Black Death had come to Noumea, the least observant of us would have asked:

“What is the matter with this place?”

A couple of dozen steamers and sailing-ships were laid up, and a ship out of work is about as forlorn a spectacle as a deserted workhouse.

The ships that were in work were all flying Yellow Jack—that spectre in bunting which followed me across the world till I bade it, I hope, a last farewell on the quay at Marseilles. Steam-launches, too, were flying it, dodging backwards and forwards between the ships and the shore. They were patrolling to stop all unauthorised communication. One of them ran alongside. Other boats, containing friends of passengers, kept at a very respectful distance.

“Five fresh cases to-day; two deaths, one a white man,” were almost the first words I heard at the gangway. Then the Doctor’s words came home to me in a somewhat chill fashion. At Sydney it was only the news. This was the ugly reality. We began to look at each other, and especially at the people from the shore.

Which of us would be first? You could see the unspoken question in every one’s eyes. People who had been friends on the passage didn’t care to shake hands now. We looked at the lovely landscape in front of us, the white-walled, grey-roofed town, nestling under tall, feathery palms, and the flamboyants blazing with crimson blossom, at the foot of the densely wooded mountains, and it seemed strangely out of the order of things that this demon which has devastated the world for ages should have chosen so fair a spot from which to send that dread message forth to men and doctors:

“I am here, in spite of all your science. Kill me if you can. Meanwhile, pay me my toll of life.”

It was dark before we had passed the doctor and got ashore. The first visible sign of the terrible presence was a long wall of corrugated iron cutting off that portion of the town which lies along the wharves from the rest. There were openings in this, and each was guarded by a sentry with fixed bayonet, but more than twenty days before the Spectre had slipped past the sentries and slain a white man. Even now it was standing by the bedside of two white girls.

The Kanakas and Tonkinois didn’t seem to matter so much. But white people—that was a family matter to all of us. This seems uncharitable, but it is none the less true.

The Plague Area at Noumea. Offices of the Messageries Maritimes, with Sentries in front.

When I found the place that I was to sleep in, I began to see, or, rather, to smell, the reason why the Spectre had crossed the barriers. Noumea has a magnificent water-supply. Fresh water flows constantly from the mountains down through the stone channels on each side of the streets; but its sanitation is about as rudimentary as that of a Kaffir village.

When I went to bed I shut the long windows opening on to the balcony to keep the smell out. I also shut in the heat and some odd millions of mosquitos, any of which, according to popular belief, might have had thousands of microbes concealed about its person. As a matter of fact they hadn’t; but they got their own work in all the same.

I stood it for nearly an hour, and then I concluded that even the smell was preferable to suffocation, so I opened the windows and went out on the balcony to scratch and say things to the accompaniment of the song of many vocal insects. The next morning I went down into the yard to cool my wounds in a corrugated iron bathroom, which, with true French colonial forethought, had been built within two yards of an open cesspool. A shower-bath in tropical countries is usually a luxury as well as a necessity. In Noumea it was only a necessity.

When I set out for my first stroll round Noumea the morning after my arrival the sun was shining out of a sky of unflecked blue. A delicious breeze was flowing down the mountain-sides. The scent of fruit and flowers was everywhere atoning for the stench of that backyard. I took in long breaths of the sweet, soft air, and began to wonder whether that black Spectre really was haunting such a paradise as this.

Then I turned into the Place des Cocotiers, which is to Noumea what the Champs Elysées are to Paris—a broad square shaded by blazing flamboyants and flanked by rows of coco-palms. The next moment I saw a long, four-wheeled, white-curtained vehicle being driven rapidly through it. It was the ambulance, and inside it lay some stricken wretch. Who—yes, who was it? A question of some significance to one who might have had to say “here!” to the dread summons before the next sun rose.

I went under the verandah of the Hotel de France, which fronts the square, and ordered a limonade, so that I might ask the news. Yes, it was the ambulance, and its occupant was one of the white girls. In three days she was to be the first white bride of the Black Death. It was rumoured that there were six new cases that morning, but the Sanitary Commission very wisely only reported two “suspected” cases and one death. If they had told the truth for a few days more there would have been panic, and panic is the best—or worst—helpmeet of disease, especially in a place like Noumea.

From the hotel I wandered along the shady sidewalks of the broad streets, and presently found myself in a quarter of the town which looked as if it had been bombarded. The houses were wrecked and roofless. Some of them were smouldering still, and some were cold, skeleton ruins. It was here that the Black Death had found its first victims. They were only Kanakas and Tonkinois, so their families had been cleared out, and their houses and belongings burnt.

Farther on up the hill leading to the military reservation I saw all that was left of what had once been a pretty villa standing in its own grounds, a garden such as one sees only in the tropics. This had been the house of the first white victim, a young fellow of splendid physique, who had fought the Demon through three weeks of torture, dying by inches in multiplying horrors unspeakable.

Later on the Demon was more merciful, because he struck harder and killed quicker. In a few weeks it was to be a matter of hours rather than of days.

I learnt afterwards that, although the Sanitary Commission had burnt the house down, they had allowed the furniture to be sold by public auction. The same authority permitted the traveller by sea to take any sort of luggage he liked on board the steamer, but would not allow even a package of clean linen to be forwarded from one port to another unless it was in the possession of its owner. Nail it up in a box and it could go, but as personal effects—no. Later on the Demon took his revenge for this foolishness. He laid his hands on the Chief of the Commission, and killed him in thirty-six hours.

That night I dined at the club, the Cercle de Noumea, an institution which is devoted to eating and drinking during the day, and to poker and baccarat during the night.

There was only one subject of conversation among the Frenchmen round the long table—la Peste.

During the plague-time in Bombay it cost drinks round to mention the word in white society, but in Noumea every one, doctors and laymen alike, talked unrestrainedly of it. The doctors told of the new “cases,” enlarged on symptoms, and described experiments in detail which made the laymen mostly sick, and nearly all frightened. Which is one point of difference between English and French ways of looking at ugly things.

A day or two after, when the name of the Demon had become familiar to my ears, and had, therefore, lost some of its terrors—I suppose I really was quite as frightened as anybody else—I noticed that a man feeling furtively under his armpits was looked at with suspicion, and a man seen limping in the street was left to walk alone.

One morning I got up feeling rather seedy. It may have been the mosquitos, or the heat, or the last French cigar overnight. It is a true saying that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client, and that a man who is his own doctor has a still bigger fool for a patient; but by this time I had heard enough of la Peste in Noumea to convince me that I had to take the latter risk into my own hands. If I had described my symptoms to a doctor I should have been “under observation” in the hospital within an hour. After that the date of my coming out would have been a very uncertain one, so I smoked the mosquitos out of my bedroom, took some chlorodyne, and went to bed. It is bad to take opiates, but it is a great deal worse to lie awake in a plague-smitten town and wonder whether or not you’ve got it.

The next day I saw a coffin carried out of a house. That night the house was pulled down, and the ruins burnt, but the day after that, as though in mockery of every precaution taken, the Demon showed himself in a new and deadlier form.

A great cleaning-up had been going on all this time, just as it was in Sydney later on. The filth-accumulations of years were being cleared out. A white man, very much down on his luck, took a job with the Kanakas and convicts who were cleaning out the basement of a store in which dead rats had been found. The others had their mouths and noses covered with cloths steeped in corrosive sublimate, but he wasn’t afraid of any blanked plague, and so he went in without.

He happened to stir up some dust out of which he disinterred the corpse of a rat. He inhaled some of the dust. The little black wriggly thing that I had seen under the microscope got into his lungs, and assisted in the change of the venous into the arterial blood. In six hours that man was dead. The pulmonary form of the Black Death is perhaps the most swiftly killing of all diseases.

After this the corrugated iron fence round the wharves came down, and the sentries went back to barracks. The enemy had passed them, unseen and unchallenged. Every gust of wind which raised a cloud of dust in the street might carry death, and sometimes did.

You might, for example, walk through one of these clouds on your way to dinner. Your appetite would not be quite as good as usual. After dinner you would feel headachy and sick, and, being disinclined to walk home,—a very bad symptom, by the way,—you would call a cab and be driven there. The next day you would have a drive in the ambulance, after which your fate lay on the knees of the gods. In the particular case here referred to the matter was decided in four days.

It was little wonder that the microbe was thriving apace in this outwardly lovely place, for dirt, disease, and death are a trinity found ever hand in hand. Just en passant, I may say here that my excellent landlady who, I am sorry to say, died of the plague soon after I left her hospitable roof, subsequently confided to me that among her guests there were some who had not had a bath for three weeks. Of course there was no law to make them wash, but I think that in a tropical country in which the Black Death has taken up its abode the penalty for not bathing, at least once a day, should be delivery to the tender mercies of the local fire brigade, with permission to squirt to taste.

II SOME SOCIAL SIDELIGHTS

My first official business in the colony was, of course, to write to the Governor acquainting him with the fact of my arrival. I did this with considerable misgivings, for both at Sydney and on the boat, I had heard the evil rumour that in consequence of the plague the Government of New Caledonia had decided to close the prisons. This meant that the convicts who had been hired out to work in the mines and elsewhere would be recalled to the prisons and the camps, and that all communication would be severed between them and the outer world until the epidemic was over.

Now I carried credentials from the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris, which is to New Caledonia what the Russian Ministry of Justice was to Siberia, and these, under ordinary circumstances, authorised me to have every prison door in the island opened to me. But M. Albert Décrais knew nothing about the coming visitation when he gave them to me, and the Governor would have been well within his powers if he had answered my letter by expressing “his infinite regret that exceptional circumstances made it impossible for him to act under the instructions of the Ministry during the present disastrous epidemic, etc.”

In this case my mission would have been brought to nought, and I should have travelled fifteen thousand miles for the privilege of sojourning an indefinite time in a plague-stricken town. It was three days before I got an answer, and during that time I allayed my anxieties by making a closer acquaintance with Noumea.

Through the kindness of the Earl of Dunmore, who was then acting as Administrator of one of the greatest mining enterprises in New Caledonia, and a member of the Municipal Council with whom I had travelled from Sydney, I was made a guest of the Cercle. Only the most exclusive aristocracy of Noumea breakfast and dine at home. The rest—officials, merchants, and professional men—knock off work at eleven, having begun about six, breakfast at half-past, and then play or sleep till three.

At six everything, except the hotels and cafés, shut up; then comes a drive or a ride, tennis or a sail in the bay, then dinner, followed by cards and drinks till midnight—and of such is the daily life of the capital of New Caledonia. I learnt afterwards that this delightfully situated little town is also one of the wickedest spots on earth, but of that I shall have more to say hereafter.

Socially, Noumea struck me as being somewhat cramped. Its society is composed of educated, highly trained, and, in the main, well-mannered men, living a little life among themselves, and being crushed into smallness by the very narrowness of their environment. They were a thousand miles from anywhere. Their only immediate connection with the outer world was the cable to Sydney, controlled by the all-powerful Administration, which published and suppressed whatever it pleased.

There were the monthly Messagerie mails, and a few odd traders, now mostly laid up in the harbour flying the Yellow Jack. Every night the same men met and discussed the same subjects, the chief of which was la Peste. Every day the same men went to the same duties, the same women discussed the same gossip and the same scandal. Every night the same men and women met in the Place des Cocotiers, under its swaying palms and flaming flamboyants, and listened to the same music—which, by the way, they will never listen to again.

I had gone to Noumea full up to the roots of my hair with the utterly erroneous notions which I had picked up from books and conversations. The books appear to have been written mostly by returned déportés or communards who had been banished in ’71 and ’72, and allowed to return to France after the general amnesty. The people with whom I had conversed had apparently got their knowledge from somewhat similar sources, but all agreed in representing New Caledonia as a second Tasmania, or Norfolk Island, where all the uncivilised barbarities of our own transportation system had been prolonged to the end of the nineteenth century.

Its population consisted of a vast horde of convicts, the most abandoned and bloodthirsty wretches on earth, ground down into hopeless slavery by the irresistible and unpitying strength of an official engine called the Penitentiary Administration. The officials were a set of soulless gaolers in whose natures every spark of humanity had been quenched by the performance of their pitiless task. The surplus of the population consisted of half-tamed natives and a few thousand libérés, or ticket-of-leave men, any one of whom would knock you on the head or stick a knife into you for a couple of francs.

Finally I was regarded in Paris as rather madder than the average Englishman for wanting to go to such a God-forsaken place, being neither a convict who had to go nor an official who wanted to earn a comfortable retraite and save up the wherewithal to purchase rentes on which to spend the balance of his days in that peace and quiet which is the domestic heaven to which all good Frenchmen look forward.

Now this is what I actually saw of convict-life in Noumea before I had passed the prison gates for the first time. I had eaten my second dinner at the Cercle, and Lord Dunmore, taking pity on my isolation, said:

“The convict-band is playing in the square to-night, suppose we go and get some seats?”

“The convict what?” I said, harking back mentally to the rigid English system, and trying to picture to myself an English convict blowing a cornet.

“It’s what they call here the Musique de la Transportation. It’s quite an institution in Noumea. I don’t suppose there’s anything like it anywhere else.”

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

It was an absolutely perfect tropical night. The moon was getting up over the eastern end of the Chaine Centrale, a ridge of mountains which runs through Caledonia from north-east to south-west; the cafés along the top of the square were glittering with light; a deliciously cool breeze was blowing down from the mountains through the trees.

Little groups of people, mostly clad in white, were sitting on chairs about the lawns, and others were strolling slowly round and round the square and across the paths which radiated from the big kiosk in the centre. There were pretty costumes and brilliant uniforms, stars and medals and all the rest of it, and the one finishing tropical touch that was needful was added by wandering bands of laughing Kanakas with gaudy waistcloths and fantastic headgear, big, luminous eyes, and teeth that gleamed whitely as they laughed.

Saving these last there was nothing that would have been incongruous with one of those delightful portions of outdoor Paris where “l’on s’amuse.” The shadow of the Black Death seemed to have been lifted for the time, and as for crime and convicts—well, presently up one of the avenues through the flamboyants there appeared a line of grey-clad figures carrying musical instruments. There were twenty-five of them all told.

They sauntered up to the band-stand laughing and chatting as though they hadn’t a care in the wide world. Possibly they had very few; fewer certainly than the peasant toiling his sixteen hours a day for a bare living in far-away France.

They were guarded by a very bored-looking surveillant, who carried in a sling a revolver which he was not allowed to use unless one of his charges struck him first!

The gentlemen of the orchestra took their places, and a short, thick-set man, with a clever, but most unpleasant face, went into the middle and looked around with an air of command, which reminded me oddly of the preliminary gestures of other conductors of very different orchestras. There was a little tuning-up, then the conductor tapped his music-stand, waved his baton of authority, and forthwith the sweet strains of the Intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana” began to float out through the drowsy hush of the tropical evening.

There is really only one word which could describe the scene, and that is bizarre. Take five-and-twenty musically inclined convicts out of an English prison, put them into the Western Gardens at Earl’s Court on a warm July evening and you would have something like it, but not quite. At Earl’s Court the convict-band would be stared at as a curiosity, but people would probably keep at a respectful distance from the band-stand, especially if there was only one tired-looking warder to keep guard over the musical criminals.

The Convict Band playing in the Kiosk in the Place des Cocotiers, Noumea.

But in Noumea no one, save, perhaps, myself, looked twice at the enclosure which contained an amount of assorted villainy and potential violence, rapine, and sudden death as you could find the wide world over in a similar space. There were men from every station of life—soldiers, priests, lawyers, politicians, financiers, and men who had once belonged to the Golden Youth of France—inside the kiosk of the Musique de la Transportation.

Collectively they had committed every crime, from forgery to outrages for which civilised speech has no name. The chef d’orchestre, for example, was the man who, a few years ago, sent a thrill of horror through the world by cutting the heart out of a man whom he believed to be his rival in his wife’s affections, getting her to cook it as a sheep’s heart, dining off it with her, and then telling her what she had been eating. In addition to being a talented musician he was also a very clever painter who has won quite a reputation in the island.

And yet, while this unspeakable scoundrel was controlling with his baton the flood of sweet sounds which flowed out from the kiosk over the moonlight-spangled lawns, the most respectable people in Noumea were sitting about in chairs smoking and chatting; young men and maidens were wandering about among the trees; and little children were playing round the grassy slope on which the band-stand stood, taking no more notice of these human hyenas than if they had been the most respectable musicians that ever wore long hair and swallow-tailed coats.

The performance finished, as usual, with “La Marseillaise.” I stood up and took off my helmet. Then I put it on again and sat down somewhat suddenly. Not another person rose; not another head was uncovered. For all the notice that was taken of it, the National Hymn of the Republic might as well have been “Mrs. ’Enery ’Awkins,”—which did not strike me as a particularly good thing for France generally.

When the performance was over the artists gathered up their instruments, lolled out on to the path in front of the kiosk, and shuffled into a sort of double line. The weary warder counted them in a languid fashion, right-about-faced them, and gave the order to march. They shambled away through the gaily dressed crowds in the square. No one even turned to look at them, and I, who had seen a party of English convicts on their way to work through a public road, ranged up with their faces to the wall because a break-load of excursionists was passing by, wondered greatly.

The Musique de la Transportation is now, happily for the credit of Noumea, a thing of the past. The pampered artists got to think themselves indispensable to the gaiety of the town. So one night, having collected more surreptitious coppers than usual, they halted on their way to barracks, bought wine and brandy, and told the warder to go and report them if he dared. He did dare, and the next day the Director of the Administration published a brief edict which abolished them as musicians for ever.

The next morning, soon after coffee, a white-helmeted, gorgeously uniformed gendarme presented himself at the door of the Hotel Gaquon with a request to see “Monsieur Griffitte.” An Englishman or German official would have saluted. He took his helmet off, bowed, and handed me a letter from the Governor appointing an interview for the next day. I went to breakfast at the club as usual, and before the meal was over I found that everybody knew of the sending of that letter. I had been an interloper before, and an Englishman at that. Now I was a guest, the guest of the omnipotent Ministry upon whose will the fate of every official in Caledonia depended.

That was a morning of introductions, and I was surprised to find how many friends I had in Noumea.

The Governor’s offices at Noumea are in a corner of the lovely grounds in the midst of which his official residence stands. It was a little, unpretentious, two-storey building, wooden built, and with a verandah giving on to the street.

I gave my card to a collarless clerk, who appeared to be getting very hot over the task of sorting a few papers. He sent it up to His Excellency, and asked me “to give myself the trouble to sit down,” which I did.

Soldiers, civilians, gendarmes, and convict messengers kept dropping in every now and then to deliver messages or letters, or have a chat with somebody by way of beguiling the tedium of official hours, and then a half-caste boy came down with my card and requested me to give myself the further trouble of going upstairs. I don’t know whether this was another official, but if he was his uniform consisted of a pair of trousers and a shirt, a linen jacket which hadn’t seen the laundry for some time, and a pair of canvas deck-shoes.

The Town and Harbour of Noumea. Across the bay are the Barracks and the Military Reservation, which no civilian may enter without authority. On the peninsula to the right are the stations of the libérés collectifs.

I followed him upstairs. He opened the door without any ceremony, and I found myself in the presence of the Governor—a man of medium French height, with a square, close-cropped head, moustache, and close-clipped beard. If the chin had matched the forehead it would have been a strong face, but it did not.

I learnt afterwards that his Excellency Monsieur Feuillet is a man of decided anti-English tastes; but for all that he received me very cordially. He had already received notice of my coming from the French Government, and expressed himself as willing to do anything to further my mission. As a matter of fact, this came to countersigning my credentials from the Minister of Colonies and writing a letter to the Director of the Administration. I then shook hands, and saw Monsieur Paul Feuillet no more save from a distance.

Then I went to the Direction, and in a few minutes I was sitting in a half-darkened, comfortable room, with double doors, through which no sound could penetrate. This room is the centre of the system which really controls the destinies of bond and free throughout New Caledonia. On the other side of an ample writing-table sat a square-headed, strong-jawed man of about five-and-thirty, with close-cropped hair, and moustache and shaven chin à l’Anglais.

This was M. Edouard Telle, Director of the Penitentiary Administration for New Caledonia and Dependencies, the strongest, politest, and most friendly Frenchman I have ever met.

He is supreme chief of an army of commandants, surveillants, and jailors, whose duty it is to keep watch and ward over between ten thousand and twelve thousand convicts, relégues and libérés—terms which I have already explained.

He is absolutely independent of the Governor, who cannot even employ convicts on public works without his permission. He is responsible to no one but the Minister of Colonies and the President of the Republic, and they are many a long thousand miles away. With the stroke of a pen he could instantly stop all convict labour throughout the colony, and so bring its principal industries to a standstill. It was he, too, and not the Governor, who could have issued that ukase which would have closed the prisons and turned my long journey into a wild-goose chase.

In the Harbour, Noumea.

But, instead of this, he took quite as much trouble with me as if I had been an inspector sent out by the French Government, rather than a wandering Englishman who was only there on sufferance. He took the utmost pains to find out exactly what I wanted; he mapped out my journeys for me; gave me special passes authorising me to inspect all the prisons and camps en détail—which is a very different thing to the ordinary, but still rarely bestowed, visitor’s pass.

He addressed a circular letter to the commandants, enjoining them to do everything to help me; and, not content with this, he telegraphed to each prison and camp so that conveyances might be ready for me. At the same time, when I suggested fixing dates, he replied:

“No, Mr. Griffith, go when you please. I wish you to see the establishments exactly as they are always, and not as they might be if they were got ready for you. When you have seen them come back and tell me what you think of them. From what you have told me of your English prisons”—this was at the end of a somewhat long conversation—“your opinion will be most valuable to me.”

Then I thanked him, and mentioned the delicate subject of photographs, and his good nature and indulgence once move proved equal to the strain.

“Photograph anything you please,” he said, “inside or outside the prisons; but I shall ask you to remember that good English rule of yours about photographing individual prisoners.”

Of course, I agreed to this, and left the Direction well at ease and wondering more than ever at the misconceptions I had managed to form of the Caledonian prison system. I frankly admit that I had expected to be received with suspicion and reserve, perhaps even with hostility.

Instead of this the most powerful man in the colony had greeted me with perfect cordiality and frankness, and had taken more trouble to make my tour a success than I should certainly have expected a good many English officials to take.

During another interview with M. Telle, before I had yet seen the inside of a Caledonian prison, we both managed to astonish each other not a little. The Director is a criminologist and the son of a criminologist, who was Director before him, but he was sufficiently French only to have studied the continental systems.

Therefore he was about as much surprised when I told him that the cat and the birch were still used in English prisons; that English prisoners ate and slept in absolute solitude and worked in silence, as I was when he told me that, in this land of supposed horrors not only had all corporal punishment been abolished, but that the surveillants were not permitted even to lay a hand upon a prisoner, except in actual self-defence; that cells and silence were only used as punishments; and when he added that the better-behaved prisoners might smoke and drink wine, I confess that I was almost shocked. All this, however, with other strange things, I was soon to see for myself.

I dined that night, as usual, at the club, in a more contented frame of mind than heretofore, for now the omnipotent Administration had spoken, and I was free of the colony—free to go where I pleased, to see what I liked, and, within the limits of the law, do as I liked.

No man might say me nay. All the prison-houses in the land must give up their secrets to me. In short, I had in my pocket the keys of every cell door in New Caledonia.

Under these circumstances I naturally found things much pleasanter than before. I listened with equanimity to a local editor’s remarks on the war news—which he had been spending the day in mangling—and even the military doctors’ descriptions of the new plague cases and the ghastly operations which they had just been performing with those nail-stained hands of theirs did not seem quite so loathsome as before.

There was, by the way, another peculiarity of New Caledonian social life to which I was already becoming accustomed. There are practically no free servants in the colony. Male or female, they are either convicts or ex-convicts, and it was no uncommon thing to have your knife and fork laid for you at breakfast or dinner by a hand which had stuck a knife into somebody else, or to take your food from hands that had poisoned.

I admit that I did not like the idea at first, but in time I got accustomed to it, just as I did later on to being shaved by a most amiable and accomplished murderer, and having my bed made up by a lady who had cut her child’s throat. It is, in fact, the fashion in New Caledonia to have murderers for servants. As a distinguished resident said to me:

“You see, the assassins are reliable. They are the aristocrats of the place. They don’t condescend to smaller crimes. In fact, they would be absolutely insulted if they were accused of a theft, at least, the good murderers would, and as for killing you, they would never dream of it. Why should they? Besides, they know perfectly well that there wouldn’t be the remotest chance of escape for them.”

This I found afterwards to be the cold-drawn truth. Fewer after-crimes are committed in New Caledonia by those who are sent there for assassination than by minor criminals. Later on I shall have some curious information to give on this subject.

III ILE NOU

Half-past five on a glorious tropical morning. The sun was still hidden behind the green, rugged mountains which gained its name for New Caledonia; but it was still high enough for the shadows to be melting out of the valleys; for the grey roofs and white walls of the town to be glimmering among the dark masses of foliage; and for the smooth waters of the lovely harbour to light up with foregleams of the glory of sunrise.

A little beyond the northern end of the plague-infected area, with its corrugated iron walls and its white-clad sentries, I found a collection of pretty buildings, with neat little gardens round them. They were the offices of the executive police, and when I had passed through them I found myself on a short, board, wooden, T-shaped quay—the Quai de la Transportation—which is used solely for the purposes of the Administration.

Leading down to this is one of the only two railways of New Caledonia on which a locomotive travels. It is quite a toy affair, with a gauge of about twenty inches, and a length of perhaps five hundred yards; but the engine puffed around just as busily, and seemed just as proud of itself, as if it had been hauling the Empire State Express. It runs from the wharves to the head of the quay, and its function just then was carrying ballast for a new road.

It is a curious fact that the French have had possession of New Caledonia for nearly half a century, and yet the only railway by which passengers can travel is one on which the cars are drawn by convicts, concerning which more hereafter.

I presented my credentials at the douanerie, where my cameras were viewed with considerable suspicion until the all-compelling documents had been read. After that, I suppose, they would have almost let me take a Maxim gun on to the island. Then they were noted and handed back to me with a polite “Très bien, monsieur. The canot will start in a quarter of an hour. If you will give your apparatus to this officer he will see it safe in the boat.”

A polite surveillant stepped up, touched his helmet, and took them from me. Then I lit a pipe and strolled up and down the quay to enjoy my strange surroundings.

I had seen hundreds of convicts in England working both within and without the prison walls; working in grim, joyless silence, surrounded by equally silent, rifle-armed warders, and never a prisoner moving without one of these at his heels. Here it was difficult to believe that I was in Prisonland at all save that the other occupants of the quay were wearing two very different uniforms, and that I was the only one en civile.

The surveillants were dressed in spotless white—the official washing-bill of New Caledonia must be something enormous—their white helmets bore a silver badge, the chief figure in which was a glorified representation of the now forbidden rod, with the letters “A. P.” (Administration Pénitentiare). Their rank was shown by galons, a sort of stripe worn on the cuff of the left sleeve. This was of blue cloth with silver braid—the lines of braid served the same purpose as stripes do with us. For instance, the French equivalent for “two stripes” is “à deux galons.”

The uniform of the others was chiefly conspicuous for its ugliness and utility—a pair of trousers and a jumper of light grey canvas cloth, with a vest underneath, and a very broad-brimmed straw hat, without a ribbon. No convict in Caledonia is allowed a ribbon on his hat. Some had stout, undressed brogues, and some were barefoot. They were without exception extremely ugly and fairly hearty.

A good many of them were smoking, and this rather got on my nerves, for I kept on asking myself what would happen to an English prison official if he saw a convict take out a cigarette and go and ask another one for a light? But here surveillants strolled about puffing their own cigarettes—making me wonder again what would happen to an English warder smoking on duty?—and not worrying particularly over anything.

At the same time, there was no lack of discipline of its kind, though it was not what we should call discipline in England. Still, the convicts worked hard and regularly; harder, indeed, than I have ever seen English convicts work.

Their task was loading the canots and the steam-launch with provisions for the great prison on the other side of the harbour; and they went at it steadily and in excellent order until it was finished, scarcely needing a word of direction from the surveillants.

As I watched them I thought of the quiet-spoken, square-headed despot with whom I had been talking a day or two before. These men, like hundreds of others that I saw, evidently knew him, if only by repute.

Presently the surveillant who had taken my cameras came and saluted and told me that the canot was ready. I got in, and found it manned by twelve convicts, who were protected by an awning stretched from stem to stern. They were chatting and smoking when we got in, and my conductor, thinking perhaps to impress the Englishman with a sense of French discipline, ordered them to be silent.

They stopped talking for five minutes while they got under weigh, then, like a lot of school-boys, they began again, whereupon the surveillant rebuked them again. “Silence, je vous dis!” said he in his most authoritative tone; and they obliged him more or less for the rest of the passage.

I must say that they rowed very well, and with a vigour which betokened good nourishment. They looked at me with smiling curiosity. They evidently knew pretty well all about me by this time—Heaven and the mysterious “loi du bagne” only know how; and I daresay they wondered why any one should have taken the trouble to come across the world just to make their acquaintance.

I was received on the quay at Ile Nou by an officer—a chief warder, as we should call him in England—who took me to the Commandant’s house. En route I found that Ile Nou, about which I had read such terrible stories, is a very pleasant little settlement, composed of white houses and shady streets, at the foot of a hill on which the great prison buildings stand.

In a few minutes another illusion was shattered. I admit that I expected to find the Commandant of the greatest prison in Caledonia a semi-military despot in a braided uniform, boots and spurs, with a sword, and, possibly, a revolver, to say nothing of fiercely waxed moustache and imperial.

Instead of this I found a mild-mannered, grey-haired gentleman of about sixty, clad in a négligé white suit, with no sign of official rank about him save a silver-embroidered blue band round the left cuff of his coat, which reminded me rather oddly of the band that a British policeman wears when he is on duty.

He was drinking his early coffee and receiving reports, which were noted by a convict clerk at another table. He gave me a cup of coffee, and ordered the carriage to be got ready. Meanwhile, he dropped his reports and began to ask me about my journey, my impressions of New Caledonia, and so on.

Presently a surveillant came in to say that the carriage was ready. We got in, and a couple of well-bred, well-fed horses pulled us at a good pace up the winding road, until our convict driver halted in front of a big black iron door in a long white-washed wall. As the Chief Surveillant put his key into the lock the Commandant said to me, with a smile:

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

“Mais pardon, Commandant,” said the surveillant, as he threw the door open. “There have been two others, but they did not come across the world to see the prison, and they stayed a good deal longer than monsieur would care to do.”

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

As the door swung to behind me I found myself in a long rectangular courtyard, one side of which was almost filled by a row of long, white buildings fronting endways on to the court, with a door at the end and small windows along the side.

At the further end, to the right hand, there was another door in the high, white wall, of which I was to learn the use later on, for the quadrangle which we were crossing is to the convicts of Ile Nou what the Place de la Roquette was lately to the Parisians—the Field of Blood, the Place of Execution.

The Commandant apologised for not being able to invite me to assist at the spectacle, as there was no patient available. I should see shortly a forçat awaiting trial for murder, but it would be some time before he could be tried, and then there would be the ratification of the sentence.

I should, of course, have assisted at such a spectacle if it had been possible; but I had the advantage of hearing a simple, but none the less graphic, description of an execution at Ile Nou from the lips of one who had more than once been an eye-witness of the dread ceremony; and this I will reproduce hereafter not only because of its dramatic interest, but because it is so absolutely different from anything ever heard of in England.

After we had inspected the cases, or dormitories, where the convicts of the third, or lowest, class sleep on sloping wooden shelves, with one foot manacled to an iron bar running the whole length of the long room, we went through other gates and walls into the central prison—the Prison Cellulaire—the heart and centre of the vast organisation.

Here I might have fancied myself in a somewhat old-fashioned English prison. Here there were no convicts smoking cigarettes or chatting at their work while their guardians smoked theirs and chatted also. The chill of silence cut down through the warmth of the tropic morning as the iron gates clashed to, and the heavy bolts shot back. Underfoot, black stone or cement pavement; around, white walls and two tiers of little black doors, the upper fronted by stone balconies and iron rails.

The Inner Court of the Central Prison, Ile Nou. The Cachots Noirs are to the right. The Condemned Cells are in the Upper Gallery above the Archway.

On the ground floor we went through several cells into which light as well as air was admitted, and here I found convicts who had been sentenced to various terms of hard labour with solitary confinement. This, with reduction of diet, is the first degree of punishment inflicted on an idle or disorderly prisoner. It was about equal to the ordinary hard labour of English prisons.

Then, after a look into the two little exercise-yards, we mounted to the second storey. Here I noticed that the cells had no windows and no gratings in the doors. Some of them had little cards affixed to them.

I went and read a couple of these; they contained the names of the prisoners, their first sentence, their subsequent offences, and their present sentences.

In these two cases it was “ten years’ solitary confinement in the dark.” Then I knew that I was standing in front of the terrible Cachot Noir, or Black Cell—that engine of mental murder which the sentimentalism of French deputies, some of them amnestied communards, has substituted for the infinitely more merciful lash.

I asked for the doors to be opened. My polite Commandant demurred for a moment. It was not réglementaire. The Cachots Noirs were never opened except at stated intervals,—once every thirty days, for an hour’s exercise and medical inspection,—but the wording of my credentials was explicit, and so the doors were opened.

Out of the corner of one came something in human shape, crouching forward, rubbing its eyes and blinking at the unaccustomed light. It had been three and a half years in that horrible hole, about three yards long, by one and a half broad. I gave him a feast of sunshine and outer air by taking his place for a few minutes.

After the first two or three the minutes lengthened out into hours. I had absolutely no sense of sight. I was as blind as though I had been born without eyes. The blackness seemed to come down on me like some solid thing and drive my straining eyes back into my head. It was literally darkness that could be felt, for I felt it, and the silence was like the silence of upper space.

When the double doors opened again the rays of light seemed to strike my eyes like daggers. The criminal whose place I had taken had a record of infamy which no printable words could describe, and yet I confess that I pitied him as he went back into that living death of darkness and silence.

We went along the galleries, looking into other cells and at other prisoners, some of whom I was surprised to find quite cheerful, but they were new-comers, and perhaps liked the idleness and the sleep. Then we came to a corridor cut off by a heavy iron gate. There were six ordinary cells in this, the cells of the condemned, and it is here that the last tragedy of the convict’s life on Ile Nou begins.

Let us suppose that, as often happens, there are four or five men lying in these cells under sentence of death. The English murderer knows the day and hour of his doom. These men do not. Every night they go to sleep not knowing whether or not it is their last sleep on earth. All they know is that they are doomed. Then the fiat goes forth that “Un nommé D.” is to make the final expiation of his crimes.

That night, when the prison doors are locked, the parts of the guillotine are brought in through the door at the end of the great courtyard, and set up on a platform supported on a stone foundation, under the supervision of “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” who is always a convict released from his other duties in consideration of performing the last functions of the law on his colleagues.

Soon after three the next morning, accompanied by the Chaplain and the Chief Surveillant, the Commandant mounts the little hill on which the central prison stands. The black doors open, and they ascend to the corridor of the condemned; a key clicks in the lock, and the bolts rattle back.

You can, perhaps, imagine what that sound means to A., B., C., and D. Men in their position do not take much awakening. Perhaps they have been waiting for this for weeks.

They hear the footsteps coming along the stone-paved corridor. Which door will they stop at? Think of the agony of apprehension that is compressed into those few seconds!

Then the footsteps stop. Three men wipe the sweat from their brows, and fall back on their plank-beds. They at least will not die for a day or two yet. The fourth hears a key rattle into the lock of his cell door. The door swings open, and the early morning flows in. “L’un nommé D.” has already accepted his fate. He is already off his bed and standing to attention as steadily as he can. The Commandant says kindly, and, perhaps, with a check in his voice:

“C’est pour ce matin!”

Then he steps back, and the priest takes his place. The door is not closed, but the Commandant and his assistants retire a little out of respect for the last confidences of the condemned.

Meanwhile “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou” has been summoned, and, in due course, he takes the chaplain’s place. He binds his patient’s hands behind his back, ties his legs so that he can only just walk, and cuts away the collar of his shirt.

At the same time, other and more picturesque preparations have been made in the great courtyard. A company of infantry with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets have been marched in and surround the scaffold in hollow square. Almost at the same time come the Director of the Administration, the Procurator-General, the Clerk of the Marine Tribunal, the Court which holds the power of life and death over the convicts, and a few other officials.

The swift tropical dawn is approaching by this time. The gates and doors of the prison are thrown open, and columns of convicts file into the yard, guarded by surveillants, revolver on hip. They take their places in ranks inside the hollow square of soldiers.

The door at the end of the courtyard opens last of all, and through it comes a little procession composed of the Commandant, the Chief Surveillant, the priest, and “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou,” escorting the principal actor in the scene. The priest mounts the scaffold with the victim, followed by the executioner and his assistant; the clerk of the court reads the verdict and sentence, the Commandant hands his warrant to the Director and then he gives the order:

“Uncover and kneel!”

The broad-brimmed hats come off and the grey-clad ranks sink on their knees around the Altar of Justice. The living sacrifice is asked if he has anything to say. He usually makes a short speech either of exhortation or bravado.

Then, with the assistance of the executioners, he takes his place on a sloping plank. A roll of drums rumbles echoing round the white walls. The plank swings into a horizontal position, the body is thrust forward till the neck is imprisoned in the lunette—the little window through which those who die by French law take their last look at the world. “Monsieur de l’Ile Nou” touches a button; then comes the “skirr” of the falling knife, a sharp thud, and there is one scoundrel the less on Ile Nou.

After which the comrades of the deceased are marched back to breakfast, and thence to their daily tasks.

The Central Prison, Ile Nou. In front is the Execution Ground. The Quadrangle is enclosed by a high whitewashed stone wall. To the left is the Chapel in which the condemned may, if they choose, attend Mass for the last time.

IV MEASUREMENT AND MANIA

I left the central prison breathing the soft, sweet air, and looking up at the deep blue sky with a sudden sensation of thankfulness which I had never experienced before. In a sense I was like a man who had been blind and had had his sight given back to him; and I thought of the wretches I had left behind me in that high-walled enclosure and those little black holes built away into the thick walls which, for so many of them, were to be tombs of mental death.

We came down the hill to the Pretoire, the Bureau of Anthropometry. This is the ante-chamber through which every prisoner must pass who enters the Prisonland of the South. On the way the Commandant and I discussed a topic which I found a favourite one with all the officials whom I met in Caledonia—the differences between the French system and our own.

They were quite as much surprised at the rigours of our system as I at first was at the leniency of theirs—always saving that horrible Cachot Noir.

We went then, as I did many times afterwards, with other officials, into matters of diet, hours, and kinds of labour, detentions, and punishments, and I succeeded in showing him that the Caledonian convict was to be envied in every particular by the English convict, until he came to the threshold of the dark cell. With us, three days’ dark cell and bread and water is the maximum punishment. There it is five years, and sentences may run consecutively. When the discussion was over the commandant added an entirely French rider to it:

“But, monsieur, you must remember that this is not only imprisonment—it is exile. How many of these poor wretches will ever see France again? Whereas your criminals, when their sentence is done, are set free in their native land.”

To which I replied:

“Quite so, and more’s the pity! Every avenue of honest life is closed to them, and they are released only to commit more crimes and deserve another sentence. There your system is better. You exile them really, but you give them another home where they have hope. We only exile them socially, and give them no hope.”

And this brought us to the door of the Pretoire.

It consisted of three apartments, the middle one was the examination room. To the right hand was a larger chamber, sometimes used as a judgment room. To the left was a smaller one, the walls of which were covered with cabinets containing the records in duplicate of every criminal that had landed on Ile Nou. Beyond this there was a dark-room.

When I had had a general look round and a chat with the Officer who operated the Bertillon system, the Commandant asked me if I would care to go through the mill. To which, not having been found out so far, I consented.

Thereupon I was delivered over into the hands of a functionary who had a pair of eyes like visual gimlets. They bored clean through me every time he looked at me. I was no longer the favoured guest of the all-powerful Administration; I was simply a subject, a thing to be measured, and weighed, and examined in the most minute detail, and to have my most trivial characteristics noted and put down under their proper categories.

He told me to take off my boots and coat. By rights my socks should have come off also, but that, although I offered to do it, was dispensed with. He put me up against a wall, fixed my head with one hand and pushed my stomach in with the other, saw that my knees were properly back against the wall, and lowered the bar on to my head. Then he moved my head a little to right and left, and said to the clerk:

“One metre, 816.”

When this was noted down he sat me in a chair. The seat was longitudinally divided by a ridge; the back was a measuring scale. Again he took means to satisfy himself that I was sitting perfectly straight, and so my sitting height was taken.

Then he got a pair of callipers, and measured my head in two directions, from back to front and across, all the time calling out the fatal figures which, in case of need, would have identified me among ten million men.

The Bureau of Anthropometry, Ile Nou.

After this he descended to minor matters, ears, nose, lips, thumb- and finger-joints, eyelids, and so on. Then he stood me on a box on which was rudely outlined a human foot. I put my right foot on this, bent forward, and rested my right hand on a table, using my left leg and foot to keep my balance. When I was steady my foot was measured.

Then I rested my right arm on a table, standing on one leg the while. It was measured from the elbow to the point of the middle finger. After this the prints of my thumb and three fingers were taken, and duly impressed on the fiche, or identification card.

Then came the most trying part of the ordeal, the general observation. I stood to attention in the middle of the floor. The gimlet-eyed official walked round me, and looked through and through me, what time the clerk at the table asked questions from the schedule he was filling up.

No detail was so minute as to escape those all-searching eyes. A scar which I had got twenty years before in a football match, though half hidden under an eyebrow, was detected, measured, and noted. The scars of a couple of old knife-stabs in my left hand, and the trace of a parrot-bite on one of my fingers—nothing escaped. The colour of my hair and moustache fell into a certain category. My eyes were examined, and the colours of the iris duly placed in their proper category.

By this time I began to feel as though I were being taken to pieces and examined bit by bit. It was a sort of mental and physical vivisection without the knife and the chloroform. Finally, the gentleman at the desk asked the question, “Intellectuality?”

“Mediocre,” replied Mr. Gimlet-eyes, with brutal frankness. Then I laughed, and the Commandant suggested that I should be photographed.

“Pas artistique, mais exact,” he said, as we went into the other room.

“And, therefore,” I said, “it will resemble the remarks of your anthropometric expert. I never had such an exact account of myself before. Anthropometry strikes me as being a pretty good medicine for human vanity.”

An Arab Type of Convict. A combination of Ideality and Homicidal Mania.

Out of the depth and width of his experience the Commandant agreed with me, and then I was photographed. There was no artistic posing or anything of that sort. I was planted on a chair with my back straightened up and my head in a vice such as other photographers were once wont to torture their victims with. The camera was brought within three feet of me. I was taken full face, staring straight into the lens, and then I was taken en profile. When, many weeks afterwards, I showed the result to my wife, she was sorry I ever went; but for all that it’s a good likeness.

By the time the negatives were developed, and I had satisfied the Commandant that certain black spots which the pitiless lens had detected under my skin were the result of a disease I had contracted years before in South America, and not premonitory symptoms of the plague, it was breakfast-time, and I went down to the canteen, where I found convicts buying wine and cigarettes, and generally conducting themselves like gentlemen at large.

I did not see the Commandant again that day, save for a few minutes after lunch, when he told me that he had an appointment at the Direction in Noumea, and placed me in charge of his lieutenant, the Chief Surveillant. The Chef was a very jolly fellow, as, indeed, I found most of these officials to be, and during our drives about the island, we chatted with the utmost freedom. As a matter of fact, it was he who gave me the description of the execution which I reproduced in the last chapter.

He, too, was entirely of the same opinion as myself as to the pitiless iniquity of the dark cell; but he took some pains to point out that it was not the fault either of the French Government or of the Administration, but simply of certain politicians in France who wanted a “cry,” and got up a crusade among the sentimentalists against “the brutality of flogging bound and helpless prisoners far away from all civilised criticism in New Caledonia.” Some of these men, too, as I have said, were déportés, or exiled communards who had been forgiven, and had brought back batches of stories with them as blood-curdling as they were mendacious.

“Bien, monsieur,” he said. “You have seen the Cachot Noir. Now we will go to the Disciplinary Camp first, because it is on the road, and then—well, you shall see what the cachot does, and when you see that I think you will say the lash is kinder.”

The Disciplinary Camps in New Caledonia have no counterpart in the English penal system. “Incorrigibles,” who won’t work, who are insubordinate, or have a bad influence on their comrades of the Bagne, are sent into them partly for punishment and partly for seclusion.

The Courtyard of a Disciplinary Camp, Ile Nou. Inspection at 5 a.m. after breakfast, and before hard labour. To the right is a Kanaka “Policeman.” The average physique of the Criminals may be seen by comparison with myself, standing in front of the Kanaka.

They have poorer food and harder work, no “gratifications” in the way of wine or tobacco, or other little luxuries. They sleep on plank-beds with their feet in anklets, and, if they don’t behave themselves, they are promptly clapped into a cell for so many days’ solitary confinement on bread and water. For graver offences they are, of course, sent back to the central prison as hopeless cases, after which their own case is usually hopeless for life.

I found several of the men in this camp working in chains. This was another subject about which the sentimentalists made a good deal of fuss in France, but when I saw what the alleged chains really were, I laughed, and said to my friend the Chef:

“So that is what you call chains in New Caledonia, is it? May I have a look at one?”

He beckoned to one of the men to come up, and this is what I found: There was an iron band riveted round his right ankle, and to this was attached a chain which, as nearly as I could calculate with my hands, weighed about six pounds. It was as absolutely no inconvenience to its wearer, when he was either sitting or lying down. When he was walking or working he tucked the end in under his belt, and, as far as I could see, it didn’t make any difference to his walk, save a little dragging of the foot. In fact, when I asked him whether it was any trouble to him, he said:

“No, not after a few days. One gets accustomed to it.”

“Very likely!” I said. “If you got the chains in an English prison, you would have them on both legs and arms, and you wouldn’t be able to take more than a half-stride.”

“Ah, they are brutal, those English!” said the scoundrel, with a shrug of his shoulders, as he tucked the end of his chain round his belt and sauntered away.

The chain is usually a punishment for gross insubordination or attempted escape. This man, the Chef told me, had tried three times with the chain on, and once had used the loose end to hammer a warder with, for which he got twelve months’ Cachot Noir and the chain for life—and a little more, since he would be buried in it.[2]

Then, after I had made the round of the cells, I was taken to a very curious punishment-chamber which is in great vogue in New Caledonia. In one sense it reminded me of our treadwheel, though it is not by any means so severe. I have seen a strong man reduced almost to fainting by fifteen minutes on a treadwheel. Nothing like this could happen in the Salle des Pas Perdus, as I christened the place when its use had been explained to me.

Here, after a brief and scanty meal at 4.30 a.m., the convicts are lined up in a big room, or, rather, shed, about sixty feet long by forty feet broad. There is absolutely no furniture in the place, with the exception of a dozen flat-topped pyramids of stone placed in straight lines about ten feet from each side.

If there are twenty-four convicts condemned to this particular kind of weariness, twenty-four are taken in, in single file. Then the word “March!” is given, and they begin. Hour after hour the dreary round-and-round is continued in absolute silence. Every half-hour they are allowed to sit on the pyramids for a couple of minutes, and then on again. At eleven the bell rings for soupe, which, in the Camp Disciplinaire, resolves itself into hot water and fat with a piece of bread. In the other camps the bell doesn’t go again till one, but these have only their half-hour, and then the promenade begins again, and continues till sunset.

I was assured that those who could stand a week of this with the chain did feel its weight, and I don’t wonder at it, for a more miserable, weary, limping, draggle-footed crowd of scoundrels I never saw in all my life than I watched that day perambulating round the Hall of Lost Footsteps.

From here we drove across to the western side of the island, and presently came to a magnificent sloping avenue of palm-trees.

“The avenue of the hospital,” said the Chef. “Now you will see the best and the worst of Ile Nou.”

And so it was. We drove down the avenue to a white, heavy stone arch, which reminded me somewhat quaintly of the entrance gates of some of the old Spanish haciendas I had seen up-country in Peru. Inside was a vast, shady garden, brilliant with flowers whose heavy scent was pleasantly tempered by the sweet, cool breeze from the Pacific; for the eastern wall of the whole enclosure was washed by the emerald waters of the Lagoon.

The Avenue of Palms, leading to the Hospital, Ile Nou.

In the midst of this garden stood the hospital, built in quadrangular form, but with one side of each “quad” open to the garden. The houses were raised on stone platforms something like the stoep of a Dutch house, and over these the roofs came down in broad verandahs. Grey-clad figures were sitting or lying about on the flags underneath, a few reading or doing some trifling work, and others were wandering about the garden or sleeping in some shady nook. It was, in short, very different from the central prison and the disciplinary camp.

I was introduced to the Medical Director, and he showed me round, omitting one wing, in which he told me there were a couple of cases of plague. I happened to know that there were really about a dozen, so I readily agreed that that part should be left out.

As prison hospital, it differed very little from others that I had seen in England. There was the same neatness and exquisite cleanliness everywhere, though the wards were somewhat darker, and therefore cooler, which, with the midday sun at 106° in the shade, was not a bad thing. All the nurses were, of course, Sisters of Mercy.[3] In fact, practically all the nursing in New Caledonia is done by Sisters, and not a few of these heroic women had become brides of the Black Death before I left.

Here, as in all other prison hospitals I have visited, diet, stimulants, and medicine are absolutely at the discretion of the Director. No matter what the cost, the spark of life must be kept alive as long as possible in the breast of the murderer, the forger, and the thief, or the criminal whose light of reason has already been quenched in the darkness of the Black Cell.

In fact, so careful are the authorities of their patients’ general health that they give them nothing in the way of meat but the best beef and mutton that can be imported from Australia; Caledonian fed meat is not considered nourishing enough. In normal times the death-rate of Ile Nou, which is wholly given over to convict camps, is two or three per cent. lower than that of the town of Noumea.

Part of the Hospital Buildings, Ile Nou. The roofed-terrace in front is where the patients take their siesta in the middle of the day. One of these is attached to each court of the Hospital. Some of the mattresses may be seen to the right.

Then from this little flowery paradise of rest and quietness we went across the road to another enclosure in which there were two long, white buildings, a prison and a row of offices, at right angles to each other. This was the “bad” side. On the other there had been invalids and invalid lunatics; here there were only lunatics, and mostly dangerous at that—men who, after being criminals, had become madmen; not like the dwellers in Broadmoor, who are only criminal because they are mad.

I once paid a visit to the worst part of the men’s side at Broadmoor, but I don’t think it was quite as bad as the long corridor which led through that gruesome home of madness. On either hand were heavy black-painted, iron doors, and inside these a hinged grating through which the prisoner could be fed.

The cells were about nine feet by six feet. They had neither furniture nor bedclothes in them. The furniture would have been smashed up either in sheer wanton destruction or for use as missiles to hurl through the grating, and the bedclothes would have been torn up into strips for hanging or strangling purposes.

It has been my good or bad luck to see poor humanity in a good many shapes and guises, but I never saw such a series of pitiful parodies of manhood as I saw when those cell doors were opened.

Some were crouched down in the corners of their cells, muttering to themselves and picking the sacking in which they were clothed to pieces, thread by thread. It was no use giving them regular prison clothing, for they would pick themselves naked in a couple of days. Others were walking up and down the narrow limits of their cells, staring with horribly vacant eyes at the roof or the floor, and not taking the slightest notice of us.

One man was lying down scraping with bleeding fingers at the black asphalted floor under the impression that he was burrowing his way to freedom; others were sitting or lying on the floor motionless as death; and others sprang at the bars like wild beasts the moment the door was opened.

But the most horrible sight I saw during that very bad quarter of an hour was a gaunt-faced, square-built man of middle-height who got up out of a corner as his cell door opened, and stood in the middle facing us.

He never moved a muscle, or winked an eyelid. His eyes looked at us with the steady, burning stare of hate and ferocity. His lips were drawn back from his teeth like the lips of an ape in a rage, and his hands were half clenched like claws. The man was simply the incarnation of madness, savagery, and despair. He had gone mad in the Black Cell, and the form that his madness had taken was the belief that nothing would nourish him but human flesh. Of course he had to be fed by force.

When we got outside a big warder pulled up his jumper and showed me the marks of two rows of human teeth in his side. If another man hadn’t stunned the poor wretch with the butt of his revolver he would have bitten the piece clean out—after which I was glad when the Doctor suggested that I should go to his quarters and have a drink with him.

V A CONVICT ARCADIA

I visited two or three other industrial camps and the farm-settlements before I left Ile Nou, but as I had yet to go through the agricultural portions of the colony it would be no use taking up space in describing them here.

There are practically no roads to speak of in New Caledonia outside a short strip of the south-western coast. In September, 1863, Napoleon the Little signed the decree which converted the virgin paradise of New Caledonia into a hell of vice and misery—a description which is perhaps somewhat strong, but which history has amply justified. In the following year the transport Iphigénie took a cargo of two hundred and forty-eight galley-slaves from Toulon and landed them where the town of Noumea now stands. This consignment was added to by rapidly following transports, and for thirty years at least the administration of New Caledonia has had at its disposal an average of from seven to ten thousand able-bodied criminals for purposes of general improvement, and more especially for the preparation of the colony for that free colonisation which has been the dream of so many ministers and governors.

Now the area of New Caledonia is, roughly speaking, between six thousand and seven thousand square miles, and after an occupation of nearly forty years it has barely fifty miles of roads over which a two-wheeled vehicle can be driven, and these are only on the south-western side of the island.

The only one of any consequence is that running from Noumea to Bouloupari, a distance of about thirty miles. At Bourail, which is the great agricultural settlement, there are about twelve miles of road and a long ago abandoned railway bed. Between La Foa and Moindou there is another road about as long; but both are isolated by miles of mountain and bush from each other and are therefore of very little general use.

One has only to contrast them with the magnificent coach roads made in a much shorter space of time through the far more difficult Blue Mountain district in New South Wales to see the tremendous difference between the British and the French ideas of colonisation, to say nothing of the railways—two thousand seven hundred miles—and thirty-three thousand miles of telegraph lines.

The result of this scarcity of roads and absolute absence of railways is that when you want to go from anywhere to anywhere else in New Caledonia you have to take the Service des Côtes, which for dirt, discomfort, slowness, and total disregard of the convenience of passengers I can only compare to the Amalgamated Crawlers presently known as the South-Eastern and Chatham Railways. Like them, it is, of course, a monopoly, wherefore if you don’t like to go by the boats you can either swim or walk.

The Island of “Le Sphinx,” one of the tying-up places on the south-west coast of New Caledonia.

The whole of New Caledonia is surrounded by a double line of exceedingly dangerous reefs, cut here and there by “passes,” one of which Captain Cook failed to find, and so lost us one of the richest islands in the world. The navigable water both inside and outside the reefs is plentifully dotted with tiny coral islands and sunken reefs a yard or so below the surface and always growing, hence navigation is only possible between sunrise and sunset. There is only one lighthouse in all Caledonia.

Thus, when I began to make my arrangements for going to Bourail, I found that I should have to be on the wharf at the unholy hour of 4.30 a.m. I packed my scanty belongings overnight. At 4.15 the cab was at the door. The cochers of Noumea either work in relays or never go to sleep. I was just getting awake, and the gorged mosquitoes were still sleeping. I dressed and drank my coffee to the accompaniment of considerable language which greatly amused the copper-skinned damsel who brought the coffee up. She also never seemed to sleep.

Somehow I got down to the wharf, and presented myself at the douannerie with my “Certificat de Santé,” which I had got from the hospital the previous evening. The doctor in charge gave me a look over, and countersigned it. Then I went with my luggage into an outer chamber. My bag and camera-cases were squirted with phenic acid from a machine which looked like a cross between a garden hose and a bicycle foot-pump. Then I had to unbutton my jacket, and go through the same process. The rest of the passengers did the same, and then we started in a strongly smelling line for the steamer.