Chapter 2
Section 2 of Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, Volume 1, Number 11, August 1920. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Jim Pearson Perry. Captain Billy's Whizbang, Volume 1, Number 11, August 1920, by W. H. Fawcett. French Convict Curse
Reverend Golightly has favored the whizbang with another ABLE article for the September issue. It is a story on the practice of witchcraft with its revolting rights throughout the West Indies and the three Guianas. The story holds the reader's attention from start to finish and gives an expose that would put the Ouija board and clairvoyant mysticisms to shame. Get the September number, read Morrill's story of The Human Hyena Which Kidnaps Children, The Goat Without Horns, and The Loop Guru, the editor.
By Reverend Golightly Morrill, pastor of People's Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Poor devil! He was an escaped convict from French Guiana. Haggard, half-starved, barefooted, his shirt torn as if to show his torn heart, his trousers ragged, bareheaded, blue eyes, a mat of brown hair,
and a neat mustache and beard reminiscent of the Parisian boulevards. He didn't look half so ferocious as his black British gorilla of a guard who dragged him on our boat and later transferred him to the train bound for Georgetown, Demerara, to languish in jail till the French mail steamer arrived to take him back captive to Cayenne. I took pity on him, gave him some fruit, chocolate, and money, wished him a bon voyage,
and was sorry I couldn't give him his liberty as well. French Guiana is a penal colony, a prison of 35,000 square miles, bounded by Dutch Guiana, Brazil, and the Atlantic Ocean. Out of a population of some 40,000, 10,000 are convicts. While there are exports of balata and phosphates, the principal ones are gold, cocoa, hides, rosewood, and rosewood oil, the last ship to France as a substitute for attar of roses.
But the glitter of the gold is dimmed by the shadow of the prison, and above the fragrance of the rosewood rises the stench of political putridity, convict crime, and corruption. From her earliest history, Cayenne has furnished an inspired chapter for the Devil's Bible, written with finger of fire in ink of blood.
In the first of the 17th century, the settlers not only had before them the interesting fate of being massacred and devoured by the cannibal Indians, but a providential blessing in the form of their mad commander, Sir de Brittany, who, not satisfied with torturing the 400 colonists with gibbet, gallows, and wheel, amused himself by instituting pleasures called purgatory and hell, in which he forced them to relate even their dreams as to a father confessor.
If he were displeased, he maltreated and killed them. The next batch of settlers mutinied en route from France, and so on arriving here so angered the Indians by enslaving and plundering them that the natives forced them to take refuge in a fort where famine and disease were the Red Men's best allies.
Succeeding colonization companies were failures. Mismanagement and misfortune were president and vice president of the ventures. For example, in 1763, 12,000 volunteer colonists came to French Guiana with the promise of free lands, which proved to be free graves. By 1765, 11,000 had died.
They landed and lived in mud and water. There were no tools for tilling the soil, yet they had a shop to make skates in this equatorial climb. Drinking water there was none, probably because they thought it would rain or they might be able to get wine. Rivers rose and not knowing how to dike them, those who lived through the fevers died from the floods. Such colonial schemes are finely satirized by Daudet in his Port Terrascan.
At best, the French are the worst colonizers, whether here or in Tahiti, Marquesas, Caledonia, Panama, Algeria, Canada, and Martinique. Cayenne next became the criminal cesspool of France, costing the lives of hundreds and eighty thousand livres. During the French Revolution, men were arrested in Paris,
paraded before the populace like wild beasts in cages, then shipped to Cayenne, the white man's grave. Of 600 royalists transported here and landed on the Cinnamarie River without shelter or food, two-thirds perished. Often, they were brutally murdered before reaching there,
according to Divini's story of Laurette or the Red Seal. The country was dubbed the Dry Guillotine, and it is said that a prisoner who had the choice between it and the blood-wet one in Paris chose the latter. In 1852, free transportation was offered as a favor, and more than 3,000 accepted. In 1854, Napoleon III, that third-class Napoleon,
made Cayenne a penal colony for his political enemies, as if he hadn't already enough crimes to atone for. Between 1852 and 1867, 18,000 exiles were brought over, although New Caledonia for the next 20 years became the ticket-of-leave tourist resort. In 1885-87, confirmed criminals and those with more than eight-year sentences to hard labor were shipped here. However, they have proved unfit for government employment.
Convicts formerly sent to Caledonia had such lease of long life that they are now sent to Guyana to reduce living expenses. Grave digging, next to gold digging, is the principal occupation. In Cayenne, the majority of the prisoners are Negroes, Arabs, and Annamites. Now most of the outcasts are sent to unsaintly Saint-Laurent.
Formerly, they were herded at Cayenne, the three Îles de Souleau, on one of which Captain Drefuss was imprisoned, and the Kourou River, La Mer, being reserved as a home for the old and sick. The convicts have trades and are bakers, carpenters, and tanners, etc. They make curios, such as balata boats, whips with kaiser and dog heads on the handle,
separable tables, fiber vanity bags, and cigar cutters in the shape of a guillotine. They are employed as balata bleeders and in gold camps, and have built some thrifty miles of road in the country where there is little agriculture or cattle raising. The little money made is spent on rum and tobacco, and the frank notes saved are tightly rolled up in a small cylindrical receptacle, which they use as a suppository to prevent robbery. Nevertheless, horrible murders and mutilations are common. There is the cutthroat class, sent here from Paris for life.
Inhabitants tell you that if they boldly and insultingly beg you for gold, you should give them lead. Then there is the harmless class, made up of those convicted three times for some petty offense. Cayenne twice a year. The culprits had steel cage cabins to prevent them from jumping overboard and swimming home across the Atlantic. As the Athenians sent youths and maidens to be devoured by the Minotaur every year,
so this monstrous country eats up 2,000 convicts annually. In the old days, when a prisoner died, the corpse was sewn in a sack, taken to the water, and a bell tolled. The sharks knew the sound and instantly rose to the surface, making it black with their fins as they hastened to the funeral meet. Felons with sentences for more than five years
are compelled to serve an additional term of the same period as settlers in the colony. When a contractor wants convict labor, he gets it from the government for so much money if it can be spared. The liberes, though having served their term,
are not free to leave the colony, and since the work is done by the regular prisoners, it is hard to land a job. Accordingly, many starve to death, unless they steal provisions. They may be skillful artisans, but have no tools and are not wanted in
town. So they go to the country to loa for pilfer, where they are arrested and punished as tramps. Often, for petty theft, an overseer ties his victim to a tree and beats him with a balata whip. When they do procure work, it is big with little wages. It is impossible for the white man to work in the sun or stand like a black man all day in the water. Many convict camps are abandoned on account of unhealthy surroundings. Poorly fed, the prisoners stalk around like specters. They
receive scanty rice rations for the amount of work they do and are compelled to beg from everybody. Their murderously minded Corsican keepers look like fiends in human form, provoked to kill, and, like the followers of Marquis de Sade, take a mad pleasure in torture, gloating over the sufferings of the wretches they starve and flog. As companions, I prefer the thief and assassin convict to the jailer,
with his white cork helmet jammed low over a low forehead, his shaggy black brows and lashes from which flash heartless glances, his long bandit-like mustachios framing a savage slit for a mouth, and his brutal jaw. Far from the restraint of civilization, he becomes a beast in fury and loves to torment his charge. Hearts, as well as stones, are broken in these prisons.
The convict's complaint is useless, for his letters are censored, doctored, and amputated before they reach home. There was one American down here for stealing. He told a friend of mine and he could be trusted up to $500, but any amount over that, he would steal. Escaped prisoners taken back to Cayenne are often chained to the deck, lashed and kicked by ruthless black guards, and are left to wallow in their excrement.
The mouths of the rivers are well guarded, and all told, there are about 700 police who set the springs to this death trap. Camps are insanatory and full of disease, insects, and vermin. After work, the exiles are thrust into dark cells of decaying barracks. Still, they have some privileges besides death and torture.
They are furnished a piece of ground with the necessary tools to work it, allowed to send home for their families, or to have a contract marriage, if they have been here for two years and shown good behavior. If the convict escapes, the French officials don't care much.
He prefers the savage jungle to his savage keeper, fleeing to the bush not half so wild through Fennin flood to Brazil, Dutch, and British Guiana. With no weapons for game or hook for fish, they grow mad with hunger, kill each other, and have cannibal feasts, for which they are guillotined if captured. To avoid ambush, they go in gangs, and when they eat or rest, watch the four points of the compass.
Just as America had an underground railway between North and South to aid the fugitive slaves, so in Perameribo, Dutch Guiana, there are agents of a society formed in France who provide food, clothes, and money to aid the convicts' escape. There I was informed that the American bauxite company engages escaped convicts and gives them a chance.
However, in holy British Guiana, if caught, they are sent back or given so many days to leave the colony, in which case they often fly to Venezuela. Recently, there was a frightful murder in the bush. A man's head was chopped off and placed in a canoe to shoot the falls in order to cover traces of the crime. But, as in Eugène Aram, guilt could not be hidden, for the canoe went over the rapids and falls without spilling its gruesome cargo. It was beached, discovered, the assassins were tracked,
and an airplane was sent from the penal colony, which swooped down on the murderers like a bird of prey and carried them off to prison. Paradoxical as it may seem, the salvation of Cayenne is the convict. He does the work. I talked with a man who employs convicts, and he said they were all good workers.
Many of the other inhabitants, who sweat to get balata and gold, are just as bad outlaws, their life being one guilty round of drink, seduction, cruelty, and crime. The colony is full of physical as well as moral lepers. Like the other Guyanas, elephantiasis, leprosy, and filthy diseases scurf and scourge. The jungles are full of envenomed serpents.
As for heat, the country is a few degrees above the equator and many above the boiling point. This dirty land is washed by the Atlantic, although the ocean does not, as Euripides says, wash away the wounds and stain of the world, but rather washes them here from France. Like a New York garbage boat carrying refuse to the sea, French convict ships dump the awful of humanity on these shores.
The pilgrims came to America with religious convictions, somewhat different from the convictions, criminal and otherwise, those Frenchmen held who settled Canada, Caledonia, and Cayenne. Climate here is one long season of sorrow. Guyana is an outlaw country, a jumping-off place of the world, a backdoor to perdition, a dominion of dolor, despair, mud, and blood,
where death is the jailer who frees. The cities of Cayenne and Saint-Laurent are cities of dreadful day and night, where spread infections of unutterable sadness, infections of incalculable madness,
infections of incurable despair. Faith, hope, and charity are banished, the colony, and the prisoners are the saddest and weariest of men. La Belle France has succeeded in establishing and maintaining a hell on earth in French Guiana.
Dante says there is a place within the depths of hell called Malabolgia. His prophetic eye must have seen this colony accursed, for he peoples the ten gulfs of the eighth circle of the inferno with seducers, thirsters for gold, grafters, thieves, peculators, hypocrites, robbers, forgers, and counterfeiters, and punishes these lost souls with terrible heat,
horrible leprosies, poisonous serpents, filth, and scourging demons. End of chapter 2
