You’ve just been told you’re going to spend the next five years of your life incarcerated,
and your sentence will be served at a penal colony called “Devil’s Island.”
Hmm, you think, that’s not the best-sounding name.
But then you remember deviled eggs are mighty tasty and your mom used to call you a “little
devil”.
Maybe Devil’s Island is a term of endearment?
Maybe not, because on your way over there a guy next to you, also wearing those fashionable
shackles, tells you that three-quarters of people that go there don’t come back.
“What do you mean?” you ask.
“What do you think,” he replies.
“It’s hell on Earth.
You go in, and you die.”
‘Sacre bleu!’ you think, ‘cos you’re actually French and don’t usually say things
like, “Holy Moly”.
You’ll have to escape, but as you’ll soon find out, that is going to be very, very hard.
The reason it’s going to be hard is because you’ll be staying on an almost deserted
island.
In fact, when you get there you’re quite surprised that you’re actually allowed to
roam about a bit.
You even get to sleep in a large room with other guys.
The downside is that most of them are killers.
It’s true that many men that go in don’t come out, and just after you got there you
saw dead fellas being carried on stretchers.
You try and formulate an escape plane, but seeing as you’re stuck on an island off
the coast of South America, getting back to Paris could be just a little bit difficult.
But one day you hear whispers from other prisoners.
They tell tales of amazing escapes.
I will go down in convict history, too, you think.
Just wait and see.
You know you’re on an island that is part of the Salvation islands.
You know that you’re in the Atlantic Ocean and about 9 miles from (14 km) the nearest
inhabited spot in French Guiana.
So, that will be your first stop on your escape route.
It’s time to eat, and you find out the daily rations consists of a plate of thin soup,
one solitary vegetable, one kilogram of bread, and 250 grams of meat, which isn’t a lot
once it’s been cooked.
It’s enough to survive on, though, until you get out.
Ok, so time to get the lowdown on this place, and luckily you meet a guy who’s part of
the 25 percent.
He’s been on Devil’s Island since 1938, so that’s six years and he’s still not
dead.
His name is Jean-Paul.
He’s a convicted murderer you hear, but after killing, his other hobby was studying
history.
He knows everything about Devil’s Island and other French penal colonies.
He sleeps in the same block as you so you have time to chat with him.
Both of you take a seat, and you tell him you want to have a history lesson.
“Ok, Victor,” he says.
“How can I expand the mind of a man from a Parisian slum?
What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” you reply excitedly, although you don’t like the tone of his voice.
He tells you that you are staying on a very small island.
It’s only about 34 acres (O.053 square miles) in size, and so to get from one side to the
other isn’t exactly a long walk.
You notice that the prison walls aren’t so high, and Jean-Paul sees the hopefulness
written on your face.
He reminds you that much of time you’re in chains and then informs you the water is
shark-infested.
He also says that if you get caught trying to escape then if you’re not just beaten
to death by the guards, what awaits you is a special kind of hell.
He says he’ll get to that, but first a bit of history.
Jean-Paul tells you that in the 17th century if you committed a heinous crime you might
be sentenced to be an oarsman on a French Mediterranean galley ship.
This was basically slavery, and virtually all men would row until they died.
“Row ‘til you go” is what the convicts called it.
This is supposed to make you feel better, you assume.
He says that after the galley fleet was retired the men would work as prisoners in the docks,
but some were sent to far off islands.
The islands were no paradise because the guys were pretty much stranded.
They might starve to death out there, and so it was a much better life working on the
docks.
At least there, you had a prayer.
Jean-Paul tells you in 1832 the French government did at least create some laws that ensured
that prisoners at least got the basic stuff they needed to survive.
You know, like a bit of food and water.
He explains that with all the crime in France and the fact that some men just couldn’t
be rehabilitated in French prisons, the idea for penal colonies on French-owned islands
really took off.
“In the 1850s French Guiana was chosen as the spot for penal colonies.
Then in 1854, Napoleon III, sent around 80,000 people to the islands of Isle Royale, Isle
St. Joseph as well as the one you are sitting on.”
“What were they doing time for?”, you ask.
He tells you severe civil crimes, but also political crimes.
Get caught spying or just become an enemy of the state in the eyes of the government
and you are virtually guaranteed to make the trip to one of those islands.
He says that you are fortunate in many ways, and he then explains why.
First, you get quite a few breaks from the pointless labor you are doing, and that’s
because so many men just die doing that job.
Right now, the French government is not so harsh.
He says there’s a good reason that transportation to a penal colony is called the “Dry Guillotine.”
“You’re actually lucky to even have made it here in one piece,” he says.
“Why’s that,” you respond, now feeling a little bit irked he keeps calling you lucky.
“I’m wearing shackles!” you think, but you hold back the urge to say anything.
You need this information for your escape.
He tells you that a lot of men die on the prison ships coming here.
The food isn’t exactly plentiful, but some guys just pass out and die in those dingy
cages.
Well, not some, quite a lot actually.
You remember your journey on the prison ship.
It was pretty horrible, and you didn’t much like being told your name was now not Victor,
but prisoner 69664.
Maybe you got a better ship than other men.
Jean-Paul says that since there was always the chance of mutiny and the sailors on the
ship being killed by vagabonds and dissidents, they take a hardline on acting out.
On his ship men were scalded with hot steam just for complaining.
He says one time the guys started singing, and the guards didn’t much like the outbreak
of joviality.
They locked the doors and threw sulphur sticks next to the cells.
The men almost choked to death.
“Merde,” you mutter.
“Right,” he says, and carries on with his morbid history lesson.
“The thing is, most men that come here will never make it back to France.
It’s not because everyone gets beat by the guards, but if you’re seen as out of line
they’ll just make sure you starve to death.
Ok, so your family back home might send you food and clothing, but the guards will take
their cut from that stuff and if you annoy them enough they’ll give you nothing.
There’s a saying we convicts have here, and that’s that the guards come with one
trunk of stuff and leave with six.
Not much gets to the prisoners.
People just die from starvation at times.”
This wants to make you leave more, and then he tells you that the mosquitoes carry disease
and many prisoners contract one of the various tropical diseases and that kills them.
Even if you have the right nutrients to survive, there are many other ways to die.
Another reason you might have a prolonged stay is the fact that some guys get sentenced
to “forced residence.”
Funny, you’ve never heard of that.
Jean-Paul tells you that some convicts will finish their sentence and become guards, a
practice known as “doublage.”
“You’d think with all that they’ve been through those guys would be sympathetic,”
he says, “but they’re actually the biggest jerks.”
Others you hear just have to stay on the island not as prisoners, but as residents.
They get a bit of land and a house, but that doesn’t exactly save them from tropical
diseases.
France doesn’t want them.
They become exiles indefinitely.”, says Jean-Paul.
Another problem, he says, is revolt.
He tells you about the revolt on the Isle St. Joseph in 1894 when some guys hacked four
guards to death.
The convicts didn’t even get off the island.
The infantry arrived the next day and killed them.
He says this place is full of thugs and bandits and they’ll kill you as soon as look at
you.
They’ll sneak up to your bed at night and slit your throat if you have something they
want.
“I don’t see any graves,” you tell Jean-Paul, saying that with just a hint of suspicion
in your voice.
Maybe Devil’s island isn’t as bad as he is making out.
“That’s because when you die, and I assure you, many will die while you’re here, they
take the guy to the edge of that cliff over there and dump him in the ocean.
It’s basically feeding time for the sharks, and that’s one reason they like to hang
around this island.
We’ve become a really convenient café for those sharks.
If they could speak they’d be saying, ‘Thank God for crime.’
There’s a saying around here along the lines of, ‘For every criminal’s misery someone
or something is benefiting.”
Jean-Paul is turning out to be so depressing.
He notices your downtrodden expression and seems to enjoy it.
“I haven’t even told you about solitary confinement yet.”
“Oh God.”
“There was a guy in here by the name of Henri Charrière.
We just called him Papillion.
This guy was an escape master, but every time he got off a penal colony he ended up getting
caught again.
They finally sent him here because Devil’s Island is the one place no one can escape
from.
Well, that’s what they thought.
They threw Papillon in solitary, for two whole years.
He told me that he suffered more than you can imagine.
Every day in one tiny cement cell with hardly any food.
Every day in almost pitch black darkness.
Holed in.
The place filled with dangerous insects at times.
Centipedes crawling over his face.
Snakes slithering under the door.
Ants biting the hell out of him.
He said when the warden threw him in there, he said, ‘Papillon, the best you can hope
for now is starvation.’”
“Jesus.”
“Yep.
That’s solitary on Devil’s Island.
You couldn’t come up with a worse nightmare if you tried.
How Papillon didn’t die of starvation or disease is nothing short of a miracle.”
“What, he survived.”
“Not only survived.
One day he was just gone.”
“Maybe they killed him?”
“Nope, word got around that Papillon had left the chat.
He was off the island.
Gone.
I heard he’d made a raft out of coconuts.”
That’s it, you think, and start looking around for coconuts.
You just know he’s about to tell you something bad to bring you down.
Jean-Paul tells you that after Papillion’s escape the guards have become paranoid.
If they even get a whiff that you want to escape they’ll break your bones and you’ll
wish you never even dreamed of freedom.
He tells you that some men got beaten badly for walking slowly and limping after a beating.
He saw a warder shoot a man dead just because the man said he was tired and then refused
to cut down some trees to make a clearing.
“Hmm, they’ve been ok with me so far,” you tell him.
“Really,” he says, “I’ve been beaten lots of times.
They left you alone, eh.
You don’t know how luck…”
“I know, I know, I know… stop telling me that.”
He shoots you a peeved expression, but carries on with his story.
There are people who have been here that did nothing wrong, he tells you, saying that a
French army captain named Alfred Dreyfus was at the heart of a massive scandal in France,
and while totally innocent, he was convicted of treason.
Since they really didn’t want this guy getting out and talking about corruption, sometimes
they kept him in the hole and other times they just chained him to his bed.
He was a really smart guy, and once told someone that on this island people were no longer
human; they were cut off the land of the living.
“What happened to him?”
He tells you that the whole affair became huge in France, although you’ve never heard
of it.
It doesn’t help that you can’t read.
Anyway, Jean-Paul tells you that the guy was eventually found innocent in a retrial.
He tells you that just before he arrived on the island someone wrote a book about Dreyfus’
experience.
He let the world know about the, “Dry Guillotine.”
“There are rumors that they’ll stop with this penal colony thing soon,” says Jean-Paul.
“People in France couldn’t believe how we are treated here when they heard the stories.
You didn’t hear about it because I’m assuming you can’t read.”
Typical, you think, people only take notice when an educated man with wealth suffers.
If you told people back home about injustice they’d make a comic strip out of it.
Your spirits lift when Jean-Paul tells you that another guy escaped from the island and
made his way to New York.
He also wrote a book about it called “Revolte.”
That guy was an anarchist, you hear.
Another guy wrote a book while actually on the island, he tells you, and he managed to
get that manuscript across the ocean on his escape.
He tells you about 100 convicts have escaped from all penal colonies.
“No way,” you say, feeling really optimistic now.
Then he tells you that many ended up dying somewhere in the Guinean tropical forest.
Some were killed by local tribes, others just perished of disease or starvation.
“This guy is such a downer,” you think, and tell him to tell you more about the writer
escapee.
“He wrapped that manuscript in oilskins to protect it from the water and rain and
took it all the way to California.
I read it just before they sent me here.
It is called, “Dry Guillotine, Fifteen Years Among the Living Dead.”
“Wow,” you say, and ask, even though you know, “What is it again, that you did to
get sent here?”
“I killed my wife,” he says.
“Why,” you ask, aware that you probably shouldn’t be doing that.
Jean-Paul replies, “She called me condescending.”
“How surprising,” you say.
“Yeah,” he replies, “That woman didn’t know how good she had it.”
After learning how you would never escape Devil’s Island, you might want to know about
some of the greatest prison escapes ever, and fortunately we’ve told the stories,
so have a look at these, “WWII Prisoner Escapes Through Toilet” and “The Most
Insane Ways Men Escaped from Prison.”