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. 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. As we went on board we gave up our bills of health, after which we were not permitted to land again under penalty of forfeiting the passage and being disinfected again. Our luggage now bore yellow labels bearing the legend, “colis dÉsinfectÉ,” signed by the medical inspector. These were passed on to the ships by Kanakas, who freely went and came, and passed things to and from the ship without hindrance. As Kanakas are generally supposed to be much better carriers of the plague than white people, our own examination and squirting seemed a trifle superfluous. The steamer was the St. Antoine, which may be described as the Campania of the Service des CÔtes. Until I made passages on one of her sister-ships—to be hereafter anathematised—I didn’t know how bad a French colonial passenger-boat could be. Afterwards I looked back to her with profound regret and a certain amount of respect; wherefore I will not say all that I thought of her during the eleven hours that she took to struggle over the sixty-odd miles from Noumea to Bourail. There is no landing-place at the port of Bourail, save for boats, so, after the usual medical inspection was over and I had made myself known to the doctor, I went ashore in his boat. The Commandant was waiting on the shore with his carriage. I presented my credentials, and then came the usual consommations, which, being literally interpreted, is French for mixed drinks, after which we drove off to the town of Bourail, eight kilometres away. As we were driving down the tree-arched road I noticed half a dozen horsewomen seated astride À la Mexicaine, with gaily coloured skirts flowing behind. “Ah,” I said, “do your ladies here ride South American fashion?” “My dear sir,” he replied, “those are not ladies. They are daughters of convicts, born here in Bourail, and reared under the care of our paternal government! But that is all stopped now, later on you will see why.” “Yes,” I said, “I have heard that you have given up trying to make good colonists out of convict stock.” “Yes,” he replied; “and none too soon, as you will see.” From which remark I saw that I had to do with a sensible man, so I straightway began to win his good graces by telling him stories of distant lands, for he was more of a Fleming than a Frenchman, and was therefore able to rise to the conception that there are other countries in the world besides France. I found Bourail a pretty little township, consisting of one street and a square, in the midst of which stood the church, and by dinner-time I found myself installed in a little hotel which was far cleaner and more comfortable than anything I had seen in Noumea, except the club. When I said good-night to the Commandant, he replied: “Good-night, and sleep well. You needn’t trouble to lock your door. We are all criminals here, but there is no crime.” Which I subsequently found to be perfectly true. Everything in New Caledonia begins between five and half-past, unless you happen to be starting by a steamer, and then it’s earlier. My visit to Bourail happened to coincide with a governmental inspection, and early coffee was ordered for five o’clock. That meant that one had to get tubbed, shaved, and dressed, and find one’s boots a little before five. Bar the Black Death, I disliked New Caledonia mostly on account of its early hours. No civilised persons, with the exception of milkmen and criminals under sentence of death, ought to be obliged to get up before nine. Still, there was only one bath in the place, and I wanted to be first at it, so I left my blind up, and the sun awoke me. I got out of bed and went on to the balcony, and well was I rewarded even for getting up at such an unrighteous hour. The night before it had been cloudy and misty, but now I discovered with my first glance from the verandah that I had wandered into something very like a paradise. I saw that Bourail stood on the slope of a range of hills, and looked out over a fertile valley which was dominated by a much higher range to the north-east. The sun wasn’t quite up, and neither were the officers of the Commission, so I went for my bath. There were no mosquitos in Bourail just then, and I had enjoyed for once the luxury of an undisturbed sleep. The water, coming from the hills, was delightfully cool, and I came back feeling, as they say between New York and San Francisco, real good. The Commission, for some reason or other, did not get up before breakfast-time (11.30), and so we got a good start of them. The Commandant had the carriage round by six o’clock, and, after the usual consommations, we got away. It was a lovely morning, the only one of the sort I saw in Bourail, for the next day the clouds gathered and the heavens opened, and down came the floods and made everything but wading and swimming impossible; but this was a day of sheer delight and great interest. We drove over the scene of a great experiment which, I fear, is destined to fail badly. The province of Bourail is the most fertile in all Caledonia, wherefore in the year 1869 it was chosen by the paternal French Government as the Arcadia of the Redeemed Criminal. The Arcadia is undoubtedly there, the existence of the redeemed criminal struck me as a little doubtful. As soon as we got under way I reverted to the young ladies we had seen on horseback the evening before. A Native Temple, New Caledonia. “You shall see the houses of their parents,” said the Commandant; “and afterwards you will see the school where the younger ones are being educated. For example,” he went on, pointing down the street we were just crossing, “all those shops and little stores are kept by people who have been convicts, and most of them are doing a thriving trade. Yonder,” he said, waving his hand to the right, “is the convicts’ general store, the Syndicat de Bourail. It was founded by a convict, the staff are convicts, and the customers must be convicts. It is what you would call in English a Convict Co-operative Store. It is managed by scoundrels of all kinds, assassins, thieves, forgers, and others. I have to examine the books every three months, and there is never a centime wrong. That is more than most of the great establishments in Sydney could say, is it not?” I made a non-committal reply, and said: “Set a thief to catch a thief, or watch him.” “Exactly! There is no other business concern in Caledonia which is managed with such absolute honesty as this is. I should be sorry for the man who tried to cheat the management.” I knew enough of Caledonian society by this time to see that it would not be good manners to press the question any further. Afterwards I had an interview with the manager of the syndicate, an estimable and excellently conducted forger, who had gained his rÉmission and was doing exceedingly well for himself and his wife, who, I believe, had blinded somebody with vitriol, and was suspected of dropping her child into the Seine. He presented me with a prospectus of the company, which showed that it had started with a government loan of a few hundred francs, and now had a reserve fund of nearly forty thousand francs. He was a patient, quiet-spoken, hard-working man who never let a centime go wrong, and increased his personal profits by selling liquors at the back door. Our route lay across the broad valley which is watered by the River Nera. On either side the ground rose gently into little hillocks better described by the French word collines and on each of these, usually surrounded by a grove of young palms and a dozen acres or so of vineyards, orchards, manioc, plantain, or maize, stood a low, broad-verandahed house, the residence of the redeemed criminal. I could well have imagined myself driving through a thriving little colony of freemen in some pleasant tropical island upon which the curse of crime had never descended, and I said so to the Commandant. “Yes,” he said, “it looks so, doesn’t it? Now, you see that house up there to the left, with the pretty garden in front. The man who owns that concession was a hopeless scoundrel in France. He finished up by murdering his wife after he had lived for years on the wages of her shame. Of course, the jury found extenuating circumstances. He was transported for life, behaved himself excellently, and in about seven years became a concessionnaire. “He married a woman who had poisoned her husband. They have lived quite happily together, and bring up their children most respectably.” I was too busy thinking to reply, and he went on, pointing to the right: “Then, again, up there to the right—that pretty house on the hill surrounded by palms. The man who owns that was once a cashier at the Bank of France. He was a ‘faussaire de premiÈre classe,’ and he swindled the bank out of three millions of francs before they found him out. He was sent here for twenty years. After eight he was given a concession and his wife and family voluntarily came out to him. You see, nothing was possible for the wife and children of a convict forger in Paris. Here they live happily on their little estate. No one can throw stones at them, and when they die the estate will belong to their children.” “That certainly seems an improvement on our own system,” I said, remembering the piteous stories I had heard of the wives and families of English convicts, ruined through no fault of their own, and with nothing to hope for save the return of a felon husband and father into a world where it was almost impossible for him to live honestly. “Yes,” he said; “I think so. Now, as we turn the corner you will see the house of one of our most successful colonists. There,” he said, as the wagonette swung round into a delightful little valley, “that house on the hillside, with the white fence round it, and the other buildings to the side. The owner of that place was a thief, a forger, and an assassin in Paris. He stole some bonds, and forged the coupons. He gave some of the money to his mistress, and found her giving it to some one else, so he stabbed her, and was sent here for life. “He got his concession, and married a woman who had been sent out for infanticide, as most of them are here. If not that, it is generally poison. Well, now he is a respectable colonist and a prosperous farmer. He has about forty acres of ground well cultivated, as you see. He has thirty head of cattle and a dozen horses, mares, and foals, to say nothing of his cocks and hens and pigs. He supplies nearly the whole of the district with milk, butter, and eggs, and makes a profit of several thousand francs a year. I wish they were all like that!” he concluded, with a little sigh which meant a good deal. “I wish we could do something like that with our hard cases,” I replied, “instead of turning them out into the streets to commit more crimes and beget more criminals. We know that crime is a contagious as well as an hereditary disease, and we not only allow it to spread, but we even encourage it as if we liked it.” “It is a pity,” he said sympathetically, “for you have plenty of islands where you might have colonies like this. You do not need to punish them. Remove them, as you would remove a cancer or a tumour, and see that they do not come back. That is all. Society would be better, and so would they.” I could not but agree with this since every turn of the road brought us to fresh proofs of the present success of the system, and then I asked again: “But how do these people get their first start? One can’t begin farming like this without capital.” “Oh no,” he said, “the Government does that. For the first few years, according to the industry and ability of the settler, these people cost us about forty pounds a year each, about what you told me it costs you to keep a criminal in prison. We give them materials for building their houses, tools, and agricultural implements, six months’ provisions, and seed for their first harvest. After that they are left to themselves. “If they cannot make their farm pay within five years or so they lose everything; the children are sent to the convent, and the husband and wife must hire themselves out as servants either to other settlers or to free people. If they do succeed the land becomes absolutely theirs in ten years. If they have children they can leave it to them, or, if they prefer, they can sell it. “Some, for instance, have got their rehabilitation, their pardon, and restoration of civil rights. They have sold their farms and stock and gone back to France to live comfortably. Their children are, of course, free, though the parents may not leave the colony without rehabilitation. After breakfast I will take you down the street of Bourail, and introduce you to some who have done well in trade, and to-morrow or next day you can see what we do with the children.”
VI
SOME HUMAN DOCUMENTS Society in Bourail, although in one sense fairly homogeneous, is from another point of view distinctly mixed. Here, for example, are a few personal items which I picked up during our stroll down the main and one street of the village. First we turned into a little saddler’s shop, the owner of which once boasted the privilege of making the harness for Victor Emmanuel’s horses. Unfortunately his exuberant abilities were not content even with such distinction as this, and so he deviated into coining, with the result of hard labour for life. After a few years his good conduct gained him a remission of his sentence, and in due course he became a concessionnaire. His wife, who joined him after his release, is one of the aristocrats of this stratum of Bourailian society. Permit to visit a Prison or Penitentiary Camp en dÉtail. This is the ordinary form; but the Author is the only Englishman for whom the words in the left-hand corner were crossed out. There is quite a little romance connected with this estimable family. When Madame came out she brought her two daughters with her. Now the elder of these had been engaged to a young man employed at the Ministry of Colonies, and he entered the colonial service by accepting a clerkship at Noumea. The result was naturally a meeting, and the fulfilment of the proverb which says that an old coal is easily rekindled. The engagement broken off by the conviction was renewed, and the wedding followed in due course. The second daughter married a prosperous concessionnaire, and the ex-coiner, well established, and making plenty of properly minted money, has the satisfaction of seeing the second generation of his blood growing up in peace and plenty about him. Imagine such a story as this being true of an English coiner! A little further on, on the left hand side, is a little lending library, and cabinet de lecture. This is kept by a very grave and dignified-looking man, clean-shaven, and keen-featured, and with the manners of a French Chesterfield. “That man’s a lawyer,” I said to the Commandant, as we left the library. “What is he doing here?” “You are right. At least, he was a lawyer once, doing well, and married to a very nice woman; but he chose to make himself a widower, and that’s why he’s here. The old story, you know.” Next door was a barber’s shop kept by a most gentle-handed housebreaker. He calls himself a “capillary artist,” shaves the officials and gendarmerie, cuts the hair of the concessionnaires, and sells perfumes and soaps to their wives and daughters. He also is doing well. A few doors away from him a liberÉ has an establishment which in a way represents the art and literature of Bourail. He began with ten years for forgery and embezzlement. Now he takes photographs and edits, and, I believe, also writes the Bourail IndÉpendent. As a newspaper for ex-convicts and their keepers, the title struck me as somewhat humorous. Nearly all branches of trade were represented in that little street. But these may be taken as fairly representative samples of the life-history of those who run them. First, crime at home; then transportation and punishment; and then the effort to redeem, made in perfect good faith by the Government, and, so far as these particular camps and settlements are concerned, with distinct success in the present. Unhappily, however, the Government is finding out already that free and bond colonists will not mix. They will not even live side by side, wherefore either the whole system of concessions must be given up, or the idea of colonising one of the richest islands in the world with French peasants, artisans, and tradesmen must be abandoned. Later on in the afternoon we visited the Convent, which is now simply a girls’-school under the charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny. A few years ago this convent was perhaps the most extraordinary matrimonial agency that ever existed on the face of the earth. In those days it was officially styled, “House of Correction for Females.” The sisters had charge of between seventy and eighty female convicts, to some of whom I shall be able to introduce you later on in the Isle of Pines, and from among these the bachelor or widower convict, who had obtained his provisional release and a concession, was entitled to choose a bride to be his helpmeet on his new start in life. The method of courtship was not exactly what we are accustomed to consider as the fruition of love’s young or even middle-aged dream. The Kiosk in which the Convict Courtships were conducted at Bourail. After Mass on a particular Sunday the prospective bridegroom was introduced to a selection of marriageable ladies, young and otherwise. Of beauty there was not much, nor did it count for much. What the convict-cultivator wanted, as a rule, was someone who could help him to till his fields, look after live-stock, and get in his harvests. When he had made his first selection the lady was asked if she was agreeable to make his further acquaintance. As a rule, she consented, because marriage meant release from durance vile. After that came the queerest courtship imaginable. About fifty feet away from the postern door at the side of the Convent there still stands a little octagonal kiosk of open trellis-work, which is completely overlooked by the window of the Mother Superior’s room. Here each Sunday afternoon the pair met to get acquainted with each other and discuss prospects. Meanwhile the Mother Superior sat at her window, too far away to be able to hear the soft nothings which might or might not pass between the lovers, but near enough to see that both behaved themselves. Along a path, which cuts the only approach to the kiosk, a surveillant marched, revolver on hip and eye on the kiosk ready to respond to any warning signal from the Mother Superior. As a rule three Sundays sufficed to bring matters to a happy consummation. The high contracting parties declared themselves satisfied with each other, and the wedding day was fixed, not by themselves, but by arrangement between those who had charge of them. Sometimes as many as a dozen couples would be turned off together at the mairie, and then in the little church at the top of the market-place touching homilies would be delivered by the good old curÉ on the obvious subject of repentance and reform. A sort of general wedding feast was arranged at the expense of the paternal Government, and then the wedded assassins, forgers, coiners, poisoners, and child-murderers went to the homes in which their new life was to begin. This is perhaps the most daring experiment in criminology that has ever been made. The Administration claimed success for it on the ground that none of the children of such marriages have ever been convicted of an offence against the law. Nevertheless, the Government have most wisely put a stop to this revolting parody on the most sacred of human institutions, and now wife-murderers may no longer marry poisoners or infanticides with full liberty to reproduce their species and have them educated by the State, to afterwards take their place as free citizens of the colony. The next day we drove out to the College of the Marist Brothers. It is really a sort of agricultural school, in which from seventy to eighty sons of convict parents are taught the rudiments of learning and religion and the elements of agriculture. During a conversation with the Brother Superior I stumbled upon a very curious and entirely French contradiction. I had noticed that families in New Caledonia were, as a rule, much larger than in France, and I asked if these were all the boys belonging to the concessionnaires of Bourail. “Oh no!” he replied; “but, then, you see, we have no power to compel their attendance here. We can only persuade the parents to let them come.” “But,” I said, “I understood that primary education was compulsory here as it is in France.” “For the children of free people, yes,” he replied regretfully, and with a very soft touch of sarcasm, “but for these, no. The Administration has too much regard for the sanctity of parental authority.” When the boys were lined up before us in the playground I saw about seventy-six separate and distinct reasons for the abolition of convict marriages. On every face and form were stamped the unmistakable brands of criminality, imbecility, moral crookedness, and general degeneration, not all on each one, but there were none without some. Later on I started them racing and wrestling, scrambling and tree-climbing for pennies. They behaved just like monkeys with a dash of tiger in them, and I came away more convinced than ever that crime is a hereditary disease which can finally be cured only by the perpetual celibacy of the criminal. Yet in Bourail it is held for a good thing and an example of official wisdom that the children of convicts and of freemen shall sit side by side in the schools and play together in the playgrounds. Berezowski, the Polish Anarchist who attempted to murder Napoleon III. and the Tsar Alexander II. in the Champs ElysÉes. All Criminals in New Caledonia are photographed in every possible hirsute disguise; and finally cropped and clean shaven. By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd. On our way home I was introduced to one of the most picturesque and interesting characters that I met in the colony. We pulled up at the top of a hill. On the right hand stood a rude cabin of mud and wattles thatched with palm-leaves, and out of this came to greet us a strange, half-savage figure, long-haired, long-bearded, hairy almost as a monkey on arms and legs and breast, but still with mild and intelligent features, and rather soft brown eyes, in which I soon found the shifting light of insanity. Acting on a hint the Commandant had already given me, I got out and shook hands with this ragged, shaggy creature, who looked much more like a man who had been marooned for years on a far-away Pacific Island, than an inhabitant of this trim, orderly Penal Settlement. I introduced myself as a messenger from the Queen of England, who had come out for the purpose of presenting her compliments and inquiring after his health. This was the Pole Berezowski, who more than thirty years ago fired a couple of shots into the carriage in which Napoleon III. and Alexander II. were driving up the Champs ElysÉes. He is perfectly harmless and well-behaved; quite contented, too, living on his little patch and in a world of dreams, believing that every foreigner who comes to Bourail is a messenger from some of the crowned heads of Europe, who has crossed the world to inquire after his welfare. Through me he sent a most courteous message to the Queen, which I did not have the honour of delivering. That night the storm-clouds came over the mountains in good earnest, and I was forced to abandon my intention of returning to Noumea by road, since the said road would in a few hours be for the most part a collection of torrents, practically impassible, to say nothing of the possibility of a cyclone. There was nothing more to be seen or done, so I accepted the Commandant’s offer to drive me back to the port. On the way he told me an interesting fact and an anecdote, both of which throw considerable light upon the convict’s opinion of the settlement of Bourail. The fact was this: There are in New Caledonia a class of convicts who would be hard to find anywhere else. These are voluntary convicts, and they are all women. A woman commits a crime in France and suffers imprisonment for it. On her release she finds herself, as in England, a social outcast, with no means of gaining a decent living. Instead of continuing a career of crime, as is usually the case here, some of these women will lay their case before the Correctional Tribunal, and petition to be transported to New Caledonia, where they will find themselves in a society which has no right to point the finger of scorn at them. As a rule the petition is granted, plus a free passage, unless the woman has friends who can pay. Generally the experiment turns out a success. The woman gets into service or a business, or perhaps marries a liberÉ or concessionnaire, and so wins her way back not only to respectability as it goes in Caledonia, but sometimes to comfort and the possession of property which she can leave to her children. As a matter of fact, the proprietress of the little hotel at the port was one of these women. She had come out with a few hundred francs that her friends had subscribed. She now owns the hotel, which does an excellent business, a freehold estate of thirty or forty acres, and she employs fifteen Kanakas, half a dozen convicts, and a Chinaman—who is her husband, and works harder than any of them. The anecdote hinged somewhat closely on the fact, and was itself a fact. There is a weekly market at Bourail, to which the convict farmers bring their produce and such cows, horses, calves, etc., as they have to sell. Every two or three years their industry is stimulated and rewarded by the holding of an agricultural exhibition, and, as a rule, the Governor goes over to distribute the prizes. One of these exhibitions had been held, I regret to say, a short time before my arrival, and the Governor who has the work of colonisation very seriously at heart, made speeches both appropriate and affecting to the various winners as they came to receive their prizes. At length a hoary old scoundrel, who had developed into a most successful stock-breeder, and had become quite a man of means, came up to receive his prizes from his Excellency’s hands. M. Feuillet, as usual, made a very nice little speech, congratulating him on the change in his fortunes, which, by the help of a paternal government, had transformed him from a common thief and vagabond to an honest and prosperous owner of property. So well did his words go home that there were tears in the eyes of the reformed reprobate when he had finished, but there were many lips in the audience trying hard not to smile when he replied: “Ah, oui, mon Gouverneur! if I had only known what good chances an unfortunate man has here I would have been here ten years before.” What his Excellency really thought on the subject is not recorded. The hotel was crowded that night for the steamer was to sail for Noumea, as usual, at five o’clock in the morning; but as Madame was busy she was kind enough to give up her own chamber to me; and so I slept comfortably to the accompaniment of a perfect bombardment of water on the corrugated iron roof. Others spread themselves on tables and floors as best they could, and paid for accommodation all the same. By four o’clock one of those magical tropic changes had occurred, and when I turned out the moon was dropping over the hills to the westward, and Aurora was hanging like a huge white diamond in a cloudless eastern sky. The air was sweetly fresh and cool. There were no mosquitos, and altogether it was a good thing to be alive, for the time being at least. Soon after the little convict camp at the port woke up. We had our early coffee, with a dash of something to keep the cold out, and I made an early breakfast on tinned beef and bread—convict rations—and both very good for a hungry man. Then came the news that the steamboat La France had tied up at another port to the northward on account of the storm, and would not put in an appearance until night, which made a day and another night to wait, as the coast navigation is only possible in daylight. I naturally said things about getting up at four o’clock for nothing more than a day’s compulsory loafing, but I got through the day somehow with the aid of some fishing and yarning with the surveillants and the convicts, one of whom, a very intelligent Arab, told me, with quiet pride, the story of his escape from New Caledonia twelve years before. He had got to Australia in an open boat, with a pair of oars, the branch of a tree for a mast and a shirt for a sail. He made his way to Europe, roamed the Mediterranean as a sailor for nine years, and then, at Marseilles, he had made friends with a man who turned out to be a mouchard. This animal, after worming his secret out of him under pledge of eternal friendship, earned promotion by giving him away, and so here he was for life. He seemed perfectly content, but when I asked him what he would do with that friend if he had him in the bush for a few minutes, I was answered by a gleam of white teeth, a flash of black eyes, and a shake of the head, which, taken together, were a good deal more eloquent than words. One of the Lowest Types of Criminal Faces. An illustration of the ease with which it is possible to disguise the chin, typical of moral weakness, and the wild-beast mouth, which nearly all Criminals have, by means of moustache and beard. By permission of C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd. La France turned up that afternoon, so did the Commission of Inspection from Bourail with several other passengers. I was told that we should be crowded, but until I got on board in the dawn of the next morning I never knew how crowded a steamer could be. I had travelled by many crafts under sail and steam from a south sea island canoe to an Atlantic greyhound, but never had the Fates shipped me on board such a craft as La France. She was an English-built cargo boat, about a hundred and thirty feet long, with engines which had developed sixty horse-power over twenty years ago. She had three cabins on each side of the dog-kennel that was called the saloon. If she had been allowed to leave an English port at all she would have been licensed to carry about eight passengers aft and twenty on deck. On this passage she had twelve first-class, about fifteen second, and between fifty and sixty on deck, including twenty convicts and relÉguÉs on the forecastle, and a dozen hard cases in chains on the forehatch. She also carried a menagerie of pigs, goats, sheep, poultry, geese, and ducks, which wandered at their own will over the deck-cargo which was piled up to the tops of her bulwarks. Her quarter-deck contained about twenty square feet, mostly encumbered by luggage. The second-class passengers had to dine here somehow. The first-class dined in the saloon in relays. The food was just what a Frenchman would eat on a Caledonian coast-boat. It was cooked under indescribable conditions which you couldn’t help seeing; but for all that the miserable meals were studiously divided into courses just as they might have been in the best restaurant in Paris. Everything was dirty and everything smelt. In fact the whole ship stank so from stem to stern that even the keenest nose could not have distinguished between the smell of fried fish and toasted cheese. The pervading odours were too strong. Moreover, nearly every passenger was sick in the most reckless and inconsiderate fashion; so when it came to the midday meal I got the maÎtre d’hÔtel, as they called the greasy youth who acted as chief steward, to give me a bottle of wine, a little tin of tongue, and some fairly clean biscuits, and with these I went for’rard on to the forecastle and dined among the convicts. The forecastle was high out of the water, and got all the breeze, and the convicts were clean because they had to be. I shared my meal and bread and wine with two or three of them. Then we had a smoke and a yarn, after which I lay down among them and went to sleep, and so La France and her unhappy company struggled and perspired through the long, hot day back into plague-stricken Noumea. When I left La France I cursed her from stem to stern, and truck to kelson. If language could have sunk a ship she would have gone down there and then at her moorings; but my anathemas came back upon my own head, for the untoward Fates afterwards doomed me to make three more passages in her. To get clean and eat a decent dinner at the Cercle was something of a recompense even for an all-day passage in La France. But it is not a very cheerful place to come back to, for the shadow of the Black Death was growing deeper and deeper over the town. The plague was worse than ever. The microbe had eluded the sentries and got under or over the iron barriers, and was striking down whites and blacks indiscriminately, wherefore I concluded that Noumea was a very good place to get out of, and, as I thought, made my arrangements for doing so as quickly as possible.
VII
THE PLACE OF EXILES My next expedition was to include the forest camps to the south-west of the island, and a visit to the Isle of Pines, an ocean paradise of which I had read much in the days of my youth; wherefore I looked forward with some anticipation to seeing it with the eyes of flesh. There would be no steamer for three or four days, so the next day I took a trip over to the Peninsula of Ducos, to the northward of the bay. The glory of Ducos as a penal settlement is past. There are now only a few “politicals,” and traitors, and convicts condemned a perpÉtuitÉ; that is to say, prisoners for life, with no hope of remission or release. A considerable proportion of them are in hospital, dragging out the remainder of their hopeless days, waiting until this or the other disease gives them final release. The Peninsula of Ducos. In the background is Ile Nou with the Central Criminal DepÔt. On another part of the peninsula, in a semi-circular valley, hemmed in by precipitous hills, there is a piteously forlorn colony, that of the liberÉs collectifs; that is to say, convicts who have been released from prison, but are compelled to live in one place under supervision. They are mostly men whose health has broken down under the work of the bagne, or who have been released on account of old age. They live in wretched little cabins on the allotments, which it is their business to keep in some sort of cultivation. They have the poor privileges of growing beards and moustaches if they like, and of wearing blue dungaree instead of grey, and of earning a few pence a week by selling their produce to the Administration. This is not much, but they are extremely proud of it, and hold themselves much higher than the common forÇat. They do not consider themselves prisoners, but only “in the service of the Administration.” I have seldom, if ever, seen a more forlorn and hopeless collection of human beings in all my wanderings. There was, however, a time when Ducos was one of the busiest and most important of the New Caledonian Settlements, for it was here that the most notorious and most dangerous of the communards were imprisoned after their suppression in 1872. Here lived Louise Michel, the high-priestess of anarchy, devoting herself to the care of the sick and the sorrowing with a self-sacrifice which rivalled even that of the Sisters of Mercy, and here, too, Henri Rochefort lived in a tiny stone house in the midst of what was once a garden, and the delight of his days of exile. Louise Michel’s house has disappeared in the course of improvements. Rochefort’s house is a roofless ruin in the midst of a jungle which takes a good deal of getting through. It was from here that he made his escape with Pain and Humbert and two other communards in an English cutter, which may or may not have been in the harbour for that particular purpose. One night they did not turn up to muster, but it was explained that Rochefort and Humbert had gone fishing, and the others were away on a tour “with permission.” As they did not return during the night search-parties were sent out for them. Meanwhile, they had kept a rendezvous at midnight with the cutter’s boat and got aboard. The next day was a dead calm; and, as the cutter lay helpless at her anchor, the fugitives concealed themselves about her cargo as best they could. The hue and cry was out all over the coast, but the searchers looked everywhere but just the one place where they were. If the next day had been calm they must have been caught, for the authorities had decided on a thorough search of every vessel in the harbour. Happily for them a breeze sprang up towards the next morning, and the cutter slipped quietly out. Once beyond the outward reef the fugitives were in neutral water, and, being political prisoners, they could not be brought back. By daylight the truth was discovered, but pursuit was impossible. The cutter had got too long a start for any sailing vessel to overtake her in the light wind, and the only steamer which the administration then possessed had gone away to Bourail to fetch back the Governor’s wife. If it had been in the harbour that morning, at least one picturesque career might have been very different. MacMahon was President at the time, and of all men on earth he had the most deadly fear of Rochefort, so he took a blind revenge for his escape by ordering the Governor to expel every one who was even suspected of assisting in the escape. The story was told to me by one who suffered through this edict quite innocently, and to his utter ruin. He was then one of the most prosperous men in Noumea. He owned an hotel and several stores, and had mail and road-making contracts with the government. Unhappily, one of his stores was on the Peninsula of Ducos, and the man who managed it was reputed to be very friendly with Rochefort. This was enough. He was ordered to clear out to Australia in two months. It was in vain that he offered himself for trial on the definite charge of assisting a prisoner to escape. The Governor and every one else sympathised deeply with him, but they dare not even be just, and out he had to go. He is now canteen-keeper on the Isle of Pines, selling groceries and drink to the officials and relÉguÉs at prices fixed by the government. He told me this story one night at dinner at his own table. The general amnesty of 1880 released Louise Michel and the rest of those who had survived the terrible revolt of 1871 from Ducos and the Isle of Pines. There are, however, two other celebrities left on Ducos. One of them is a tall, erect, grizzled Arab, every inch a chieftain, even in his prison garb. This is Abu-Mezrag-Mokrani, one of the leaders of the Kabyle insurrection of 1871, a man who once had fifteen thousand desert horsemen at his beck and call. Now he rules a little encampment in one of the valleys of the peninsula, containing forty or fifty of his old companions-in-arms, deported with him after the insurrection was put down. When the Kanaka rebellion broke out in New Caledonia in 1878, Abu-Mezrag volunteered to lead his men against the rebels in the service of France. The offer was accepted and the old warriors of the desert acquitted themselves excellently among the tree-clad mountains of “La Nouvelle.” When the rebellion was over a petition for their pardon was sent to the home government, but the remnant of them are still cultivating their little patches of ground on Ducos. The other surviving celebrity is known in Caledonia as the Caledonian Dreyfus, and this is his story: In 1888 Louis Chatelain was a sous-officier of the line stationed in Paris. He was dapper, good-looking, and a delightful talker. He engaged the affections of a lady whose ideas as to expenditure were far too expansive to be gratified out of the pay of a sous-officier. Poor Chatelain got into debt, mortgaged or sold everything that he had, and still the lady was unsatisfied. Finally, after certain recriminations, and when he had given her everything but his honour, she suggested a means by which he could make a fortune with very little trouble. She had, it appears, made the acquaintance of a gentleman who knew some one connected with a foreign army, who would give twenty thousand francs for one of the then new-pattern Lebel rifles. He entered into correspondence with the foreign gentleman, addressing him—c/o the —— Embassy, Paris. His letters were stopped, opened, photographed, and sent on. So were the replies. Then the negotiations were suddenly broken off, Chatelain was summoned before the military tribunal and confronted with the piÈces de conviction. He confessed openly, posing as a martyr to la grande passion—and his sentence was deportation for life. The remains of Henri Rochefort’s House. The Bedroom of Louis Chatelain, “The Caledonian Dreyfus” in Ducos. The photographs on the wall and the one on the table are those of the woman who ruined him. When I went into his little sleeping-room at Ducos, I found on a little table beside his mosquito-curtained bed, a photograph of a very good-looking young woman. On the wall above the table there were two others of the same enchantress, the evil genius of his life. The moment he fell she deserted him. Unlike many another Frenchwoman, who has done so for lover or husband, she did not follow him across the world to Caledonia, and yet every night and morning of his life Louis Chatelain kneels down in front of that table as he might before an altar, and says his prayers with his eyes on those photographs.
VIII
A PARADISE OF KNAVES For the next three or four days after my visit to the Peninsula of Ducos there was nothing definite to be learnt about means of transit. In fact there was nothing certain except the plague—always that Spectre which seemed to stand at the end of every pathway. It was really getting quite monotonous, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should ever get out of Noumea at all. Then I began making inquiries as to an over-land journey through the interior. No, that was impossible, save at great risk and expense. The Spectre had jumped the mountains. Huge armies of rats had appeared in the bush, just as though some Pied Piper of Hamelin had enticed them away from the towns into the mountains, and they were spreading the plague in all directions among the Kanakas. It is a curious fact that rats, who of all animals are the most susceptible to the plague, will migrate from a plague-stricken town just as they will try to escape from a sinking ship. Convicts and Kanakas were dying in unknown numbers. Camps were being closed, and the rains were coming on. There was nothing to be seen or done worth seeing or doing, so I had to content myself with wandering about Noumea and the neighbourhood, taking photographs, making acquaintances with convicts and liberÉs and getting stories out of them, wondering the while, as every one else was doing, what the Spectre was going to do next. As far as I was concerned, he did me the unkindest turn that he could have done, save one. He infected the only two decent boats on the Coast Service, and so left me the choice between voyaging to the Isle of Pines in La France or stopping where I was. I had to get to the island somehow, so I chose La France, and at five o’clock one morning, after being duly inspected and squirted, I once more boarded the detestable little hooker. I thought my first passage in her was bad enough, but it was nothing to this. She was swarming with passengers, bond and free, black, white, and yellow, from end to end. She was loaded literally down to the deck, and she smelt, if possible, even stronger than she did before. The worst of this was that before we got to the Isle of Pines we had to get outside the reef and into the open water. I have seen too much of seafaring to be easily frightened on salt water, but I candidly admit that I was frightened then. In fact, when we got outside and she began to feel the swell, I took out my swimming-jacket and put it on, though, of course this was a pretty forlorn hope, as the water was swarming with sharks and the shortest swim would have been a couple of miles. Still, one always likes to take the last chance. Happily, she was English-built, and high in the bows, so she took nothing but spray over. Two or three green seas would have swamped her to a certainty, but they didn’t come, and so in time we got there. On board I renewed the acquaintance of the Commandant of Ile Nou, who was taking his wife and family to the Isle of Pines, which is to Caledonia as the Riviera is to Europe. At midday we stopped at Prony, the headquarters of the forest camps which I was to visit later on my return; and we lunched in the saloon with six inches of water on the floor. That was the first time I ever saw a steamer baled out with buckets. Still, they managed to get the water under somehow. There didn’t appear to be a pump on board. When we passed the reef, and started on the sixty-mile run through the open sea, some began to say their prayers and some said other things, but in the end we worried through, and just as the evening star was growing golden in the west we anchored in the lovely little Bay of Kuto. Never before had I heard the anchor chain rumble through the hawse-hole with greater thankfulness than I did then, and, judging by the limp and bedraggled look of every one, bond and free, who went ashore, I don’t think I was alone in hoping that I had seen the last of La France—which I hadn’t. My friend the Commandant introduced me to his confrÈre of the Isle of Pines. He was not particularly sympathetic. I believe I was the only Englishman who had ever come to the island with authority to inspect his domains, and he didn’t take very kindly to the idea. Still, ruler and all as he was in his own land, the long arm of the Minister of Colonies reached even to the Isle of Pines, and, although he did not even offer me the usual courtesy of a glass of wine, he handed the credentials back to me, and said: “TrÈs bien, monsieur! If you will come and see me at nine o’clock to-morrow morning we will make arrangements. You will, I think, find accommodation at the canteen.” With that I took my leave, and went out into the darkness to find the canteen and some one to carry my luggage there. I found a surveillant, who found a relÉguÉ, and he shouldered my bag and found the canteen, the only semblance of an hotel on the island. There, quite unknowingly, I stumbled upon excellent friends. The canteen-keeper was the man whose story I told in the last chapter. I was a stranger from a very strange land. Their resources are very limited; for communications with the grand terre were few and far between, and yet the twenty days that I was compelled to stop on the Isle of Pines, proved after all to be the pleasantest time that I had spent in New Caledonia. But there was one exception, happily only a transient experience, yet bad enough in its way. If the plague was not on board La France it ought to have been, for never did a fitter nursery of microbes get afloat, and when I got into the wretched little bedroom, which was all they could fix up for me that night, I honestly believed that the little wriggling devil had got into the white corpuscles of my blood. I had all the symptoms with which the conversation of the doctors at the Cercle in Noumea had made me only too familiar—headache, stomachache, nausea, dizziness, aching under the armpits and in the groins. Of course, I was about as frightened as an ordinary person could very well be, a great deal more so in fact than I had been a few years before when I first experienced the sensation of being shot at. It may have been the fright or the fact, but the glands were swelling. Then I caught myself repeating fragments of “Abide with me,” mixed up with Kipling’s “Song of the Banjo”; and when a lucid interval came I decided that the case was serious. I had three things with me which no traveller in the outlands of the world should be without—quinine, chlorodyne, and sulpholine lotion. I took a big dose of quinine, and then one of chlorodyne. I should be afraid to say how big they were. Then I soaked four handkerchiefs in the lotion, put them where they were wanted, and laid down to speculate as to what would happen if the microbe had really caught me? I had an appointment with the Commandant at nine o’clock the next morning. His house was more than a mile away. What would happen if I couldn’t walk in the morning? I should have to explain matters, if I were still sane, to the people at the canteen. I had just come from Noumea, the very centre of the plague. The inference would be instant. The military doctor in charge of the hospital would be sent for, and he would say la Peste. I should be taken to the hospital, where, a day or two after, I saw a man suspected of the plague die of blood-poisoning, and once there—quien sabe? Thinking this and many other incongruously mixed-up things, I went to sleep. Probably it was only a matter of a few minutes altogether. Nine hours after I woke and thought I was in heaven. The pains and the deadly fear were gone. I pulled my watch out from under my pillow. It was ten minutes to seven. The light was filtering in through the closely shut persiennes. The waves on the silver-sanded beach within a few yards of my bedroom were saying as plainly and seductively as waves ever said: “Come and have a dip, and wash all that plague nonsense out of your head.” So I got up, opened the window, put on my deck-shoes, and walked down to the beach. I could walk! Out of hell I had come back to earth. A few hours before I had really believed that the next dawn would be shadowed by the presence of the Black Death. Now I looked up at the sapphire sky, and threw my hands above my head to make sure that the pains in the armpits were gone. Then I stepped out to the full length of my stride along the smooth, hard coral sand, to see if the groins were right. Having reached a decent distance from the canteen I rolled into the cool, bright, blue water, and for half an hour I splashed around—not daring to go much beyond my depth, because those same blue waters are often cut by the black triangle of a shark’s dorsal fin—thinking how good a thing it was to live instead of dying, especially in such a paradise as this. When I paid my official visit after breakfast, I found M. le Commandant in a more friendly mood. We exchanged cigarettes and compliments, and then we had a stroll round the little settlement of Kuto. Kuto is most exquisitely situated on a promontory between two delicious, white-shored, palm-fringed bays, broken with fantastic, tree-crowned rocks. Long ago it was the home of the “politicals” and those soldiers of the Commune who had not been thought dangerous enough to be put in batches against a wall and shot. In those days Kuto, so they told me, might have been taken for a tiny suburb of Paris. It had a theatre, and a couple of newspapers, one serious and one humorous. There were social functions and many gaieties in the intervals of road-making and barrack-building. But nowadays all this is changed. The deportÉs have gone back to France, and the relÉguÉs have come in their place, which is the same thing as saying that over this lovely scrap of earth there has descended the moral night of incurable crime and hopeless despair. Kuto is now a silent place of prisons, barracks, and workshops, inhabited by a few soldiers and officials and many blue-clad figures with clean-shaven faces, mostly repulsive to look upon and all stamped with the seal of stolid despair. In order that you may understand what manner of people these were it is necessary to explain the meaning of the French legal term relÉgation, since there is nothing at all corresponding to it in the English system. In France, as in all countries, there are criminals of many kinds and ranks, and of these the French relÉguÉs are the lowest and meanest. I have said before that in the criminal society of New Caledonia the assassins, forgers, embezzlers, and what we should call swell-mobsmen form the aristocracy. The relÉguÉs are the lowest class. They are the gutter-snipes of crime; the hard cases; the human refuse beyond all hope of social salvation; mental and moral derelicts, of no use to themselves or anybody else. We have thousands of them in this country, but we don’t deal as wisely or as humanely with them as the French do. Our judges and magistrates send them to prison again and again, well knowing that they will only come out to commit more crimes and be sent again to prison, becoming in the intervals of liberty the wives and husbands and parents of other criminals. This is one of the social problems which they deal with better in France. There is no nonsense there about a criminal “having paid his debt to society” when he has served his sentence, and being, therefore, free to go and commit more crimes. When a man or woman has committed a certain number of crimes of the minor sort, or has been convicted of hopeless immorality or alcoholism—in other words, when there is reason to believe that he or she is absolutely unfit to possess the rights of citizenship—such person may be, in the last resort, sentenced as in England, say, to twelve or eighteen months’ hard labour as punishment for that particular crime. Now in an English police-court the habitual criminal might possibly thank the magistrate and go away to “do it on his head,” but in France he may hear the fatal words: “At the expiration of your sentence you will be placed in relÉgation.” The “Market” in the Convent, Isle of Pines. The Female RÉliquÉs are drawn up before one of the Prison Buildings. In the foreground are the Kanakas waiting to sell their fruit and vegetables. Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph.
Of this the meaning is: “You have proved yourself unfit to live in the society of your fellow-citizens. Punishment is no warning to you. You will neither reform yourself nor be reformed; therefore Society has done with you: you are banished! You will be fed and clothed and attended when you are sick. You will have work found for you, and you will be paid for it. But if you won’t work there will be the prison and the cell for you. Now go, and make the best of it.” The banishment is practically for life. There are circumstances under which a relÉguÉ can win his release, but there are two things that he can never do: he can never gain a concession and marry and settle down on his own property; and he can never gain restoration of the full rights of citizenship—both of which, as I have shown, the forÇat can do. As we drove out through the big gate in the wall which had been built across the neck of the peninsula to keep revolting Kanakas out, I remarked what a pity it was that such a lovely land should be nothing better than the habitation of scoundrels, to which the Commandant replied that the island served the purposes of the Administration very well, and if the relÉguÉs were not there it would have to be given over to the Kanakas, for free colonists would not come. I thought—but, of course, I didn’t say—what British colonists would have made of such a paradise—fertile, well-watered, and blest with an absolutely perfect climate. The first thing I noticed in the Isle of Pines was the excellence and extent of the roads. They are broad, level, and beautifully kept, and, tiny as the island is, there are many more miles of them than there are in all New Caledonia. They were mostly made by the deported communards, who also built the solid stone prisons, barracks, hospitals, chapels, and official residences which seemed to me to be ample for about twice the present white population of the island, which is under two thousand, bond and free. I found very little difference between the treatment of the relÉguÉs and the best class of convicts, save that they were rather better fed, and lived in open camps. They slept in hammocks in common dormitories, and were permitted to have any little luxuries that they could buy with their earnings. There were no plank-beds or chains to be seen in the camps. In fact, they might just have been ordinary industrial settlements, save for the blue cotton livery, the bandless straw hats, and the hang-dog, hopeless faces which looked out under the brims. But before our first drive was half over we passed a big quadrangle of high, white walls, and over the little black door in front was the word “Prison” in big black letters. “That’s for the hard cases, I suppose?” I said to the Commandant as we passed. “Yes,” he said; “we will visit it another day, and you shall see. This is worse than Ile Nou, you know. There they have the aristocrats. Here we have the canaille, the sweepings of the streets. Any one of these animals here would cut your throat for a few francs if he dare.” Then I told him what the Commandant of Bourail had said about locking doors. He laughed, and said: “Parfaitement, but you had better lock your door here, and if you have a revolver put it under your pillow.” The advice was well-meant but somewhat superfluous. The faces I had seen were quite enough. I soon found that my friend was somewhat of a cynic and a humorist in his way, for when I asked him what was the greatest punishment he could inflict on a recalcitrant relÉguÉ, he said: “Make him work. Look at that gang of men yonder,” he went on, pointing to the hillside, which a long row of blue-clad figures was breaking up with picks and spades. “Every stroke of the pick is a punishment to those men. They are wretches whose only idea of life is to get through it without working. They have been thieves and swindlers, beggars and souteneurs—everything that is useless and vile. There is nothing they have not done to save themselves from working. Now, you see, we make them work.” “And if they won’t?” “Eh bien! They have stomachs—and soup and fish and meat and coffee and a drink of wine now and then, with a cigarette or a pipe, are better than bread and water, and the open air in a country like this is better than the black cell or the quartier disciplinaire, which you will see later on.” “In other words,” I said, “you have gone back to the good old law: If a man will not work, neither shall he eat. Well, I must admit that you deal more sensibly with your hopeless vagabonds than we do with ours.” “Bien possible,” he said, with some justification, “you will see that at least we make some use of them, more than they would in Paris or London, I think. For instance, this is our farm.” As he said this we pulled up opposite to a rustic arch, over which were the words Ferme Uro. We went down through a flowery avenue to a pretty verandahed house almost buried in greenery and flowers—the home of the Farm Superintendent. He came out and greeted his territorial lord, and then we went over the farm. It was as perfect a specimen of what the French call petit culture as could be imagined. It was, in fact, rather a collection of exquisitely kept vegetable gardens than a farm. Every patch was irrigated by water from the low hills which run across the centre of the island. Every kind of vegetable, tropical and temperate, was under cultivation, and outside the gardens there were broad fields of maize and grass pasture. In one of the fields I saw a long line of women hoeing the ridges for corn, and at one end of the line stood a white-clad surveillant, revolver on hip. For the fiftieth time my English prejudices were shocked when I learnt that these were a detachment of the female relÉguÉs; and I wondered what would be thought at home if the lady-guests at Aylesbury were turned out to work in the fields under the charge of a male warder. Here it was quite a matter of course. “Wait till you have made the acquaintance of the ladies,” laughed the Commandant, in reply to a rather injudicious question, “and you will see that they want some watching.”
IX
USE FOR THE USELESS From the farm of Uro, after a drink of delicious milk, which, for some reason or other, took me back instantly to far-away England, we went on a few miles along the road to the ateliers, or workshops, where all kinds of industries, from boot-making to waggon-building, were being carried on in a somewhat leisurely style, and under what seemed to me very slight supervision. “This is a hard school for them to learn and us to teach in,” said the Commandant. “The forÇats generally know a trade and are accustomed to work, if they have not been gentlemen; but these have been brought up to hate the name of work. Yet you see we have made something of them. Everything that is used on the island is made here. In fact, we make something which will be used a long way from here.” I saw this later on during our visit to the prison, which was too similar to the others to need any description. About a score of the occupants of a big shed within the walls were busy plaiting a long, reedy grass which others, squatted about the yard, were stripping and preparing for them. They had to get through so much a day or their rations were docked. The unhappy wastrels didn’t seem to like the regime at all, but they worked, if only for their stomachs’ sake. When we left the prison we went to a long shed, where the plaits were being worked up into matting—miles of it there appeared to be—and when I asked what it was all for, I learnt that it was destined to be trodden by the millions of careless feet which would saunter through the halls and corridors of the Paris Exhibition. This was the contribution of this far-away spot to the great show. Of course, those who were making it knew what it was for. Perhaps their thoughts—if they had any by this time, beyond their daily meat and drink, or any dreams of delight, beyond the little luxuries that their hard-earned pence could buy them at the canteen—were travelling even as they stitched back to the elysium of crime and idleness which they would never see again. From what I saw and heard I doubt not that many a bitter thought was woven in with the miles of matting which afterwards covered the exhibition floors. The next day we went to make the acquaintance of the lady relÉguÉes, who are accommodated in the Convent, as it is called, under the charge of a Mother Superior and six Sisters of St. Joseph, among whom I was a little surprised to find one who, learning that I was English, came and greeted me in a deliciously delicate Irish brogue. She was an Irish lady who had taken the vows in a French Convent, and had voluntarily exiled herself to this far-away foreign land to spend the rest of her days in a prison. Still, she and her French sisters appeared to be most cheerfully contented with their lot. They had, however, one little trace of feminine vanity left. They sorely wanted their photographs taken, and my Irish compatriot wanted it most of all. It was against the rules not only of the Administration, but of their order, wherefore the photographs which I did take of the convent and its occupants did not turn out successes. There were one hundred and seventy-six female relÉguÉes in the Convent just then, mostly healthy, hearty-looking women of all ages, from twenty to sixty. Their faces were, if anything, more repulsive than the men’s. They had committed almost every possible crime, but most of them were there for infanticide. I was the first man—not an official—that they had seen, perhaps, for a good many years, for there are few visitors to the Isles of Pines, and fewer still to the jealously guarded Convent. A little before dinner that evening I was sitting under the trees in front of the canteen jotting down some notes when I heard a voice, with a suspicion of tears in it, asking whether “monsieur would speak for a minute with an unfortunate woman.” I turned round, and saw the gaunt figure and unlovely face of Marie, the relÉguÉe housemaid of the canteen. Here was another human document, I thought, so I told her to go on. She was in great trouble, she told me, and as I was a friend of the Government and of the Administration I could help her if I would. She had been released from the Convent to take service at the canteen, but though she was comfortable, and had a good master and mistress, her heart was pining for the society of her husband, who was working in enforced celibacy in far-away Bourail. They had been parted for a trifle, and she was sure that if “Milor” interceded for her with the Director she would be restored to his longing arms. When she had finished, I said: “And what was your husband sent out here for?” “Il a ÉventrÉ un homme,” she murmured. “And what are you here for?” I continued. “J’ai tuÉ mon enfant,” she murmured again as softly as before. I did not think the reunion desirable, and so the petition was not presented. Nevertheless, it would have probably been a very difficult matter to have convinced that woman that she hadn’t a perfect right to rejoin her husband, raise a family, and become with him a landed proprietor. I learnt afterwards that she had been relegated to the Isle of Pines for theft aggravated by assault with a hatchet. Somehow the food that she handed round the table at the canteen that night didn’t taste quite as nice as usual, in spite of the conversation of Madame Blaise and her two charming daughters, the elder of whom, though she had never been farther into the world than Noumea, might, as far as grace of speech and action went, have just come out from Paris. In the course of the next few days I wandered, sometimes in the Commandant’s carriage and sometimes afoot, all over the island, and ascended its only mountain, the Pic ’Nga, on the top of which there are the foundations of an old fort and look-out tower, dating back, so they say, to the old days of the pirates of the southern seas. From here you can see every bay and inlet round the coast, and a very lovely picture the verdant island made, fringed by its circlet of reefs and coral islets, with their emerald lagoons and white breakers, and the deep blue of the open ocean beyond. Another day I went through the native reserve, and visited the settlement of the Marist Brothers, a most delightful little nook where the good brothers lead a contented existence, teaching their bronze scholars the beauties of the Catholic Faith, and the beneficence of the good French Government, which graciously permits them to live in a part of their own country, and sell their produce to the officials and such of their prisoners as have money À prix fixe. After this I visited the coffee plantation—the only actually profitable industry in which prisoners are employed in New Caledonia—the hospitals and the disciplinary camps, which I found practically the same as those which I had already seen on the mainland. The hospital was, however, an even more delightful abode of disease and crime than the one on Ile Nou. It stands well up the hillside behind the Convent, and the view from its terraces is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. With the exception of the man who died of blood-poisoning under suspicion of the plague, the principal disease seemed general decay and old age. In fact, out of a criminal population of over twelve hundred, there were only thirty patients, for which reason the Isle of Pines, with its perfect climate, reminded me of Mark Twain’s Californian health resort, which was so healthy that the inhabitants had to go somewhere else to die. Later on I saw a much more mournful place than the hospital. This was the Camp des Impotents. I don’t think I ever saw a more miserable, forlorn-looking collection of human beings than I found here. They were not suffering from any specific disease, or else, of course, they would have been in the hospital. They are just mental and physical derelicts, harmless imbeciles, cripples incapable of work, and men dying quietly of old age. Of course, the camp was exquisitely situated, and their lot struck me as being, after all, not a very bad ending to a useless, hopeless life—to dream away the last years under that lovely sun, breathing that delicious air, and waiting quietly for the end without anxiety or care. The poor wretches looked at me somewhat as they might have looked at a visitor from some other world. They had ceased to be criminals or prisoners. They had no more crime left in them, and they would not have escaped if they could, so in their case discipline was relaxed and I spent a few francs in buying some of the rude carvings and a few walking-sticks which they had made out of lianes, the only work with which they whiled away the long sunny hours. It was worth twenty times the money to see their feeble, almost pitiful, delight as they looked at the little silver coins in their brown, shrivelled hands, and I really think that some at least of the blessings which followed me out of the camp were sincere. But when I said this to the Commandant he only smiled, and said: “Perhaps! But no doubt they would like a visitor from England every day.” A few days after I had finished my round of visits to the prison camps I had the privilege of assisting at a session of the Disciplinary Commission, a court whose function it is to hear complaints, grant redresses and privileges, try offences against the penal regulations, and inflict punishment. The Commandant is President, ex officio, and he is assisted by an officer of the Administration, who is a sort of civil magistrate and the Conductor of Works. These functionaries sit at a curved desk on a platform, and here, for the first time, I took my seat on a judicial bench. There was a space of about twelve feet between the end of the platform and the railing which divided off the rest of the hall. Here the Principal Surveillant sat at one desk, and opposite to him on the other side of the room the Greffier or Clerk of the Court. The court being a French one, precedence was, of course, given to the ladies. They were brought in one by one through a side door between the railings and the platform. The triviality of their complaints testified eloquently to the narrowness of the little lives they led. One woman accused another of stealing her needle and thread so as to get her into trouble. Another wanted three halfpence of her savings, which she said the Mother Superior was unjustly keeping from her. A third wanted to know why she hadn’t had a letter from a friend of hers in service in Noumea, and was gravely informed that the plague had seriously interrupted communications and the letter would probably arrive as soon as possible. Another had rheumatism, and wanted to be taken off the field-work; besides, she was getting too old, she was nearly seventy—and her request was promptly granted. Then a few were accused of little acts of idleness or insubordination or wastefulness. These were either fined a penny or so, according to the magnitude of the offence, or dismissed with a caution. It must not, however, be imagined from this that the ladies of the relÉgation at the Isle of Pines are exactly models of female deportment, for, as the Commandant told me afterwards, they once revolted, and before help could be got they had caught two surveillants, stripped them stark naked, and made them run the gauntlet of the Convent between two rows of beautiful palms, after which they douched them well in a muddy duck-pond. They were proceeding to treat the good sisters in the same way when rescue arrived from Kuto and the other camps. The male prisoners were a terribly hard-looking lot. They were brought up in twos and threes—plaintiff, defendant, and witnesses—and they accused each other of every sort of crime, from stealing a bit of bread to attempted murder. The English axiom about dog eating dog does not hold good among relÉguÉs. They will steal from each other just as cheerfully as they will from anybody else, and will descend to any little meanness to spite each other. Most of the offences were of the pettiest and meanest kind, such as stealing each other’s clothes, or food, or tools and selling them for a penny or so to some one else who had lost his. Others were up for being out of bounds after hours, and I noticed that these nearly all said they’d been fishing, which was not inappropriate. During the proceedings I was very much struck by the appearance of an Arab in the grey uniform of the quartier disciplinaire. He was a tall, well-built, handsome fellow of about thirty, with a frank, open expression and an ever-smiling mouth which continually showed a magnificent set of teeth. There was a wonderful difference between him and his fellow-scoundrels, but I learned afterwards that he was the biggest scoundrel of the whole lot. Two or three hundred years ago he would probably have commanded a fleet of Corsairs, and made his name a terror from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Now, thanks to changed environment, he was only a deserter and a common thief who could not even keep his hands off the property of his fellow-thieves. The procedure of the Court was quite different to anything we have in England. The prisoners were all, as I say, brought up and examined individually with accusers and witnesses. Then they were taken away what time the Court deliberated and fixed the sentence. Then the whole lot were brought in and ranged up along the two sides of the room. The greffier called out the names, and each man stepped forward, heard his sentence, and was marched out. The Arab took his fifteen days’ prison with an even jauntier smile than usual. While this was going on I had been making a study in criminal physiognomy, and I came to the conclusion that if forty criminals were taken at random from English prisons, dressed exactly as these forty French criminals were, and mixed up with them, it would be absolutely impossible to tell which were French and which were English. There is no nationality in crime. Criminals belong to a distinct branch of the human family, and the family likeness among them is unmistakable. As we were driving back that morning the Commandant invited me to a picnic which he was giving in honour of the Commandant of Ile Nou and myself. Naturally I accepted, and, being on the subject of pleasure excursions, I said: “Of course you must have some delightful yachting and fishing about these lovely bays. I have been wondering why I haven’t seen any sailing craft about.” “That is forbidden,” he said. “No one may own even a rowing boat without the licence of the Administration in Noumea, and even then he would have to give guarantees for its safety. You see these fellows would think nothing of stealing a boat and trying to escape in it, and the owner of the boat would be responsible for any escapes. Twenty-five of the politicals once managed to make a big canoe and got away in it, but they were all drowned or eaten by the sharks. Now all boats, even the Kanakas’ canoes, have to be kept locked and chained and guarded from sunset to sunrise.” This, then, was why these smooth, sunlit waters were sailless and deserted—another effect of the curse of Crime on Paradise. The picnic was a great success, and the Commandant proved a most excellent host. There were four wagonette loads of us, with a fair sprinkling of pretty girls, among whom, of course, were my host’s daughters. Everybody seemed to have forgotten for the time that I was an Englishman, and so I passed a very jolly day. We camped in a big white stone building which had once been a gendarmerie barracks, standing in a delightful valley near to the entrance of a magnificent limestone cavern. We lunched sumptuously under the verandah, and I think I prattled French more volubly than I had ever done before. Then we went and shot pigeons, quite half as big again as the English variety, and splendid eating. The woods of the Isle of Pines swarmed with them and other feathered game whose names I don’t remember. Of course, we wound up with a dance, and this was the queerest dance I had ever seen. Our drivers and attendants were, of course, all relÉguÉs, and so were the musicians. One ingenious scoundrel led the orchestra with a fiddle that he had made himself, even to the strings and the bow. It had an excellent tone, and he played it very well. I wanted to buy it, but he loved it and wouldn’t sell. I must say that I pitied these musicians not a little as I watched them standing in a corner looking with hungry eyes upon the Forbidden and the Unattainable as it floated about the room in dainty light draperies with the arms of other men about its waist—for the relÉguÉ is not like the forÇat. He has no hope of marriage, even with the meanest of his kind. His sentence includes, and very wisely too, perpetual celibacy. All the same, I tried to picture to myself a picnic, say, at Dartmoor, with a company of English men and maidens dancing in one of the prison halls to music made by a convict band! When the feast was over every bottle, full and empty, every knife, fork, spoon, plate, cup, and dish was counted over. The remnants were given away, but everything else was packed under the official eye. If the slightest trifle had been overlooked it would have been immediately stolen. This is one of the peculiarities of picnicing in Prisonland. A few days afterwards my pleasant exile came to an end. The ungainly form of La France waddled into the bay, bringing news of the outside world. The principal items were to the effect that the plague was increasing merrily in Noumea, and that the victorious Boers were driving the British into the sea. We had quite a sad little supper that night at the canteen, for I was rapidly becoming quite one of the family. Still this was the turning-point in my thirty-thousand-mile journey. At daybreak the snub nose of La France would point toward home, and so when I had said good-bye for the third or fourth time I pulled out across the bay which lay like a sheet of shimmering silver under the glorious tropic moon, and boarded the wretched little hooker for the last time with feelings something akin to thankfulness. When many days afterwards, I got back to Noumea the Director asked me what I thought of the Isle of Pines. “If you want my candid opinion,” I said, “I think it is an earthly paradise which you have used as a dust-heap to shoot your rubbish on. If the French Government would give me a hundred years’ lease of it, with power to do as I liked as long as I didn’t break the law, I would find capital enough in England and Australia to make it the Monte Carlo of the South Pacific. I’d have everything there that there is at Monte Carlo, and a couple of fast boats to bring the people over from Sydney in two days. I’d have all the wealth and fashion of Australia and a good many people from Europe there every year. In fact, your paradise should pay you a million francs a year and me twenty millions.” “Ah!” he said, after a few moments of silence. “That is just like you English. That is enterprise. Here we only have government.”
X
A LAND OF WOOD AND IRON New Caledonia is essentially a land of contrasts, both in scenery and climate, and when I had left the sunny hills and plains and the silver-sanded, palm-fringed bays of the Isle of Pines some fifty miles behind me, I found myself in a region of enormous forests, clothing the slopes of rugged mountains running sheer down to the sea from the clouds which rarely broke above them. There were no white beaches here, only boulder-strewn shores, which were literally, as well as in the metaphorical sense, iron-bound. Not only the rocks and the boulders, but the very sands of the shore themselves were of iron, sometimes pure, but, as a rule, containing from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of the metal. This was Prony, the chief of a cluster of convict camps scattered about what is literally a land of wood and iron. The wood is used, the iron is not. Millions of tons of it are lying round the shores of one of the finest and safest natural harbours in the world. A thousand miles away are the coal-fields of New South Wales. Since it pays to ship copper and iron from Spain and even South America to Swansea, one would think it would pay to ship this to Newcastle. However, there it lies, waiting, I suppose for some one to make fortunes out of it, and the energies of the eight hundred or one thousand relÉguÉs are devoted to hewing timber in the forests, bringing it down to the shore, and floating it in big barges to Prony, where there is a finely equipped saw and planing mill. The dressed timber is, of course, the property of the Administration, and is used for building wharves and jetties. A good deal of it is sold to the public for building purposes. Some day, too, there is going to be a real railway in Caledonia, and then the forest camps of the Baie du Sud will furnish the sleepers, signal-posts, and platforms. Meanwhile Prony has a railway all to itself, of which I shall here give some account. I was fortunate in making two very pleasant acquaintances in this out-of-the-way corner of the world. One was the Commandant, who was quite the most intelligent and broad-minded man of his class that I met in Caledonia, and the other was the Doctor of the port. He was, of course, a military Doctor, and held the rank of lieutenant in the army. His official title was “Le MÉdecin Major!” He had seen a good deal of the world, and had visited the United States on a French warship, and from him I heard the first words of English that I had heard for nearly three weeks. The dear little Doctor was proud of his English, and he had a right to be. Although it was not very extensive, it was distinctly select. One day the Commandant referred somewhat slightingly to it as “son peu d’Anglais”; but perhaps that was because he couldn’t speak a single word himself. At any rate, he never tried to. At Prony, too, I renewed my acquaintance with the microbe. In fact, the Doctor was there because of him. One day a coast steamer had brought some tons of flour for the station, which depended entirely for its food on Noumea and Australia. The sacks were stacked under cover in the Commissariat Department. The little daughter of the Chief Surveillant got playing about among these sacks. Some infected rats had been doing the same a short time before, and so she got the plague. The Doctor was telegraphed for to Noumea, and he came and saved her, and, thanks to his skill and precautions, that was the only case in Prony, although we actually had the infection in the midst of us, and for the fifteen days that I was tied up there we ate bread made from that flour! I often had to pass the sacks, but I did so at a respectful distance. One morning, however, I had a bit of a fright. There had been a deluge of rain all night, and, when I woke, I found a dead and very wet mouse on my bedroom floor. What if it had come from those sacks? I drenched it with corrosive sublimate, and pitched it carefully out of doors with a stick. Then I poured petroleum over it and burnt it and the stick, and there the incident closed. It always struck me as somewhat of a miracle that rats did not find those sacks out and spread the plague broadcast among us. It would have been a terrible thing in that isolated camp, cut off from all communication with the world except the telegraph. Perhaps there were no rats. At any rate, I never saw any, and felt duly thankful. There are no roads about Prony, only footpaths, and not many of these, so we paid our visits to the camps in steam launches. When it was fine it was very pleasant work cruising about the picturesque bays, discoursing the while on crime, criminals, and colonisation with the intelligent Commandant, or swopping Anglo-French jokes and stories with the Doctor, who had a very pretty wit of his own. The Commandant was a firm believer in relegation and transportation generally, but like every one else, he looked down upon the liberÉ and the relÉguÉ. According to him a forÇat was worth two liberÉs, and a liberÉ was worth a relÉguÉ and a half, if not more. Nevertheless, during my stay at Prony I saw a squad of relÉguÉs working about as hard as I have ever seen men work. This was on the railway aforesaid. The Convict Railway at Prony. Drawn by Harold Piffard from a photograph. We started one morning, as usual, about five o’clock, and steamed across two or three bays to the Camp du Nord. In all the other camps the timber is got down from the hills to the sea by means of wood-paved slides, which are quite as much a feature of this part of Caledonia as the ice-slides are in Norway, but the Camp du Nord rises to the dignity of a railway on which that morning I did the most curious bit of railroading I have ever done. When we had inspected the camp at the terminus and, for the Commandant’s sake, I had duly admired the landing-stage, the trim buildings, and the gardens in which the flowers and vegetables were struggling for existence in the burning iron soil, the State car was brought out for us. It was a platform on wheels, with four sloping seats facing backwards. I could see the line twining away up through the forest, but there was no engine. Presently it, or, rather, they, materialised at the summons of the Chief Surveillant. Fifteen blue-clad figures, each with a halter and hook-rope over his shoulder, came out of one of the dormitories. There was a long chain shackled to the front of the car. At an order the human beasts of draught passed the halters over their heads and hooked on to the chain, seven on each side and one ahead. Then the Commandant invited the company to mount. There were seven of us. The Commandant had brought his two little girls, and there were four besides: the Chief Surveillant, who weighed fifteen stone if he weighed a pound, the Chief Forester, who weighed a good twelve stone, and the Doctor and myself, who were comparatively light weights. I had often seen convicts harnessed to carts in England, and, of course, I had ridden many miles in rickshaws in the East, but this was the first time I had ever travelled in a car drawn by human beings who did it because they had to, and who would have had their food docked if they had refused to do it, and I confess that I didn’t exactly like it. Still, I took my place, and the strange journey began. At first it didn’t seem very bad, for the line was almost level, but when we got into the hills the collar-work began, and our human cattle had to bend their necks and their backs to it. The line wound up through cuttings and over bridges at what seemed to me an ever-increasing gradient. It was a damp, muggy, tropical morning. It was not exactly raining, but the moisture soaked you to the bones for all that, and the leaves and branches of the vast virgin forest on either hand shone and dripped as the moisture condensed on them. We perspired sitting still and making no more exertion than was necessary for breathing, so you can imagine how those poor wretches tugging at the chains sweated—and, great heavens, how they stank!—though the most fastidious, under the circumstances, could hardly blame them for this. For very shame’s sake I got off and walked whenever there was an excuse. It made breathing pleasanter. So did the Doctor, who was a botanist and found us Venus’ Fly-Traps and other weird vegetable monsters. The Forester also got off now and then, not from motives of mercy, but to point out varieties of timber to the Commandant. The Chief Surveillant sat tight, probably on account of his weight, until I wanted to put him into one of the halters. But what, though I hardly like to say so, disgusted me most was the absolute callousness, as it seemed to me, of the two little girls. Perhaps the worst of it was that it was absolutely innocent. They had been born and bred in Prisonland, and I don’t suppose they really saw any difference between that sweating, straining, panting team of human cattle and a team of mules or donkeys. At last, to my own infinite relief, the journey was over. What it must have been like to our team I can only guess from the fact that in a distance of a little over four miles they had dragged us up one thousand five hundred feet! It took an hour and three-quarters to do it. They were dismissed when we got to the top and allowed to have a drink—of water. The Doctor took us back. He understood the brake, and in consideration for the young ladies he kept the speed moderate. We got back in twelve minutes and a half. He said he had done it in six; but I wasn’t with him then, and didn’t want to be. Although forestry is, of course, the same all the world over, and, therefore, not the sort of thing to describe here in detail, there were two other camps that I visited which had interesting peculiarities of their own. One of these was the Camp of Bonne Anse, a pretty little spot whence a very steep and stony path led over a little range to a promontory called Cap Ndoua, which is the telegraph station for the Isle of Pines. I don’t know whether there are any other telegraphic stations which have neither cables nor wires and make no use of electricity, but this and the one on the Isle of Pines were the only ones I have ever seen. When I was taken into the operating-room at Cap Ndoua I saw an apparatus which looked to me like a gigantic magic-lantern with a telescope fixed to its side. In the front of the big iron box there was a huge lens about eighteen inches across, behind this was another smaller one, and behind this again a powerful oil lamp, with a movable screen in front of it, worked with a sort of trigger; on a table in the corner of the room were the usual telegraphic transmitters and receivers in connection with the general telegraphic system to Noumea and the cable to Sydney. Every evening at seven, when it is of course quite dark, the operators go on duty until nine. If Ndoua has a message to send to the island the lamp is lit, and the man at the telescope in the observatory above the hospital on the island sees a gleam of white light across the forty-six miles of sea. He lights his lamp, and the preliminary signal twinkles through the darkness. Then the shutter begins to work. Short and long flashes gleam out in quick succession, the dots and dashes of the Morse system in fact; and so the words which have come over the wire from Noumea, or, perhaps, from the uttermost ends of the earth, are translated into light, and sent through the darkness with even more than electrical speed. Saving only fogs, which are not very frequent in those latitudes, the optic telegraph is just as reliable as the cable and the wire, and they are good for any distance up to the range of the telescope. The apparatus cost about £50 apiece, while a cable would cost several thousands; and it struck me that for quick communication between the mainland and islands or distant light-houses, the optic telegraph is worthy of a wider use than it seems to have. The other visit was to Port BoisÉ, near to Cape Queen Charlotte, which is the extreme north-western point of Caledonia. Port BoisÉ is, like so many other of the Caledonian convict camps, a most beautiful spot. It is fertile, too, thanks to the existence of ancient bog lands, which make it possible to temper the heat of the ferruginous soil, and so skill and patience have made it a delightful oasis in the midst of the vast forest and jungle which surround it on all sides save the one opening to the sea. These forests and jungles, by the way, are of somewhat peculiar growth; the timber is mostly what is called chÊne-gomme, and is an apparent combination of oak- and gum-tree. It is almost as hard as the iron which is the chief ingredient in the soil from which it derives its sap, and it is practically indestructible. As for the jungle, it is composed of brush and creepers which have the consistency of wire ropes—a sort of vegetable steel cable, in fact. But for me, as an Englishman, the chief interest in Port BoisÉ was connected with Cape Queen Charlotte, and a little island lying about five miles out to sea, which is called Le Mouillage de Cook—the Anchorage of Captain Cook. It was here that the great navigator made perhaps the greatest mistake of his life. As every one knows, he discovered and named New Caledonia. He sailed along its shores, and contented himself with describing it as an island of lofty mountains surrounded by reefs which made it inaccessible. He anchored at a little island, and named the bold promontory in front of him Cape Queen Charlotte. He landed here, and, as he says, found the natives very civil and obliging. It is a million pities that he did not cultivate their friendship further, and learn something about their country. He would not then have described it as “inaccessible” and “unapproachable.” Beyond the bay in which his boats landed he would have found a stretch of open country under the hills across which his men could have marched till they discovered what is now the Baie du Sud—another Sydney Cove in miniature. If he had only done this, Caledonia, with its enormous mineral wealth and its magnificent harbours, would have been British instead of French, a worthy appanage to that other Empire of the future, the new-born Commonwealth of Australia. I discussed this with the Commandant as we walked back to Bonne Anse, and he told me the story of how on a much later occasion we also lost Caledonia. Once upon a time, a little more than fifty years ago, there were two frigates lying in Sydney Harbour—one British and one French. We will call the British ship H.M.S. Dodderer. She was commanded by an old woman in naval uniform who ought to have been superannuated years before. The Frenchman, as events proved, was a man of a very different sort. New Caledonia in those days was a sort of No-Man’s Land, but there were both Catholic and Protestant European missionaries working among the natives. The two warships received almost simultaneous orders to go and annex the island. They started the same day. The British frigate out-sailed the Frenchman, but her captain had got those fatal words of Captain Cook’s deep-rooted in his mind, and when he got near the dreaded reefs he began to take soundings. The Frenchman went ahead, neck or nothing. He gambled his ship to win a colony, and, taking only the most ordinary precautions, he kept on his course. By great good luck he struck the broad passage through the reef which leads to the harbour of Noumea, and when H.M.S. Dodderer eventually groped her way in she found the French frigate at anchor, and the Tricolour flying from a flagstaff on one of the hills, after which the French captain politely invited him and his officers to lunch and to an excursion on French soil; and here ends a short but exasperating chapter in our colonial history. I had been ten days in Prony when we visited Port BoisÉ, and each day we had been looking anxiously for the coming of the steamer which was to bring us food and me release. Morning after morning we looked out across the bay to the two islands which guarded the channel through which she had to come, but for six more days never a whiff of smoke drifted across the clear-cut horizon. Meanwhile, food was running very low, and we were getting decidedly ennuyÉs. So one day, by way of a diversion, the Doctor proposed that we should break the law and go dynamite-fishing and shark-slaying. The fresh meat had given out. Vegetables—far more important to a Frenchman than to an Englishman—were nearly a memory. The fruit supply of the camp was represented by a lime-tree in the Doctor’s garden, and that grew in imported soil. No fruit would grow in the iron soil of Prony. The preserved Australian meat was getting very low. In short, in a few more days we should have got within measurable distance of starvation, and then mutiny; and it was with an idea of deferring such unpleasant contingencies that the doctor suggested we should go fishing. Any change from the monotony of wandering about the little area walled in by jungle and forest, impassable by any save those who knew the Kanaka paths, was welcome, and I began to talk gladly about rods and line and bait, to which the doctor replied: “Oh no, we must work quicker than that. We shall fish with dynamite! You will see them come to the bait, and then—pouf!—there breaks out the waterquake, not earthquake, as you say, and they are all dead—hundreds! You shall see sharks, too. Dynamite is good medicine for them.” This sounded interesting, and I got up the next morning about half-past four, more cheerfully than usual, because, of course, we were going to start at five o’clock. It was a dull, cloudy, steamy morning when I went down to the jetty, and found the big whale-boat manned by six stalwart Kanakas armed with their throwing-spears, and the Doctor with a little saloon rifle, and the Director of Works—the biggest and most English-looking Frenchman that I met in the colony—with his pockets full of dynamite. We first paid a visit to a camp about eight miles away, taking a contribution of meat and bread, and the news that the long-expected supplies had not yet come. Then we shaped our course for Sharks’ Bay, which proved to be a most characteristically tropical piece of water. The dense vegetation not only came down to the water’s edge, but threw out long, snaky-looking roots a couple of yards from the shore. It was among these that the first sport began, because it was in these oily-looking shallows that the flat fish were wont to take refuge from the wolves of the sea. This was the Kanakas’ part of the sport. We ran the boat in quietly and four of them went ashore with their spears. The Director of Works did the same, and when he had landed I felt that the Doctor and I were a little farther off from the razor-edged brink of eternity than when he was sitting beside us with enough dynamite in his pockets to blow the boat to matchwood and ourselves beyond the confines of time. We amused ourselves by taking potshots at the black triangles which keenly cut the unrippled surface of the brown water. As far as my own experience goes, I don’t think there’s another piece of water in the world that possesses as many sharks to the acre as that well-named bay. Wherever you looked you could see a black fin cutting the water, and every minute or so you would see a swirling eddy which meant that one of the sea-wolves had made a dash at something, and had either got an instalment of his breakfast or missed it. When I was talking this over afterwards with the Doctor, who was a bit of a naturalist, I learnt a little more about the doctrine of evolution and the survival of the fittest than I knew before. Sharks swarm in the New Caledonian waters, and the only chance for their victims is flight; wherefore about the shores of New Caledonia you find the fastest swimming fish in the world. After we had had a few ineffective shots at dorsal fins, one of our crew said “Ough!” and pointed to the shore. We pulled in, it being evident that there was sport afoot. The Kanakas ashore had been climbing with marvellous agility over the snaky water-roots of the trees until they had come to a tiny little cove. They were leaning over the roots peering down into the water, motionless as bronze images. Then one swiftly and silently shinned up a tree with his spear in his mouth. He got a foot- and hand-hold. Then with his right hand he took the spear out of his teeth, balanced it for a moment, and then down it went like a flash of lightning. The next instant there was a terrific commotion in the water below. Three other spears went down, and our men laid to their oars and rushed the boat in. Two of the others jumped into the water, and the crowd began struggling with a huge flat-fish, something like an exaggerated flounder, which was nailed to the bottom by a couple of spears. When we got him into the boat, I thought he would have knocked the side out of it. Subsequently he made good eating for many hungry convicts. Meanwhile, the Director had been wandering about with a cigarette in his mouth and a dynamite cartridge in his hand, looking for his prey, which, unobligingly, kept too far out. His turn was to come later on, when we had pulled across past the sulphur stream to the mouth of the river which flows into Sharks’ Bay. It is a rather curious fact that the waters of this bay are strongly impregnated with sulphur, and yet, as I have said, they are literally swarming with fish. They evidently seemed to like it, for both the sharks and their victims were thicker in the neighbourhood of the submarine springs than they were anywhere else. Wherefore it was here that we made the best bags. Our Kanakas seemed to have a faculty of seeing through the brown water which none of us possessed. Again and again they located swarms of fish that we had no notion of. One of them lay in the bows with his big black eyes seeing things where we could see nothing, and directing our course by moving his right or left hand. Meanwhile the dynamiter stood on the seat with one foot on the gunwale, puffing at his cigarette, keeping it in a glow so that he might light the fuse of his cartridge at it. Presently there came from the bows a low intense whisper, “Stop!” The Kanakas use a good deal more English than French when they’re out sporting. He got up and pointed to the water about ten yards ahead, and hissed: “There, lÀ! plenty! beaucoup!” The dynamiter took his cigarette from his lips, blew the ash away, and touched the end of the fuse with it. Then he pitched his cartridge into the water about ten yards from the boat. Ten seconds later a volcano seemed to burst up from the bottom of the bay, and the boat jumped as if a whale’s flipper had struck her. The water ahead boiled up into a little hillock of foam and dropped again. Then all about us I saw the water sprinkled with the white bellies of fish, some quite dead, and others swimming in a feeble, purposeless sort of way with their tails. The next moment there were six big splashes, and I saw six pairs of brown legs disappearing into the water, after which heads and arms bobbed up, and it began to rain fish into the boat. They ran from eight to eighteen inches in length, and from two to six pounds in weight, and so I took some pains to dodge them as they came flying up out of the water. They were something like bass, but they had the heads and tails of mackerel, and they swam like lightning—of course, before they struck the dynamite. I have often watched, in clearer waters, the sharks hunting shoals of them. The Caledonian shark can get a tremendous speed on him. I have seen a twelve-footer carried clean out of the water by the impetus of his rush. But the way these things dodged them just at the moment that they turned over to make their grab was simply marvellous. You would see a shark plunge into the midst of a swarm of them. The long, blue-grey body would turn over, the mouth—the ugliest mouth in all creation—would open, and the tripled-armed jaws would clash together on a mouthful of empty water. Every fish had vanished, and brother shark would give a disgusted wriggle, and go on the prowl again. Escapes of this kind were, of course, due to inherited wisdom, but dynamite was a recent experience, and the fish fell victims to it through sheer curiosity. When the cartridge dropped into the middle of the shoal they naturally scattered in all directions. Then they came back to see what had fallen into the water, and after that came the catastrophe. Those who died were victims to curiosity. Those who escaped would probably be about the most scared fish that ever wagged a fin. The effect of the dynamite on those who did not escape was most extraordinary. In every case the vertebral column was broken just behind the head, and the heart was as cleanly divided as if it had been cut with a razor. When we had our boat about half full we started in pursuit of bigger game. The shock of the explosion had startled the sharks, who, like all bullies, are mostly cowards, and the Kanakas had kept them away by beating the water every now and then with their hands in their usual fashion. So our dripping, laughing crew, sure now of a splendid feed, pulled merrily down the bay to a point on which we landed two of them and the dynamiter. They crept stealthily along the tangled shore till one of the Kanakas stopped and pointed to three little black spots on the surface of a tiny jungle-fringed bay. The dynamiter took out a cigarette and lit it, watching the three points the while as they moved along the oily surface through little eddies made by the great bodies underneath. Presently they formed a triangle not many feet apart. Two or three vigorous whiffs of his cigarette, a touch to the fuse, and a motion of the hand, a scurry in the water—and then a muffled bang and an uprising of muddy water. We waited a moment or two, and then we could see something white—three streaks of it—gleaming through the water, and three livid shapes rose slowly to the surface, wagging the great tails which would never send them through the water again. Their horrible mouths were a little open, but they would never close fish or man again. I took the Doctor’s word for it that their necks, so to speak, were broken, and their hearts split as those of the smaller fry were; but I didn’t make any personal investigations, for soon after the troubling of the waters had subsided there came swift, swirling rushes from all sides; black fins cut the water, white bellies gleamed under it, and then came a clashing of cannibal jaws, a tugging and a tearing, a silent, horrible contest, and presently all that was left of those three sharks was a blood-reddened scum on the surface of the little leaf-fringed bay. Our morning’s fishing closed with the slaying of a shark who fell a victim to his insatiable appetite just as the smaller fry had done to their curiosity. When the tragedy was over we pulled out into the middle of the outer bay and waited until quiet and confidence was restored among our friends below. Meanwhile, one of the Kanakas had cut one of our biggest fish open. The Director put a dynamite cartridge into it, and then it was tied up, after which the end of a line was passed through its gills. When one of the black triangles came within a few yards of us the Director touched the end of about six inches of fuse with his cigarette and dropped it quietly overboard. Brother Shark didn’t seem to notice the little fizzy splutter which made this fish different from all others that he had eaten, or, if he did, he took no notice of it. He turned over on his side, the jaws opened, and the fish vanished. In a few moments and for just an immeasurable fraction of a second he was the most astounded shark in the Pacific Ocean. After which came chaos for him, and a breakfast for his brethren. The pieces weren’t very big, with the exception of the head, which, after a bit of a scrimmage, was carried off by a monster who might have been his mother-in-law. The rest of the fragments disappeared in a swirl of bloody froth, and we went home to breakfast to learn the glad news that the long-awaited Emily had really left Noumea at last.
XI
MOSTLY MOSQUITOS AND MICROBES The Emily arrived that evening, and we fed royally on good fresh Australian beef, fried fish, and potatoes, and compÔte of fruit, followed by fresh cream cheese, with bread and tinned butter—as usual, from Australia. In fact, if it wasn’t for Australia I believe that New Caledonia would either live on tinned everything or starve, which is of course a good thing for Sydney and Newcastle. The Doctor produced a couple of bottles of excellent Burgundy from his private cellar, and altogether we did ourselves exceeding well. The next morning the Emily sailed, of course, at five o’clock; but I turned out of bed in the moonlight well contented, for my last journey but one was over. The Commandant invited me on to his verandah for a farewell consommation. After which I went with the Doctor and the Dynamiter for another one or two at the canteen. Then we parted in as friendly a fashion as English and French ever did. I was glad to get away, yet I left some regrets behind me. Though I had come under unpromising circumstances, every one had made me welcome, and although my stay had lengthened into something like a little exile, my visit to the Land of Wood and Iron had been both pleasant and profitable. The Doctor I parted from with real regret. He was one of the best types of the travelled French officer and gentleman that I have ever met. At first his ideas about the Boers were hopelessly wrong, and that was all there was the matter with him; but I was the first man he had ever met who had actually lived among them, and when I left his views were considerably altered. Just before I left, the Director of Posts and Telegraphs—every official seems to be a director of something in Caledonia—brought me the first letters that I had received in Prisonland. They had been carried by a Kanaka over the mountains from Noumea, through fifty miles of jungle-paths. These bush-postmen have never yet been known to lose a letter. When I asked how much extra they were paid for work like this I was told that they were made to do it as a punishment—which struck me as being entirely French. The Emily—may her name be blessed!—was only a steam launch multiplied by two, but she was clean and sweet, and her nose was pointed towards home. She towed two lighters loaded with dressed timber, and she took something like fifteen hours to do forty-five miles. But that mattered little. It was a delicious day, and the scenery along the coast was lovely. Moreover, you could lie down on her decks without having to change afterwards and throw your clothes overboard, and so the long hours passed pleasantly under the awning. When at length she had puffed and panted her way into Noumea, I looked about the harbour and saw that Yellow Jack was flying more numerously than ever. The first news I learnt when I landed was that the plague was a great deal worse than the papers were allowed to say. It had begun to jump about all over the town, just as it did later on in Sydney. The Chief of the Sanitary Commission had just been struck down by it. The first thing I noticed as I drove from the wharf to my old quarters was the number of people in mourning. My landlady, who—I dare say under compulsion—had had her premises cleaned and disinfected, greeted me with even more than French effusion. I owed her a long bill, and she thought I was dead of the plague in some out-of-the-way spot. She nearly cried for joy when she saw me. Poor old lady, she was to be one of the next of the microbe’s victims! At dinner that night I learnt, to my intense disgust, that the Messagerie Company and the Government had established a twelve-days’ quarantine on a mosquito-haunted islet in the bay for any one who wanted to travel by the monthly mail to Sydney. The principal reason for this was that the Governor was going home and wanted to be quite certain that no microbes got on board concealed about the persons of his fellow-passengers. From my point of view it amounted to this: Twelve days on Ile Freycinet, four days’ passage, and from eight to ten days’ quarantine in Sydney—total at least twenty-six days for a trip of a little over a thousand miles. It had to be avoided somehow, and at the same time Noumea was getting every day a better place to get out of. Even Lord Dunmore, who had stuck to his offices down near the wharves while his neighbours were running away, and while the rats, driven out of destroyed buildings, were coming under his floors to die, at last admitted that things were serious, and advised me to “get” as soon as I could. Fortunately one of the larger coast-boats had been disinfected and was put on the line again, and in her I took passage to Pam, at the north-eastern extremity of the island. Pam is the port and headquarters of an immensely rich mining district, the property of the International Copper Company, of which his lordship is Administrator. It has been said that when Nature made New Caledonia she set herself to dump down as many ores and minerals in as small a space as possible. She has certainly succeeded, for there is scarcely a mineral known to science that is not represented in greater or less quantities in this wonderful island. The Mines of the International Copper Co., Pilou, New Caledonia. There is a greater variety of Metallic Ores within the area shown here than in any other region in the world.
A very clever and experienced mining expert once went over from Australia to make a survey for the International, and after an exhaustive examination he was shipped to London to make a personal report to the Board. He knew as much about mining as any one in the Southern Hemisphere, but his language and deportment were those of the bush and the mining camp. A noble lord asked him if he could give any estimate of the amount of copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, silver, gold, etc., that might be found in the Central Chain, and this was his answer: “My lord, if you were to take all the —— minerals there are out of those —— mountains the —— island would —— well fall to pieces.” The report was taken as satisfactory. I brought some specimens away with me which certainly seem to bear out his estimate. They were the wonder and envy of several mining experts in Australia. One of the specimens weighs about three pounds, and I am told that it contains about a dozen distinct kinds of minerals. It didn’t come out of the mine. It was just chopped off the surface for me with a pickaxe. The mines are not at Pam. They are at Pilou, about seven miles up the river. Here, connecting the principal mining station with the wharf, is the only other railway in Caledonia, which is run by steam. It is a narrow gauge and about five miles long. That five miles is a journey through purgatory. The attendant demons are little black and devilishly businesslike mosquitos. Now, I thought I knew something about mosquitos. They had lived off me in many parts of the world from Delagoa Bay to Panama, and Honolulu to Guayaquil, but when I got to Pilou I found I hadn’t begun to learn about them. The air above the swamp over which the railway ran was black with them, and their song made the whole atmosphere vocal. They were all over us in a moment. They even settled on the boiler of the engine, and bit it until it whistled in its agony. We were black with them from head to foot. Clothing was no protection; and, of course, ours was pretty thin. They just stood on their heads and rammed their probosces down into our flesh, usually along the line of a vein, and sucked in our life-blood until they were too gorged to get their blood-pumps out again. By constant sweeping with green branches we managed to keep our faces fairly clear, and do our breathing without swallowing more than a dozen at a time. Even the Kanakas, who are not as a rule a favourite article of food with mosquitos, had to go on swishing themselves with boughs to keep the little black demons out of their eyes and nose and mouth and ears. As for me, I visited the camps and the mines, and then I fled. I was a sight which my worst enemy, if I have one, might well have looked upon with eyes of pity. I had got a touch of fever, too, in the swamp, and an illness in Pilou was too terrible for contemplation. I would not live in the place, rent free and with nothing to do but fight mosquitos, for a hundred pounds a week. The unhappy convicts who work the mines were the most miserable lot I had seen in all Caledonia. Neither by day nor night have they any protection from the swarming pests, which, as one or two of them told me, made their lives one long misery. They sleep in open barracks without mosquito curtains over their hammocks, and by day their tormentors pursue them even down the shafts of the mine. It was the same with the officials and their wives and children. They all looked anÆmic, as though most of the blood had been sucked out of them. They were worried and nervous. Their hands had got into a way of moving mechanically towards their cheeks and necks and foreheads, the result of long and mostly vain efforts to squash mosquitos. When we were going to have a meal a couple of fire-pots, covered with green boughs, had to be put into the room until it was full of smoke and comparatively empty of mosquitos. Then we went into the smoke, and the fire-pots were put in the doorway. I wasn’t at Pilou long enough to get used to being half-cooked myself while I was eating my dinner, but even the smoke in your eyes and lungs was a more bearable affliction than the winged tormentors who seemed to be a sort of punitive discount on the vast mineral wealth of Pilou. No one but very wicked people ought to live there, and when they die their accounts ought to be considered squared. The Saloon of the Ballande liner St. Louis. With eyes puffed up and almost closed; with nose and ears and lips about twice their normal size; with knuckles and wrists swollen and stiff—to say nothing of a skinful of itching bumps—I got back to Pam, and on board the cargo boat on which I had booked a passage in Noumea. We called her afterwards the Ballande liner St. Louis. She was an exaggeration of La France, and belonged to the same distinguished firm. She was bigger and, if possible, dirtier. She also smelt more, because there was a larger area for the smells to spread themselves over. No provision had been made for the eight passengers who were doomed to travel by her. The captain had no money or credit to buy stores, and when I offered to lend him some, he declined, in case his owners should hold him responsible. The result was that the food we ate on that miserable voyage made me look back longingly to the days when I had eaten salt horse and pickled pork in the forecastle of a black-birder. The decks were not washed down till the fifth morning, when we reached Sydney Heads. Then there was a general clean-up before the Medical Superintendent came on board, in case a worse fate than quarantine might await us. Up went Yellow Jack again, and that afternoon saw us anchored off the quarantine station at North Head. I have been in prisons of many sorts, but that quarantine taught me for the first time what imprisonment really means. The penalty for leaving the St. Louis without authority was £300 fine and six months’ hard labour—so there we were for eight days and nights of about one hundred and fifty hours each. On one side there was the quarantine station—about as beautiful a land and seascape as those about to die ever took a last look from at earth and sea and sky. On the other hand, the varied beauties of “Our Harbour,” with Manly Beach to the northward, North Shore with its red-roofed villas sprinkled among the trees; and, away in the dim distance, the spires and chimneys of Sydney. A couple of hours would have taken us to it, but as we looked at it with longing eyes, thinking of what a cocktail at the bar of the Australia Hotel would taste like, it might just as well have been twenty thousand miles away. It was during those eight days of mingled dirt and discomfort, cursing, and cribbage that I saw as curious a contrast between life and death as you might search the wide world over for. On the starboard side, which is the right-hand side looking forward, lay the route of the excursion steamers running between Sydney and Manly Beach. They came past at all hours of the day, and they came near enough for us to hear strains of stringed and wind instruments, which brought back memories of the dear old Thames with painful distinctness. On the port side, with almost equal frequency, there came a green-painted, white-awninged launch, flying the Yellow Flag and carrying corpses, “cases,” and “contacts” from the depÔt at Wooloomooloo. As she rounded into the jetty she whistled. Day and night for eight days and nights we heard that whistle—and the meaning of it was usually death. But you get hardened to all things in time, and before our durance vile ended we had got to call her the Cold Meat Boat. One day the Medical Superintendent of the station acceded to an urgent request made by myself and a fellow-passenger. Neither of us had washed properly for six days, and so, after a little discussion and many promises, he let us go ashore that we might enjoy ourselves under a hose. We douched each other for more than half an hour, and then we went to stretch ourselves on the beach—a silver-sanded rock-walled curve, trodden by many feet which will never tread earth again. As we were coming back to the quay to go on board we heard that never-to-be-forgotten whistle again, and the green Death Boat swung round the corner. One of the sanitary police on the wharf put his hand up and waved us back. In the stern there were about a dozen people sitting. Forward there was a long shapeless bundle lying on a stretcher. It was a case. The others were “contacts,” friends, lodgers, and relations who had lived in the same house with the case. They had come to be isolated for ten days, so that the microbe of the Black Death might show whether or not it was in their blood. They were taken out of the boat first. Their own feelings didn’t matter, for the Black Spectre takes no account of human affections, and permits no other to do so. They were marched away to the quarters set apart for contacts. No farewells were permitted, just a look that might be the last, and that was all. Then the stretcher with the long bundle on it was lifted and carried on to the wharf. Meanwhile the ambulance backed down to the shore-end, the stretcher was put into it, and it drove away up through the trees to the hospital. The next journey of that particular “case” was to the cemetery four days afterwards. When we got back to our floating prison I told the chief engineer what we had seen on shore, and he said in very epigrammatic French: “Quite so! What would you? You are a human being till you take the plague; after that you are an outcast, a thing separate. You live and get better; you die and are buried that’s all.” And, as it happened, the very next day brought an all-too vivid illustration of the truth of this saying. About ten in the morning we heard the “woo-hoo” of the Death Boat’s whistle. There was only one passenger this time, and he travelled in a coffin. A common two-wheeled cart backed down to where the ambulance had been the day before. The coffin was carried to it and put in just like any other sort of packing-case might have been. The driver whipped up his horse, and we watched the cart with its load of coffin, corpse, and quicklime, trotting up the winding road which leads to the burying-ground of North Head. I have seen many funerals in a good many places from Westminster Abbey to Wooloomooloo, but this one was the simplest and the saddest of them all. Away on the other side of the bay, wife and children, brothers and sisters and friends were mourning—and there was the indescribable Thing, which two or three days ago had been a man, being carted away to be dropped into a twelve-foot hole in the ground—buried like a dead dog, because it had died of the Black Death instead of something else. From which you will see that the Black Death has terrors for the living even after it has claimed its dead.
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