In an Unknown Prison Land / An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home

by George Chetwynd Griffith

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.